transit oriented development : Innovation + Job News

The Foundation is moving its 20+ employees from a small office shared with Atomic Data into a bigger space in the recently renovated Ford Center, near the heart of the North Loop. The “single source IT provider,” which serves as a one-stop help desk for design, architecture and nonprofit firms that use Apple systems, is also opening a new office in Co-Merge, a coworking space in San Diego, in what could be the first phase of a multi-city expansion.

A rapid expansion and a shift into mobile device support for national retail chains “caused us to run out of physical space” for housing employees and “storing pallets of iPads and iPhones,” says Matt Woestehoff, director of operations and business development. “Meanwhile, Atomic Data”—a data center operator co-owned by Jim Wolford, sole owner and CEO of The Foundation—“was growing rapidly and basically kicked us out of their office,” Woestehoff says with a laugh.

The new digs are “definitely an upgrade,” he adds. The Foundation shares one floor of the Ford Center with Seed, a small startup incubator that focuses on biotechnology and other high-tech ideas. Seed uses an old chemistry lab on one side of the building.

The Foundation’s new space belonged to a boutique soap manufacturer, a longtime client of The Foundation’s, which moved its operations to Milwaukee after a buyout by Johnson & Johnson. The space has a 32-desk bullpen and easy access to a highly secure storage area for valuable electronics. The Foundation has access to a guest parking lot, a huge perk for the 300-odd local clients that had to use meter parking at its old location.

Though The Foundation is growing rapidly, the Ford Center space should be fine for the foreseeable future. Unlike many IT companies, The Foundation lacks an office-based salesforce. “We’re not salesy people,” says Woestehoff. Instead, the company relies on referrals and search traffic to generate new business. The company’s engineer-heavy workforce spends “40 to 45 hours per week, per person” on site at local clients’ offices, freeing up space at the Ford Center.

The flexible work model first led Woestehoff and the team to explore the possibility of a second office last year. Two employees, an engineer and operations specialist, expressed interest in moving to southern California and remaining part of the team. Woestehoff investigated and found that San Diego’s business culture is remarkably like the Twin Cities’, “very forward-looking in terms of technology, but laid back and supportive too,” he says, without the competitiveness of tech hubs like San Francisco and New York.

Using The Foundation’s experience with CoCo, “a valued partner” that the company has worked with for years, Woestehoff found Co-Merge and set the two employees up there. It’s still early going, but initial business development efforts have been successful. He’s confident the move will pay off, noting that other cities with similarly forward-looking yet supportive cultures could be ripe for additional offices for The Foundation.

But not too fast. In today’s fast-paced IT world, The Foundation, now in its 15th year, prides itself on patience and strategic thinking. “A lot of our friends have gone out of business because they’ve acted fast and made mistakes,” he says. “If it takes another 15 years to open a third office, so be it.”
 

The St. Paul Healthy Transportation for All Convening, held on October 25 at Carpenter’s Hall in St. Paul, found St. Paul’s alternative transportation advocates celebrating their movement’s growing momentum and planning for challenges ahead. The goal of the conference, according to St. Paul Healthy Transportation for All (SPHTFA), was to “actively engage St. Paul grassroots community leaders to create a sustainable multimodal transportation system.”
 
“Based on what our planning team has heard from community members, walkable streets with safe and accessible infrastructure is the most widespread issue,” says Lauren Fulner, who coordinates the “District Council [members], transportation focused non-profits and relevant agencies” that comprise SPHTFA. “[Our unofficial motto is] ‘everyone is a pedestrian at some point', so...awareness of the pedestrian realm is a natural place to focus.”
 
As SPHTFA’s first major event, the Convening drew community leaders and citizens from nearly every St. Paul neighborhood. At workshops and breakout sessions, participants learned how to lead conversations and initiatives around public and alternative transportation, collaborate with counterparts in other communities, and work directly with city and state decision-makers to effect positive change.
 
The Convening covered most of the day’s hot transit topics. Workshops included “You and the St. Paul Bike Plan,” “Racial Equity in Transit Decision Making” and “From Vision to Plan to Project.” The event also featured a session devoted to “Organizing Friendly Streets and Better Blocks,” which highlighted Fulner’s work with the Friendly Streets Initiative. And the conference explored useful tools for transportation advocates, including an “Equitable Development Scorecard” and a “walkability/accessibility survey” for SPHTFA attendees.
 
Despite St. Paul Healthy Transportation for All’s community-driven focus, the conference attracted key state and local leaders. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman opened with remarks on St. Paul’s transportation system, followed by Minnesota Commissioner of Health Dr. Ed Ehlinger’s keynote speech on the health benefits of walking, biking and public transit. Charles Zelle, Minnesota’s Transportation Commissioner, closed with remarks on past and future developments in road use and public transit.
 
According to Fulner, SPHTFA formed out of “several years of conversations around more intentional collaboration and sharing of resources between District Councils,” with the Macalester-Groveland and Hamline-Midway councils taking the lead. Fulner stresses that SPHTFA is “in it for the long haul, in the sense that [this isn’t] a one event or one meeting kind of project,” she says. “We want to foster increased collaboration and creative, big picture thinking in community members and decision makers.”
 
SPHTFA takes a “whole city” approach to transportation, paying special attention to the needs of traditionally underserved communities and marginalized demographic groups, such as the elderly and people with disabilities. While celebrating the better-than-expected debut of the Green Line, Fulner is quick to point out that it “does not serve many of the traditionally under-represented and under-resourced neighborhoods and populations.”
 
“There needs to be more focus of the city as a whole, including the East Side and the West Side [meaning the area south of downtown],” she adds.
 
Overall, Fulner and SPHTFA would like stakeholders and citizens to recognize the fundamentally interconnected nature of St. Paul’s urban fabric and work to strengthen it. “Transportation and health are both issues that function in a web of interconnectivity, rather than as a series of isolated issues, and should be addressed with this in mind,” she says.”
 

Green Line Theater, an “original, mobile theater production” sponsored by the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative’s Catalyst Fund, will enliven the Green Line at 1 p.m. this Saturday, Oct 18, (or 1 p.m. this Sunday, in the event of a rainout). The production—created in partnership with the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s (MMAA) Project Space exhibition “From There to Here”—includes visual art and performances from artists Wing Young Huie, Ashley Hanson and Jessica Huang, as well as from members of the communities surrounding the Green Line.

The play comprises five scenes at five stops—Raymond, Hamline, Dale, Capitol/Rice and Central—and explores the “rich history, stories and collective memories associated with [Green Line] neighborhoods,” according to the MMAA. Creatively, it’s an extension and expansion of “Bus Stop Theater,” a Creative CityMaking collaboration that brought Huie and Hanson together last year.
 
Huie, Hanson, Huang and others developed the script in close consultation with Springboard for the Arts, the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, and the African Development Center. The three organizations held “workshops and street engagements to collect stories about the neighborhoods along the Green Line,” using the information to “inform the script for the interactive play,” according to MMAA.

The audience will travel together from scene to scene, using the light rail as transportation, in a style of site-specific theater know as mobile theater. “Utilizing public transportation to move from scene to scene is not anything we have heard of happening here before last year, when [Wing and I] produced ‘Bus Stop Theater’,” Hanson says.

“The idea behind this type of mobile theater is to get the audience engaged with their public transportation system, the landscape that it moves through, and the other people who utilize public transportation,” adds Hanson. “In a way, we are turning transit vehicles into community meeting places.”
 
In addition to her work along the Green Line, Hanson’s PlaceBase Productions—a collaboration with artist Andrew Gaylord—puts on site-specific performances at locations across Minnesota. Paddling Theater, for instance, makes its way through the Minnesota River Valley by boat. We use “mobile theater to connect audiences to their physical landscape by producing stories...in the landscape [where they] occurred,” Hanson says.
 
Performers and audience members meet at the parking lot for 2314 University Ave W, near the Raymond Station. Though “Green Line Theater” is free, register for the event. A free, open-admission reception follows the last scene at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, in downtown St. Paul.
 
“We hope to continue exploring this medium in the hope that more people will bring theater outside the box,” Hanson says, “and engage with an audience that might not otherwise attend a theater production.”
 

The Knight Foundation recently announced 42 winners of its first-ever St. Paul Knight Arts Challenge. The challenge tasked applicants with answering this question: “What’s your best idea for the arts in St. Paul?” The grants, totaling nearly $1.4 million, recognize creative initiatives from the Far East Side to St. Anthony Park.
 
In addition to providing their best ideas for the arts in St. Paul, the Knight Foundation requires successful applicants to demonstrate that that project will either “take place in or benefit St. Paul,” according to a release from the foundation. And each applicant must find funds to match the Knight Foundation’s awards. Some of notable winners include:
 
The “Smallest Museum in St. Paul,” $5,000
A project of almost-open WorkHorse Coffee Shop, in the Creative Enterprise Zone in St. Anthony Park, the “Smallest Museum in St. Paul” will be really, really small—a vintage fire-hose cabinet that couldn’t even hold a Labrador retriever. The museum will host rotating collections of artifacts, art and memorabilia from the neighborhood’s vibrant creative and academic communities. The first exhibit is scheduled for June. Future exhibits must follow three simple rules: celebrate local themes or history, engage the coffee shop’s patrons, and avoid high-value, theft-prone artifacts.
 
Fresh Traditions Fashion Show, $35,000
The Center for Hmong Arts and Talent won a sizable grant to expand its Fresh Traditions Fashion Show, the Twin Cities’ “only culturally inspired fashion event that exhibits the creativity, originality and quality of work by Hmong designers,” according to the Knight Foundation. At the show, designers must incorporate five traditional Hmong fabrics into clothing that hews to contemporary fashion. Part of the Knight Foundation grant will be set aside for career support and skills-building classes for individual designers.

Radio Novelas on the East Side, $50,000
Nuestro Pueblo San Pablo Productions, led by Barry Madore, will use its Knight award to produce a series of 20 fictional radio novelas that celebrate the history and culture of the East Side’s Latino community. Madore plans to promote the series with three live shows at yet-to-be-named venues around the district. Like Fresh Traditions Fashion Show designers, participating performers can count on support and training from Madore and his partners.
 
Paleo-osteological Bike Rack, $40,000
Artist and paleo-osteological interpreter Michael Bahl has plans to fabricate the bronze skeleton of a large dinosaur-like animal in repose, with its ribcage functioning as a bike rack. That bony crest on its skull? A bike helmet. The work focuses on how prehistoric skeletons, which are obsessed over by scientists and fossil hunters around the world—can also be viewed as works of art. “When the individual bones are joined in a united effort, a skeleton becomes the ultimate functioning mechanism, or in this case, a whimsical bike rack,” according to Knight’s website.

Twin Cities Jazz Festival, $125,000
More established organizations got a slice of the pie, too. The largest single grant went to the Twin Cities Jazz Festival. The annual festival already draws more than 30,000 attendees, but organizers wanted to add more stage space and spring for better-known headliners. Performers have yet to be announced for next year’s event, in June, but executive director Steve Heckler is considering a move to the brand-new St. Paul Saints stadium, in the heart of Lowertown. That would create more seating space and facilitate pedestrian traffic from the Green Line stop at Union Depot.
 
The St. Paul Knight Arts Challenge will continue through 2016, with two more rounds of awards. All told, the foundation has earmarked $4.5 million to fund creative ideas, plus another $3.5 million for five established St. Paul arts institutions: Springboard for the Arts, Penumbra Theater, TU Dance, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and The Arts Partnership. St. Paul is just the fourth city to participate in the Knight Arts Challenge, after Miami, Detroit and Philadelphia.
 

Next week, September 21-24, the Twin Cities will host Rail~volution 2014, one of the country’s most visible transit and development conferences.
 
Founded in 1989 in Portland, Oregon, as a local advocacy organization, Rail~volution expanded in 1995 into an annual conference that brings the country’s top transit and design thinkers together each year. According to the Rail~Volution website, the "conference is for passionate practitioners — people from all perspectives who believe strongly in the role of land use and transit as equal partners in the quest for greater livability and greater communities."
 
Rail~volution 2014 will showcase the vibrancy of the Twin Cities, thanks to two dozen “mobile workshops” spread across four days. The a la carte events include “Grow, Sell and Eat Local,” which will take attendees to Frogtown Farm, Urban Organics and the St. Paul Farmers Market. “BOD: Bike-Oriented Development + The Midtown Greenway” shows off “the nation’s best urban bike trail” on a 12-mile bike tour.
 
Other noteworthy events include a “cultural journey” centered on the Franklin Street LRT station, a tour through the Warehouse District/North Loop, and a “history and vision” workshop about the Northstar commuter rail line. Other workshops and lectures will take place at the Hyatt Regency near the Minneapolis Convention Center.
 
Another highlight of Rail~volution 2014 is a trade show that features more than a dozen rail-related exhibitors, from multinational rolling stock manufacturers like Siemens to smaller firms like Oregon-based United Streetcar and Northwest Signal. Local sponsors include Kimley Horn, a St. Paul-based design firm, as well as the Central Corridor Funders’ Collaborative, a consortium of organizations dedicated to fostering transit-oriented development and sustainable growth along the Green Line.
 
Local conference attendees will have plenty of opportunities to network with national players in the transit and development business. Before the conference officially kicks off, the Baseball + Hotdogs + Local Brews event combines a Twins game with a tour of the newly refurbished Ford Center, in the Warehouse District, and free-flowing Twin Cities beers. For non-baseball fans, a paddleboat cruise shows off the cities’ skylines and natural beauty from the Mississippi River. Those who want to pair art and transit can tour the Loring Greenway and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which precedes a Saturday-evening show at the Jungle Theater.
 
The location of its signature conference varies each year, but Rail~volution has plans to implement year-round programming that “fufill[s] our mission and vision that America's cities and regions be transformed into livable places—healthy, economically vibrant, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable,” according to its website.
 
 

When Ethiopian-born Tashitaa Tufaa lost his civil service position with the Minneapolis Housing Authority in 2003, he saw two possible directions: either go back to his former job as a bus driver, or take a leap of faith and start his own bus company instead.
 
Fortunately for himself and the 200 people he now employs, he took the entrepreneurial option.
 
Tufaa brought in family members to help run the business, Metropolitan Transportation Network, and began garnering contracts with public and private schools, steadily growing the Coon Rapids-based company over the years.
 
"We seem to grow faster every year," he says. "We stay on top of it by working day and night, and also by empowering our management team. They're responsible for big decisions, instead of everything coming from me. I think that builds trust."
 
With more contracts coming in and expansion into other communities like Crystal and St. Cloud, Tufaa expects to hire at least 50 more people in the next year. He also anticipates that buying more vehicles, broadening the current fleet of 300, and constructing a new building on a six-acre lot in Fridley should help in the effort.
 
"We're excited by the opportunities that we see ahead," says Tufaa. "We want to start providing public transportation in different cities, that's a major goal. In the meantime, we're just going to work hard and provide excellent service."
 
Source: Tashitaa Tufaa, Metropolitan Transportation Network
Writer: Elizabeth Millard

St. Paul-based Transit for Livable Communities (TLC) has released funds for three new projects through its administration of the federal Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Project (NMTPP).

Minneapolis is one of four communities in the country participating; TLC has allocated nearly $20 million of NMTPP funds in four funding rounds so far, much of it through its Bike/Walk Twin Cities program.

This smaller than first round will fund:

� $62,000 in pedestrian improvements on Franklin Avenue between 23rd and 26th avenues in Minneapolis, including countdown timers, marked crosswalks, curb extensions, and possibly future bike lanes;

� $110,000 to fill two "pedestrian gaps" to the North Star Rail Station in Fridley; and

� $1 million additional capital support for the bike-share program Nice Ride, to expand the number of bikes and stations.

Joan Pasiuk, bicycling and walking program director for TLC, describes the effort as more than just "new streetscape and infrastructure.

"We really look at this as�innovative ways to help people connect with their community and use resources in different ways," says Pasiuk.

In Minneapolis, the Franklin Avenue improvements have been "very community-led" and especially included new residents and new immigrants in the process, she says.

Likewise, the Fridley project is part of a transit-oriented development effort in that city, she says--part of a Compete Streets movement and larger comprehensive plan.
 
"That's very progressive, for suburban communities to take on that type of project," says Pasiuk.

Source: Joan Pasiuk, Transit for Livable Communities
Writer: Jeremy Stratton

Emily Goodman has given the subject some thought.

While earning degrees in geography and psychology at Macalester College, she wrote an honors thesis titled The Green Cities: an Exploration into the Twin Concepts of Urban Sustainability and Conservation Psychology.

In January, after nearly three years working on transportation and bike/walk issues in St. Paul's Department of Planning and Economic Development, Goodman began putting her knowledge and experience to work as the city's first sustainable transportation planner.

The position is a new spoke in the city's larger Sustainable St. Paul strategy. A key part of her work so far has been conducting a survey of bicycle projects in anticipation of a citywide bike plan, which she calls "much-needed and exciting."

Goodman will work to establish a "bicycle priority network"--areas and routes in which the city will support biking with aspects like signage, road treatments, traffic calming, bump-outs, bike boulevards, and off-street trails.

That too supports a larger effort: to create a balanced transportation plan in line with the city's adopted "Complete Streets" policy.

"It acknowledges that the system should serve all users," says Goodman. Cars, bikes, buses, light rail, and pedestrians all have their place. Goodman's position "will focus on types of transportation that�will need a little bit of extra love," she says.

Another part of her role is to partner with other organizations and municipalities--"anybody who is doing good work in the Twin Cities region," she says. St. Paul is currently working on an effort to establish regional way-finding guidelines with nearby counties, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and, of course, that twin city across the river.

While she does feel a bit overshadowed by the country's number-one bike city, St. Paul's relationship with Minneapolis is "friendly and collaborative," says Goodman, who calls Minneapolis "a great asset."

St. Paul has received some funding, for instance, as a rider on Minneapolis' participation in the federal Non-motorized Transportation Pilot Program, administered through St. Paul-based Transit for Livable Communities.

And Goodman agrees that Minneapolis' lauded bike culture is bolstered at least a bit by its metropolitan neighbors.

"St. Paul has done amazing things," Goodman says. "I'm excited to improve on those, but also to improve on telling the story of what we're already doing."

Source: Emily Goodman, St. Paul's Department of Planning and Economic Development
Writer: Jeremy Stratton