Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Americana
At the edge of a section of irrigated ground on the Great Plains, you can sometimes see the history of a decision. A center pivot that ran a full circle for thirty years now stops short and backs up. Its wheel tracks end where a new set of steel transmission poles crosses the field. Two […]
October 2026 series: Transportation & the Comprehensive Plan You know the moment. You’ve been driving a state highway for twenty minutes through open farmland—center pivots, a grain elevator on the horizon, a pickup or two coming the other way—when a green sign tells you you’ve arrived: Welcome to …, followed by a population figure, maybe […]
October 2026 series: Transportation & the Comprehensive Plan Every few years, the price at the pump becomes the loudest number in town. People talk about it at the diner, the school board hears about bus budgets, and the county road department recalculates what a season of grading and plowing will cost. Usually the spike passes. […]
Four Sundays. One development proposal. Four different layers of the same question. We started with a farmer’s heirs who wanted to sell. We followed that proposal through the future land use map, through agricultural land use policy, through the gap between the zoning code and the comprehensive plan, and finally through the thirty-year cost calculation […]
What makes the place you live different from every other place out there? It’s not the Taco John’s out on the strip. It’s not the dollar store, or the strip mall, or the Starbucks. It’s the red brick commercial buildings around the courthouse square, in so many American communities built in that common pattern. It’s […]
Development proposals tend to arrive one parcel at a time. So do the public decisions attached to them. A landowner wants to sell. The ground is outside town but close enough to market as a rural homesite. The developer has buyers. The road exists. The property is not in a floodplain. The tax projection looks […]
In 1919, Clem Kruse started selling Oldsmobile, Maxwell, and Chalmers-Velie vehicles from the ground floor of a two-story concrete building on Mill Street, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities. Upstairs, Kruse’s Hall hosted dances, plays, and high school basketball games. One hundred years later, Cannon River Winery opened a tasting room […]
The building has stood at the corner for a hundred and eighteen years. Red brick, two stories, cast-iron columns flanking a recessed entry, a limestone date stone reading 1908. The ground floor has held a dry goods store, a five and dime, an insurance agency, and for the last six years a coffee shop that […]
The development application is straightforward on paper. Twelve residential lots on forty acres of prime ag land, five miles outside of town. The heirs of the family that farmed it want to sell. A developer has found buyers. The parcel is accessible from a county road. No wetlands. No floodplain. Nothing obviously wrong. The planning […]
What began as scattered neighborhood resistance to individual projects has become something much larger: a national backlash against the physical footprint of the AI economy. According to Data Center Watch, at least 75 data center projects worth more than $130 billion were delayed or canceled in the first quarter of 2026 alone, effectively matching the […]
