I Have Tried To Like Grand Forks As An Urban Landscape

 

View of Downtown Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. FEMA public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.

 An update to this article for May 2024 is that Grand Forks has made great strides in improvement primarily in its downtown area where the old Townhouse Hotel site has become a mixed use high rise area for downtown living. Good job Grand Forks, now just get rid of some of those ugly stroads.

I recently went to Grand Forks to chaperone a group of students attending State Science Fair. I have tried to like Grand Forks. I grew up less than an hour away and can remember traveling there when downtown shopping was still a thing and the opening of Columbia Mall in 1978 that heralded the dominance of car-centric development from then on. I tend to like the city and its people since I have a number of family and friends in town, so it is too bad the city as a place is mostly an ugly and placeless collection of wide roads and sprawling parking lots with no sensible logic behind where everything is located. It is in short, an urbanist nightmare.

Though the old central city has its charms, even walking there can be problematic. Within a few blocks, the grid reverts to a spread out, suburbanized landscape of stroads and parking lots that lock in the tree lined neighborhoods like a cage. The many nice neighborhoods are hamstrung by the fact that they are close to nothing and doing anything there requires a car. At different points in my life, I have walked across the city in every quadrant and it is not designed for such things. In Grand Forks, more than other places, as a walker or biker one feels like an outsider.

Even UND, a bright spot in the ugly mess of Grand Forks, though walkable, it is only walkable to parking lots that ring the campus. Often, cities dominated by universities plant the seeds of good transit and walkability that spread through the city. Unfortunately, just like the neighborhoods, UND is bounded by parking lots, stroads and a rail yard that pen it in. To get almost anywhere for supplies requires a brave walker, biker or a car. I often wonder why on the northern plains where compact urbanism would block a lot of the wind and make for a nicer city, we instead build vast paved over playas only interrupted by slightly higher playas formed by the flat tops of big box stores and strip malls.

I happened to be joking with the Geography Chair Dr. Douglas Munski about how UND tracked me down for a parking ticket some years ago when he related to me efforts to put in an urban transit rail line at one point. How much better a city would it be if one could get from end too end by rail? Grand Forks, Fargo and Bismarck all had tram lines before World War Two. Had they survived, by now they would have been converted to light rail. How cool would it be to go to these modest cities and not have to drive everywhere?

One would think that a car-centric city would have a great ride share network. While we were there, I found it impossible to get a driver via Lyft or Uber. Asking my sister about this, she related how my millennial niece who doesn't drive had this problem often when trying to get a ride to work. As I have written before, this is a car centrism born of middle class ignorance that there are people who can't or don't drive. I am glad that there are many more in the younger generations that see the problem of car dependency and dystopian urban design for what it is: infrastructure that marginalizes and discriminates while subsidizing unsustainable sprawl and methods of getting around.

Visiting Columbia Mall a mere forty-five years after its opening, it has the look of a blighted neighborhood with empty an closed storefronts that were once vibrant. I remember the optimism of the "mall era" when we didn't question driving from home to sprawling parking lots to get every little thing. That era is drawing to a close and like the boarded up storefronts, we can now see clearly the social, environmental and financial costs of this short sighted type of development.