If a Tree Falls in the City But Someone Replaces it, Will it Cover the Ground?

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories. 

All My Homies Hate the Emerald Ash Borer

Ohh buddy, we love an interactive map, and this one from Kyle Stokes at Axios about the Twin Cities' changing—or should we say "diminishing"—tree cover is no exception.

After you're done tooling around with the map to see how tree cover in local municipalities changed between 2013 and 2023 (Minneapolis is down 17%; St. Paul is down a whopping 30%; Burnsville is up 8%) you can scroll down to see the depressing data. Overall, the area lost 11% of its tree cover during that decade, a figure that's largely due to the invasive emerald ash borer. Fungal disease has also "ravaged" spruce and pine populations, cutting them down by 374,000 trees and 249,000 trees respectively.

But there's hope! Tree cover may be down, but the Twin Cities also gained 1 million new trees during that period. Cities like St. Paul are losing their canopies because they're removing ash trees and replacing them with other leafy varieties. "A community that proactively removed declining ash and replanted with diverse, resilient species might show the same canopy loss as one that did nothing, but those two communities are in very different positions for the next 20 years,” DNR urban forester Rachel Morice tells Axios.

Fourplex Redux

Let's get one thing straight: I don't like calling 'em Freyplexes, because, as Trevor Mitchell outlines in his latest MinnPost story, "Freyplex, despite rhyming with 'triplex,' was generally used to refer to fourplexes. Go figure."

Rhyming scheme aside, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has been an advocate for fourplexes, and he picked up that thread again in his latest budget address, saying that his administration would "work to allow for construction of four-unit buildings."

If you're getting flashbacks to 2018, when fourplexes dominated the conversation about housing in the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan, Mitchell is right there with you. He asks Meg McMahan, a planning director at the city of Minneapolis, why the mayor is reviving the debate again; she tells him their overarching idea is to make the city more inclusive, and that updating the types of housing that are allowed in UN1 zoning districts, or small-scale residential lots, is one way the city might do that.

A Photo Booth Love Letter

You can't accuse Zoë Jackson of gatekeeping. The intrepid Star Tribune reporter has compiled a list (gift link) of all the photo booths, both digital and vintage, that remain in the Twin Cities area. She also spoke with photo fanatics like Clio Cullison, who often includes a photo booth stop when she's planning a night out and has amassed a collection of more than 100 strips since childhood.

Honestly, I would have read 1,000 more words on the topic of photo booths. When did they first arrive in the Twin Cities? Are there any old-school technicians around changing chemicals in the few remaining vintage photo booths? How lucrative is it to run a pop-up booth biz like this one? But then, you're reading the same publication that's dedicated thousands of words to CRT TVs, VHS tapes, and video rental stores over the years; our pro-analog biases are well documented. Maybe it's perfect that this piece is short and sweet... not unlike a session in a photo booth.

Wanna Buy Super Cheap My Chem Tix?

I'm old enough to remember when My Chemical Romance reunited for a massive worldwide tour that took concert halls and arenas like Xcel Energy Center by storm. (It was 2022.)

Four years later, My Chem is returning to the Twin Cities; the Black Parade tour will march through Target Field on August 24. And it's a lot easier to snag a ticket this time around. "With less than a week to go before showtime, Bring Me The News has found tickets for as little as $12, including fees," writes BMTN's Dustin Nelson. Yes, that makes them cheaper than a beer at Target Field.

We can't find any $12 tickets on SeatGeek today—damn you, Dustin!—but there are still plenty of seats available in the $15–$25 range at this writing. Get those little black-polished thumbs typing fast to snag yours, adult emo readers!