VOLUME 35, NUMBER 7
©2019 Real Estate Publishing Corporation
July 2019
Update: A Look at Downtown Minneapolis’ Next Wave of Development
By Liz Wolf
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owntown Minneapolis continues boasting billions of dollars in new commercial and residential development activity with no slowdown in sight. “We’re in our eighth year in a row of over $1 billion in building permits each year,” says David Frank, director of the department of Community
Planning and Economic Development (CPED) for the city of Minneapolis. “What that says is it’s a great place to invest, because it's a place people want to live and work and be, and it says it’s validation of the packages that we have available,” he notes. A number of the sites being redeveloped were previously city-owned. Here’s a look at some key projects that recently broke ground or are in various stages of planning:
RBC Gateway Minneapolis-based United Properties broke ground on the RBC Gateway mixed-use development on the “Nicollet Hotel Block” at the northern end of Nicollet Mall. United Properties purchased the site – a cityowned surface parking lot -- from the city of Minneapolis for $10.4 million. The city had had owned the property since the early 1990s, acquiring it after Downtown to page 14
Not Your Mother’s Mall: Transforming the Modern Retail Center By Tom Hershey
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atching the latest season of Stranger Things, you can’t help but reminisce about the mall in its glory days. In the 1980s, the mall did to Main Street what the internet has done to almost all brick-and-mortar retail. All too familiar eye-grabbing headlines have now
become commonplace when reading about today’s retail climate. Retailageddon. Mallpocalypse. While there is no doubt that there has been a seismic shift of the retail landscape, all may not be doom and gloom for the favorite teen hangout of the ‘80s. As retail bankruptcies soar and store closures continue, mall developers and owners are creatively transforming their assets into housing, hotels and even multi-faceted entertainment venues. The underlying goal is to get people to go back to (what was) the mall.
Owners and developers are looking to new uses to draw the consumer, some of which include abandoning retail completely or retaining only a portion as a complement. When the oldest mall in the United States, the Arcade Providence in Rhode Island, was transformed into 48 micro apartments, along with various retail amenities, some looked at it as a novelty. Nonetheless, before it opened there was a waiting list Mall to page 12