The high-traffic business roads, industry, abandoned industrial sites, and active railroads that surround Como contrast sharply with the residential character of the neighborhood.

The housing stock consists of modest early 20th-century bungalows and Victorian and twenties-era homes mixed with a scattering of newer duplexes and single family homes. Some areas (e.g. along Como, 15th and Hennepin Avenues) have post-60’s two-story walk-up apartment buildings.

Within Como are Tuttle School building which Minneapolis Public Schools leases to two charter schools, the large public Van Cleve Park, a new University child care center, and Como Student Housing.

Commercial activity is focused on Como and East Hennepin Avenues. The neighborhood is served by two convenience grocery stores (including one with a laundromat and deli) and a number of small service businesses, including a hardware store, a barber, a dentist, two coffee houses, three bar/restaurants, a diner, a car parts store, several auto repair garages, and several gas stations.

The Como neighborhood sits on Decorah Shale and Platteville-Glenwood rock formations. This bedrock emerged in roughly its present state at the end of the last ice age, approximately 12,000 years ago. The land was originally flat oak savannah dominated by a deep peat bog with sporadic sandbars and ponds, lying at the foot of the rocky glacial ridge that rises at the neighborhood‘s northeastern edge, at 33rd Ave SE and East Hennepin Ave. A creek called Tuttle’s Brook drained some of the neighborhood’s marshy ground, coursing from the area of Brook Ave SE through what is now the Southeast Minneapolis Industrial (SEMI) area and Dinkytown. The creek emptied into the Mississippi River at a waterfall called the Silver Cascade, at approximately 12th Ave SE. Development eliminated the creek, but the Como neighborhood’s ground water continues to flow in the same southwesterly direction. Just beyond the southeast edge of the Como neighborhood, another stream drains some marsh water: Bridal Veil Creek, now much modified and without the pond that existed east of the neighborhood until about 2009.

The Como neighborhood’s census tract, which extends from Broadway St NE to the north section of the SEMI area, and from west of I-35W to the east city limits at 33rd Ave SE, more closely approximates the historical neighborhood than does today’s smaller residential area. There has been some erosion of the housing stock as commercial and industrial uses continue to exert pressure on it. For example, a 1922 sociological report on the Como neighborhood included its easternmost section and sections north of East Hennepin Ave that were platted as residential—and partially developed—as the family area served by Columbus School, an elementary school at Winter St NE and Hoover St NE from 1907 to 1931. The small community of homes that existed until the 1970s in the Mid-City Industrial Area north of East Hennepin Ave has disappeared. Elwell’s Second Addition extends north to Winter St NE for three blocks, a residential northern edge that has seen sustained industrial pressures.

When the Como neighborhood was founded in 1882, the eastern limit of Minneapolis was Oak St SE/18th Ave SE. That boundary quickly extended eastward in the 1880s, and in 1920 the city limit was

34th Ave SE. When Highway 280 was built to connect I-94 with I-35W at the border between St. Paul and Minneapolis, 33rd Ave SE became the eastern city limit. The western limit of the Como neighborhood is a curious tiny sliver of industrial land west of I-35W and south of East Hennepin Ave.

The former Great Northern Railway line, 8th St SE, and Elm St SE together form Como’s southern boundary.