Development News

More than 100,000 people crowd into the West Side neighborhood for St. Paul's annual Cinco del Mayo celebration. The area's appeal as a place for shopping, entertainment and doing business the rest of the year should get a boost, now that the commercial zone collectively called District del Sol has gained Traditional Neighborhood (TN) zoning status.

That's the hope of local businesses and residents who pushed for two years to get TN zoning, says Roxanne Young, commercial development manager at Riverview Economic Development Association (REDA).

A big reason TN zoning has had support on the West Side is the mixed-use development it allows: a veterinary clinic with the doctor living upstairs is an example Young offers. That's a common pattern along St. Paul's most vibrant commercial street, Grand Avenue, she says, and TN zoning has a good track record of encouraging pedestrian-focused development along other neighborhood corridors such as Rice and Arcade streets.

Design guidelines that accompany TN zoning will also come in handy as REDA pursues redevelopment of the District del Sol's major intersection at Robert and Cesar Chavez (Concord) streets. It's a gateway from downtown St. Paul just across the Mississippi River, yet with its vacant buildings and vacant land Young says it's been "blighted and underutilized for more than 20 years."

TN zoning has residential and commercial neighbors "looking at opportunities opened up for mixed-use development," she says. That would add a reason for visitors to return to an area where, Young says, for most businesses Cinco de Mayo stands as "one of the main ways to recruit new audiences."

Source: Roxanne Young, Riverview Economic Development Association
Writer: Chris Steller

It took only 90 days for a Minneapolis neighborhood food co-op to raise $1.5 million in member loans earlier this year to fund a building renovation at a new location. That commitment on the part of 200 member-owners helped the Linden Hills Co-op Grocery and Deli attract $2 million more in financing from outside sources, including the City of Minneapolis, Peoples Bank and Northcountry Cooperative Development Fund.

The new store opened last week with 50 percent more retail space to accommodate a growing customer base, says Allie Mentzer, the co-op's marketing and member-services manager. That increase was reflected in sales as soon as the second day in the new location, when the store took in $43,300. That's a 46 percent increase over the sales for the same day a year before, Mentzer says.

Customer enthusiasm for the new store also showed up in the number of members the co-op enrolled in the first two days: more than 30. That's as many as sign up in the average month. Membership now stands at more than 5,000.

The opportunity to stay in Linden Hills yet gain room to grow in an existing building was rare: the neighborhood boasts only a couple of commercial buildings of sufficient scale. So the co-op's board acted quickly when the owners of the former Almstead's Sunnyside Market made their building available for lease in the summer of 2009. They signed on for 15 years, with first crack at purchase when the lease is up or before if the owners decide to sell.

The new location is seven blocks away, at Linden Hills' other commercial node.  

The co-op took on higher renovation costs to bring the building up to LEED certification standards for environmental sustainability, with green coolers, freezers, lighting and the like. (The board opted to leave its rooftop solar array behind for the next occupants of its former building, saving an anticipated $30,000 in moving costs.)

But the co-op, in the far southwestern corner of Minneapolis, continues to draw increasing numbers of customers from nearby suburbs as well as from other parts of the city. "We saw sales go up even in the economic recession," Mentzer says. "It's pretty remarkable."


Here's a video from Linden Hills Co-op's opening day last week:

At a century-old brick building in St. Paul's Mid-City area, lawn mower-makers have given way to CodeWeavers. And the engineers at the software firm that goes by that name will be joined this week by educators working for the Minnesota Literacy Council. With the two tenants, the building will be 60-62 percent leased.

The 18,000 square-foot factory/warehouse now known as The Foundry at Raymond is the 15th property near the crossroads of Raymond and University avenues to be renovated by Update Company, a family-owned development firm with more than three decades in the neighborhood. Partner Sandy Jacobs says Update currently owns and manages eight buildings in this commercial and industrial section of the St. Anthony Park neighborhood.

Jacobs remembers a less-vibrant era in the 1970s when her parents' home-based painting business began to evolve into Update. She figures the firm's Midtown Commons office conversion of a pair of buildings in 1990 was a turning point for the area. "That when things really started to gel," Jacobs says.

Now she can point prospective tenants toward numerous nearby amenities, including the Edge Coffee Shop, Hampden Park Co-op, Gremlin Theater, and Caf� Biaggio. CodeWeavers has found the location midway between downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis so convenient for employees to bike to work that they installed a shower.

A Central Corridor light-rail transit station will be under construction at Raymond and University next year, eventually increasing the development potential of surrounding land. The St. Paul Port Authority has scooped up a nearby former trucking property, Jacobs said.

Office workers aren't the only ones finding the once desolate area more appealing. Jacobs says a newly landscaped stormwater-runoff collection pond at the Foundry has attracted a recent eagle.

Source: Sandy Jacobs, Update Company
Writer: Chris Steller

Nieeta Presley envisions a day sometime soon when a new coffeeshop at University and Dale in St. Paul will offer a "Frogtown with Two Hops of Rondo."

If you have a better name for a drink, Presley invites you to put your money where your mouth is. The organization she directs, Aurora St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corporation (ASANDC), is planning to open the Rondo Coffee Cafe in the new Frogtown Square mixed-use building. For a $500 donation, ASANDC will assign any name you like to a beverage on the menu.

But Presley says the real purpose of the cafe is not to create new drinks but to be a generator of social enterprise -- hiring and training people who have trouble getting work elsewhere and helping folks learn how to start their own businesses.

The cafe's name recalls the lost, lamented Rondo neighborhood, home to St. Paul's African-American community before the construction of Interstate 94 destroyed it almost half a century ago. The Rondo Coffee Cafe will serve as a mini-museum to the memory of Rondo, Presley says.

To that end, supporters may donate lesser amounts to have their family photo from Rondo displayed on the cafe's walls or on top of a table. She wants to include stories with the photos.

The kind of photo customers might see is one that's been offered already from 1954 when Hubert Humphrey was re-elected to the U.S. Senate. The donor's dad--an African-American weighing more than 300 pounds--is shown seated in a wheelbarrow that's being pushed by a "little white guy" up Cathedral Hill, as Presley recalls it. The two had bet on the outcome of Humphrey's Senate bid, and the photo documents how the bet was settled.

Eventually the display could grow to include memorabilia of community life since Rondo Avenue disappeared, Presley says, to answer the question, "What happened next?"

Source: Nieeta Presley, Aurora St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corporation

Writer: Chris Steller

Just don't call it a corporate campus.

That might send prospective tenants of the Minnesota Science Park--a million square feet of research facilities on 32 acres near the University of Minnesota campus and the border between Minneapolis and St. Paul--running in the opposite direction.  

Inventors, research scientists and biotech entrepreneurs want spare, efficient, functional spaces to do their work, says architect John Cuningham, whose Minneapolis-based Cuningham Group Architecture will design the dozen or so buildings on what's now industrial land nestled up against the edge of the U of M's East Bank campus.

"They don't want ostentatious display," Cuningham says. "They actively dislike it." They want shared spaces where researchers in different areas can interact, but beyond that they tend to be hostile to what they regard as wasteful niceties.

It's "a very demanding project," he says, requiring Cuningham's designers to be "very economical with very advanced technology."

The project breaks the mold of most research parks located near university campuses, Cuningham says. Like the U of M itself, the Minnesota Science Park will be crammed into the urban core rather than sprawled across farmland on a rural, land-grant campus. The nonprofit team behind the project (no state dollars involved) announced it at the annual gathering of the national Association of University Research Parks held in Minneapolis last week.

Cuningham's firm had already been involved for a decade or so with urban design and planning in the Southeast Minneapolis Industrial (SEMI) Area at the western end of the Midway, a linear industrial district that stretches for miles through St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Once renowned as having the world's highest concentration of grain elevators, the area will instead be home to "21st-century American discoveries," Cuningham says, such as alternative fuels and nanotechnology.

"This is not manufacturing farm implements," Cuningham says.

Source: John Cuningham, Cuningham Group Architecture, P.A.
Writer: Chris Steller

It was the way the last rays of the setting sun lit up the red brick of the old Hamm's brewery that struck Murph Dawkins one evening six years ago. "It glowed like a ruby," she recalls. As she stood agape in Swede Hollow, a ravine park on St. Paul's near East Side, Dawkins said to herself, "Wow, I've got to share this."

Dawkins called Karin DuPaul, hoping to spark interest in the wondrous if fleeting sight she'd just beheld. DuPaul, who heads the Friends of Swede Hollow group and is a longtime organizer for the Dayton's Bluff Community Council, is quick to recognize a good idea and handy with a phone tree. "She doesn't need any extreme encouragement," Dawkins says.

The pair dreamed up a community gathering, dubbed simply "Watch the Glow," to be centered on viewing the sun's spectacular lighting of the brewery. The first "Watch the Glow," on a late October day in 2005, drew about 50 people who took in the transitory sight of the glowing brewery then shared a picnic dinner.

Saving the vacant brewery complex was a not-so-hidden item on the revelers' agenda. When brewing ceased in the mid-1990s, private developer Everest LLC took over the property, successfully renovating buildings on the north side of Minnehaha Avenue for artists' lofts and other uses.

But the discovery that the brewery land included part of Swede Hollow itself led the City of St. Paul to purchase the parcels south of Minnehaha that also hold the historic buildings neighbors hold dear. "Watch the Glow" invitations went out to city leaders who then were considering demolition--a threat that has now passed, DuPaul says. The buildings are safely mothballed, and three are poised to house an Asian Pacific Cultural Center when funding is found.

Some years, cloud cover or uncooperative weather mutes the event's eponymous effect. DuPaul recalls one year when the assembled were resigned to the show having been a bust--before the sun burst through at precisely the right moment to set the vacant Hamm's brewhouse ablaze.

This year's Watch the Glow was held last Saturday, preceded by a performance of the operetta "Tales of Hoffmann" in the Hollow. DuPaul was ready to document the glow, should it happen. She snapped a photo from the back of the crowd as they watched the sunset's sudden appearance. By the time they turned to face her for another picture, the show was over.  

Sources: Murph Dawkins, Friends of Swede Hollow; Karin DuPaul, Dayton's Bluff Community Council
Writer: Chris Steller

Turning the tide along Minneapolis' upper riverfront from industrial dominance to recreational opportunity is the impetus behind a major design competition now underway. Organizers hope the winning plans will showcase features of the best in recent park design from around the world.

It's all about "urban regeneration," says Andrew Blauvelt, curator of architecture and design at the Walker Art Center. Minneapolis has a long history with its own extensive park system, but locals are open to outside ideas in planning their parks' future.

The Walker has teamed with the Minneapolis Parks Foundation and the University of Minnesota College of Design to explore "The Next Generation of Parks," as they've called their joint effort.

A "Next Generation" lecture series bringing national and international ideas into the local mix began last summer. It continues next week, when Peter Harnick, director of the Trust for Public Land's Center for City Parks Excellence, speaks at the Minneapolis Central Library. In November, Ed Uhlir, executive director at Chicago's Millennium Park, will give a talk at the same location.

But the riverfront design competition is the collaborative's first initiative that will put park-design innovations like those its lecturers have describe to the test locally--although moving beyond a winning concept isn't guaranteed.

The competition is open to all professional designers, with a shortlist picked in October and a winner announced in February. Blauvelt says the public will have a chance to see an exhibit of the competing entries at his museum in late January or early February, with a related event such as a public forum also likely to be held there.

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, which has its own broad plan for the what it calls its "Above the Falls" parks, is also a competition sponsor. Minneapolis' riverfront revival of recent decades can be traced to another major design effort, titled "Mississippi/Minneapolis," a 1972 effort led by the city's planning department.

The Walker recently completed a summer-long park experiment of its own called "Open Field" on a grassy plot next door, with the space used for everything from performance to learning labs.

"Parks can be anything," says Blauvelt.

Source: Andrew Blauvelt, Walker Art Center
Writer: Chris Steller

For the fourth fall, volunteers are fanning out across town to count how many bicyclists and pedestrians pass by a given location over a two-hour period.

The Twin Cities is one of four places selected for a bike/walk program funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, and measuring trends in bicycle and foot traffic is an important part of the project, says Tony Hull of Transit For Livable Communities, the nonprofit group working with local governments on "Bike/Walk Twin Cities." (The other places are less urban: Sheboygan, Wis.; Columbia, Mo.; and Marin County, Calif.)

Counts by humans with clipboards are needed because bikes and pedestrians are too light to trip the rubber strips that planners stretch across roads to count motor-vehicle traffic volume. The data lets transit advocates and city officials factor in all forms of transportation rather than focusing solely on the flow of cars and trucks.

Volunteers get training to ensure accuracy and consistency, then head out to 48 spots where people like to bike and walk. A few locations have seen a doubling or even tripling of bike and pedestrian traffic from 2007 to 2009. Most saw percentage-point increases in the double digits. An observer along a busy route can expect to see several hundred bicycles over two hours of counting.

(This year's count could still use a few good volunteers. If you can help, check out this link.)

By Hull's reckoning, the traffic levels of bikes and pedestrians are increasing at a rate that raises the question, "Do we need more capacity?" Bulking up the infrastructure dedicated to non-motorized traffic, like bike lanes and paths, may be needed, he says. Consider, for example, the Midtown Greenway, which has become so popular it can suffer crowded rush hours and near-traffic jams. In places like that, Hull says, the need for transit "starts getting to the next level."

Source: Tony Hull, Transit for Livable Communities
Writer: Chris Steller

The place-names Minnesota and Minneapolis share a common source: mni, from the Dakota language, meaning water.

But leaders of the City of Lakes and the Land of Sky-blue Waters have butted heads over a Minneapolis public-art project intended to celebrate that common water heritage--demonstrating that water can divide as well as unite.

It began in 2007 when the Minneapolis City Council budgeted a half-million dollars to commission 10 drinking fountains designed by local artists to be installed in public places around Minneapolis.

The expenditure of $50,000 per fountain drew criticism, most notably from Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Although bonds, not state aid, were to pay for the fountains, the project got caught up in the raging debate over state cuts to funding for local governments.

It's an argument recently revived by Tom Emmer, GOP candidate for governor, who criticized St. Paul's privately funded sidewalk poetry program as a waste of government money.

Early this year, the Minneapolis City Council scaled back the number of fountains to four. Now, after a dedication ceremony last Saturday, water is flowing at the first two fountains. "3 Forms," a fountain by Gita Ghei, Sara Hanson, and JanLouise Kusske (with help from South High School students) draws inspiration from geology formations and fossils in a classical fountain design.  

Last fall, the first fountain, "Water of the Doodem Spirits" by St. Paul sculptor Peter Morales, was installed to less fanfare on Franklin Avenue. Morales says he enjoys watching people drink under the gaze of Raven, who is perched above Turtle and Fish in a sculptural treatment drawing on Ojibwe origin stories. There is no sign to explain the fountain's meaning, but stopping for a drink can sometimes elicit interpretations from other passers-by.

"There's a wide swath of society that goes by there," Morales says. "People took to it right away."

Source: Peter Morales, Balam Studios
Writer: Chris Steller

St. Paul may be the smaller of the Twin Cities, but it surpasses Minneapolis by one measure that some of its citizens lament:  population of billboards. According to Scenic Saint Paul, an anti-billboard group, Minnesota's capital city has by far the greatest number of billboards of any city in the state--505 at last count.

It's a number that has dropped slightly as outdoor advertising companies trade existing, traditional-format signs for the right, under a 2007 ordinance, to erect digital billboards elsewhere. A 1990s moratorium on new billboards in St. Paul remains in force but didn't translate into victory for a 1999 initiative to remove half the city's stock.

Battles over billboard have gone on in St. Paul for more than a century, by Scenic Saint Paul's reckoning. The latest salvo came last month when, as The Line noted, a federal appeals court sided with the outdoor industry, nullifying St. Paul's 2006 ban on billboard extensions--those attention-grabbing protrusions the companies sometimes build out from their boards' ordinary flat rectangles.

The St. Paul group has extended its campaign to rein in outdoor ads from the main battleground of the capital city through the formation of another group, Scenic Minnesota, which in turn is an affiliate organization of the national organization Scenic America.

Within St. Paul, the group's volunteers have mapped an uneven distribution of billboards. "If you don't have billboards in your neighborhood, you don't think it's a problem," says communications director Gerald Mischke. He said even with fewer billboards to regulate, city staff in Minneapolis seemed daunted by the group's offer to create a similar map there.

The groups assert that outdoor advertising companies don't have the right to profit off public "viewsheds" or what people see when they simply look around: "Billboard companies are selling something they do not own--the public's collective field of vision."

Source: Gerald Mischke, Scenic Minnesota
Writer: Chris Steller

One of the might've-beens about the Central Corridor light rail line that's now under construction is a route not taken at its Minneapolis end. University of Minnesota officials pushed hard for an alternative plan that would have seen trains skirt campus by swinging through the Dinkytown commercial district rather than plowing down Washington Avenue, close to vibration-sensitive research facilities. (The university dropped a lawsuit over the vibration issue last week.)

One of the advantages offered by the alternative route to downtown via Dinkytown was a proximity to land ripe for a wave of development of the sort it seemed only LRT could bring. But redevelopment is happening in the area in a big way anyway, even despite a lousy lending environment. One firm, Doran Companies, has just broken ground on its second big Dinkytown project, the 412 Lofts at Fourth Street and 13th Avenue SE.

It's to be a five-story, 102-unit apartment building with two levels of underground parking, says Jim LaValle, Doran's vice president of development. It's not student-only--that would be illegal under fair housing laws--but LaValle says the 412 Lofts will cater to the close-to-campus environment.

A year ago, Doran broke ground on Sydney Hall, a similar project that also included renovation of the Dinky Dome, built in 1915 as the Minnesota Bible College but now better known for its signature glass dome skylight. The development is now fully leased, LaValle says, including a ground-floor CVS, Dinkytown's first drugstore after a decade or more without. Plans to lease space directly under the dome for commercial use didn't find any takers, LaValle says--so lucky residential tenants will enjoy the spectacular interior instead.

How do two big developments take off within two blocks when construction is stalled elsewhere? Doran credits "efficient design that works financially"--along with a "captive audience."

Source: Jim LaValle, Doran Companies
Writer: Chris Steller

Minneapolis' North Loop may not be as forested as other more outlying neighborhoods of the Twin Cities, but this autumn brings colorful changes there anyway.

Known for being stocked with living spaces converted from former warehouses, the North Loop will finally see redevelopment of a warehouse building that has long been on the market: the Holden Building at 607 Washington Ave. N., which dates from 1910. Local firm Greco Development has a purchase agreement for the 180,000-square-foot building and plans to convert it into apartments.

Greco's Arnie Gregory says it'll take about $25 million to rehab 180,000 square feet of "old, boarded-up, vacant building" into 120 apartments (half affordable, half market rate). He'll rely on a mortgage of $12--14 million as well as "pay as you go" tax-increment financing. He expects downtown service workers will snap up the affordable units, while the market-rate apartments will go to young professionals. The basement and first floor will have 100 stalls of parking, a 5,000 square-foot annex will house retail or a bar, and each residential floor will have a common area, possibly including co-working space. Why buy it now? Gregory credits state tax credits for re-use of historic buildings.

"The neighborhood is always glad to see an imposing older building re-purposed for active uses," observes David Frank, president of the North Loop Neighborhood Association. Greco is scheduled to present the project to the association's planning and zoning committee next week, according to Frank.

Something the North Loop is not so well known for is a sizable population of children. But the facilities to attract and maintain a (much) younger population will see a significant increase with the addition of a new playground at 400 W. River Pkwy. Construction of the playground begins this week, with a big boost coming next month: a national convention of park officials has designated it as their public-service project. A series of fund-raising dinner events is underway.

But the North Loop's biggest new feature is Target Field, where the Minnesota Twins began play this season. One of the facility's most admired public features is a plaza designed by local landscape architect Tom Oslund and an adjoining parking-ramp screen called "The Wave" by California-based artist and MacArthur Fellow Ned Kahn. Oslund and Kahn will share the stage for an artist talk at noon, Sept. 16, at the Minneapolis Central Library. Later that day, beginning at 6 p.m., an  interactive musical event will celebrate "The Wave."

Source: Arnie Gregory, Greco Development; David Frank, North Loop
Neighborhood Association
Writer: Chris Steller

It's the $27,000 question: Will people become regular bus riders if you mail them free bus passes and teach them about transit?

Seeking an answer is a neighborhood nonprofit organization with a playful name that sounds like a utility: Linden Hills Power and Light.

The name is "just a joke," says executive director Felicity Britton. It's meant to suggest empowering or enlightening the Linden Hills neighborhood on environmental issues.

The group has received one of eight grants for fighting climate change from the City of Minneapolis, a grant program now in its third year and funded by the federal Recovery Act.

Linden Hills Power and Light's idea is to promote transit ridership with a direct mail campaign to residents of the Linden Hills neighborhood in Minneapolis' far southwestern corner.

About 2,000 lucky residents will receive free Metro Transit bus passes in the mail, each with enough stored value for one round trip fare, explains Linden Hills Power and Light executive director Felicity Britton.

Metro Transit can track how many of the cards get redeemed, and which get more value added--an indication that a rider has become a regular.

Linden Hills is a bit below-average for bus-ridership, Britton says, with about 6 percent of residents riding regularly. Boosting that by 1 or 2 percent would mean 200 new regular riders.

The neighborhood is ahead of the curve in other environmental respects, including a pilot program for curbside compost pickups. (The rest of the city is set to have the service by the end of 2012.)
 
Besides buying bus passes and postage, the group plans a transit education program for the neighborhood. The effort is supported with $10,000 in federal funds plus more than $17,000 in locally raised matching funds and in-kind donations.

"We're calling it 'Taking the bus with training wheels,'" says Britton.

Source: Felicity Britton, Linden Hills Power and Light
Writer: Chris Steller

Sometimes an innovation is so welcome that it doesn't need branding.

When medieval Icelanders needed a name for their big invention, the world's first parliament, they settled on simply calling it the All-Thing.

This summer the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors (MAAR) faced the dilemma of naming its invention, an online, interactive database of local real-estate activity.

The MAAR staff took the Icelandic route. They called it The Thing.

Click on thething.mplsrealtor.com and you become the master of your own real estate data. Choose a Twin Cities neighborhood, a date range and a metric such as Days on Market, and colored lines appear, stretching across a chart to tell the story you want.

The Thing grew out of a desire to do better at communicating data, says Jeff Allen, who directs research at MAAR: "We were frustrated at our own inability to explain to our Realtors what was happening in the market in a way that was digestible and understandable to them."

MAAR "stumbled onto a business model" while trying to solve that problem, Allen says. Now its data-gathering arm, 10K Research, follows 70 markets for local realtors' associations. Some prefer a members-only approach to Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data, which is included in The Thing's database, but Allen says that in the Twin Cities the attitude is that "information should be transparent."

So far Allen says the "vast majority" of The Thing's users are real estate professionals seeking market information for their customers, says Allen. But the website is open to all and may eventually draw more lay users. "It's still in its infancy," he says.

Source: Jeff Allen, Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors
Writer: Chris Steller

The Nice Ride Minnesota bike-share service debuted in June across a significant swath of Minneapolis: from Uptown, through downtown, to Dinkytown. But the program drew notice for two areas left out of its geographic range: St. Paul and North Minneapolis.

For North Minneapolis, that's about to change.

Last week the Minneapolis City Council approved spending $228,500 in federal Recovery Act funds to expand Nice Ride onto the city's north side. Next week, Nice Ride will hold a public meeting to gather ideas for where to put the bikes. Next summer, Nice Ride's trademark yellow-green bikes will show up at six bike-rental stations paid for with the $230,000 allocated for North Minneapolis.

St. Paul, meanwhile, waits.

"We're ready to go if we had the money," says Bill Dossett, Nice Ride's executive director.

Dossett's attention is focused for the moment on the program's reception on campuses in Nice Ride's current range, as students return for fall classes at the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

He's also looking forward to next spring. If Minneapolis follows Montreal's pattern, that's when annual subscriptions will take off. Only 1,100 year passes have sold so far--a number depressed, Dossett guesses, by the misconception that annual subscriptions expire at the end of 2010.

In reality, the passes are good for a full year from day of purchase. Annual subscribers get a key and a coupon book, making them, in Dossett's estimation, "the happiest people."

Source: Bill Dossett, Nice Ride Minnesota
Writer: Chris Steller