Roseville is located in Ramsey County, just north of Saint Paul and east of Minneapolis. It is one of two Twin Cities suburbs to be geographically adjacent to both Saint Paul and Minneapolis, the other being Lauderdale. The land comprising Falcon Heights, Lauderdale and the southern part of Roseville used to be part of Saint Paul, until 1948 when these towns incorporated.
Property taxes are some of the lowest in the metro, in part, due to the extensive commercially zoned land.[3] Several major shopping centers are located there, such as Rosedale and the Har Mar Mall. The city's per-capita retail spending is slightly higher than the city of Bloomington (home of the Mall of America), and has the greatest number of restaurants per-capita in the Twin Cities.
Roseville was the location of the first Target ever built (was demolished in early 2005 to build a SuperTarget which opened later that year), the first Best Buy store ever built (originally called Sound of Music), the first Barnes & Noble bookstore outside of New York City and the first McDonald's built in the state of Minnesota.
Roseville is also home to the John Rose Oval, the world's largest outdoor artificial sheet of ice. The 1995 men's Bandy World Championship and the 2006 women's Bandy World Championship were held here. The fifth largest board game publisher in the world, Fantasy Flight Games, is based in Roseville. Old Dutch Foods, Minnesota Departments of Transportation and Education and the Minnesota State Lottery have their headquarters in Roseville.
Roseville's population was 33,690 at the 2000 census.
The city is the hometown of MacGyver and Stargate SG-1 star Richard Dean Anderson, WKRP in Cincinnati star Loni Anderson (no relation), Six Feet Under and Dirty Sexy Money star Peter Krause. In August 2006, resident Jim Kramer won the United States Scrabble Open in Phoenix, Arizona to become the National Scrabble Association (NSA) champion. The town was also depicted as the hometown of sitcom character Mary Richards on the 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (before the character moved to Minneapolis).