Returning snowbirds get a fresh perspective of Minnesota highways and streetscapes

The annual migration is underway, and soon you’ll see another familiar sight of spring —snowbirds returning from Arizona.

If they rode out the winter in a trailer in the high desert, there’s not much urbanist advice they have to offer. But people who’ve spent the past few months the larger urban areas of the Grand Canyon State might have some lessons for Minnesotan cities, and they’re worth hearing out.

This shouldn’t be controversial. Highways are necessary, and their prime function is getting everyone from here to there, safely. But that doesn’t mean they can’t look nice. Phoenix-area highways are frequently adorned with enormous petroglyphs, mosaics and rock landscaping. The bridges have distinctive adornments, from abstract magenta cacti to stylized images of water. You’ll also find abstract Native American icons of flying birds adorning the sound barriers.

Can we do it here? We can, depending on the political appetite for nonfunctional highway spending. Murals on the sound barriers would be preferable to graffiti.

When carefully managed, colors can create an entire urban aesthetic.

The residential exurbs in Arizona can be summed up in one word — brown. It’s not all brown, of course. Sometimes it’s tan or orangish-brown. It’s like what Henry Ford supposedly said about Model T’s: They can have a house in any color they like, as long as it’s brown.

White is popular, as well. And older homes outside of pre-planned communities often have vivid hues, like an eccentric elder the village indulges. But the planned subdivisions prefer to reflect the desert hues, with plants and flowering bushes providing the accents. The overall impression is intended to connote harmony between the artificial and the natural.

Should we do this here? No. In fact, you wish we’d do the opposite, and splash our homes with the hues you’d find in a Caribbean town. It would make the winters brighter.

At the same time, there’s also a lack of color in Arizona, producing a sense of placeless monotony.

The Scottsdale municipal code says: “Exterior paint and material colors shall not exceed a value of six as indicated in the Munsell Book of Color,” which sounds like the commandment in the holy book of a 19th-century religious sect. It’s referring to a system developed in 1938, which grades color according to hue, lightness and intensity. It prevents people from going wild and painting their house with fruit-hued stripes, but the effect, when driving great distances across town, is an unending expanse of sameness. Low-slung developments hidden behind beige-brown walls, punctuated by commercial intersections, are bound by the same color laws. There’s little chance to appreciate the distinctions between the neighborhoods unless you crash through the gate, break into someone’s home and note the construction era from the tiles or layout. But this, as you might expect, is discouraged.

Should we do this here? No.

It works best when woven into the existing urban fabric.

The snowbirds going back south after summer are probably used to finding an enormous block of four-story apartments where there was only scrub brush and gravel the previous year. It might have a name like The Place at Greystone or Sonora Corners at Eaglewood, or any other combination of western-sounding names. The units will have a central courtyard. There might be a new hotel tossed up overnight in the same lot. Maybe even an upscale strip mall.

It’s more efficient than a single-family home development, and more interesting to look at. But it’s not the same as a project that’s blended into an existing neighborhood.

Can we do it here? Sure — and you might argue that the Highland Bridge plant development on the old Ford site in St. Paul is a good example.

Minnesota suburbs suffer the same problem as cities across the country — the streetscapes have a feeling of arid placelessness with their strip malls, box-shaped fast-food restaurants and wide streets. In Arizona, the strip malls and grocery stores look quite nice, but suffer the problem that plagues them all: the huge parking lot is out front. Repeated again and again, this model produces a charmless expanse punctuated only by store names and endless free-standing restaurants.

Can we do it here? We already did; it’s called Hopkins.

The attributes of Minnesota that are lacking in urban Arizona can’t be re-created, nor should they be. Every region has its particular distinctive qualities. No snowbird wants Arizona to be just like the Gopher State, any more than they want to get home after a pleasant winter away and see cacti.