Downtown Minneapolis' six neighborhoods in one urban core

'Stepping stone' replaces old downtown lodgings

A growing segment of downtown residents are 'empty nesters'

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Neighborhoods at a glance

Two may be a crowd in downtown condo

Published Monday, December 23, 1996

Downtown Minneapolis' six neighborhoods in one urban core

Steve Brandt / Star Tribune

They'd love a bigger grocery store that's closer. They'd like more uniform skyway hours. They're concerned about city zoning efforts to concentrate adult entertainment and gun shops in the city's core. They're even enthusiastic about forming block clubs.

And it bugs some of them when City Hall talks about taking a proposal "out to the neighborhoods."

That's because downtown Minneapolis is a neighborhood to the 19,000 people who by city estimates live at its core. Or more accurately, it's six distinctly flavored neighborhoods that lie within the arc of Interstate Hwys. 94 and 35W, with a residential bridgehead on the East Bank of the Mississippi River.

The folks who live downtown are a more adventuresome lot, say those who develop housing there. Some come for the nightlife of theaters and restaurants. Some make the riverfront their equivalent of the Chain of Lakes. They're willing to test the popular perception that downtown's unsafe; many say they find it untrue. Some prefer it as a bus hub; others find its skyways accessible for the disabled.

"It's the center of things. It's where everything is happening," said George Rosenquist, a co-founder of the Downtown Minneapolis Residents Association and a wheelchair user.

For years, downtown living meant The Towers, the pioneering 500-unit building in what much later became a wave of downtown high-rises. Or it meant less-expensive older buildings that ranged from dingy fleabag hotels for day laborers to quiet, relatively inexpensive places that comfortably held families.

Population plunged

Indeed, in 1959, six years before The Towers, the downtown area held 29,000 residents. But wholesale clearances leveled the Bowerylike Gateway area where The Towers and other buildings rose. Then the south end of Nicollet Mall was cleared.

As a result, the Loring Park neighborhood plunged from a peak of about 14,000 people in the late 1960s to below 6,000. Luxury and middle-income developments that filled that space have returned only a small fraction of the people displaced.

A building boom in the early 1980s helped bring 1990's downtown census almost back to the 1970 level of 17,608 people. But the '80s boom stalled when changes in federal tax incentives undercut real estate markets. Still, downtown's population has risen by about 1,500 since the census, with more than 800 units of renovated and new housing at Laurel Village, the biggest project in that period.

There's renewed interest in the riverfront, with luxury townhouse units at The Landings, a little north of the new Federal Reserve Bank, and several Brighton Development Corp. high-end projects completed or planned close to St. Anthony Falls.

The biggest pending project is Heritage Landing, along several blocks of N. 2nd St. The first stage is a 326-unit mix of townhouses and condominiums, with a May construction start for the 82-unit first phase. Sizable potential housing sites also have been identified near the Milwaukee Road Depot and along Harmon Pl.

The city's recent downtown planning report, which looks ahead to 2010, projects a downtown population of at least 23,000 by that date. Downtown population growth has been closely linked to employment growth. And the amount of office space added is expected to drop to 500,000 to 700,000 square feet each year from 825,000 -- the average from 1980-95.

More empty-nesters

Yet despite this slower growth, close to 245 new housing units are expected each year through 2010, the same rate over the last 15 years, according to the Planning Department.

That's because more empty-nester baby boomers are expected to leave their single-family homes for townhouses and high-rises.

City subsidies also will be a factor. "Much of what happens downtown will be related to the level of financing, which will be related to the level of assistance the city provides," said Tom Melchior, executive director of Maxfield Research Group, a real estate marketing research firm.

The downtown plan calls for more housing for all income levels, but it emphasizes moderate- to high-income owner-occupied housing. The Alliance of the Streets, a nonprofit advocacy group, counts more than 2,400 units of low-income housing lost to development in downtown since 1979. It listed 12 buildings lost to the Minneapolis Convention Center, 15 lost to parking facilities and hundreds of units lost when buildings were retooled for higher-income tenants.

Although hundreds of units have been renovated or built for low-income residents by nonprofit developers such as Central Community Housing Trust, the trust's executive director, Alan Arthur, said some former downtown residents are on the streets -- or in other low-income neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the desire for a full-line grocery store has been a perennial wish-list item for downtown residents. They have a few convenience stores, and even a couple of modest-size supermarkets on the core's outskirts. But with low profit margins in the grocery industry, expensive land downtown and much of downtown's population scattered in a ring, rather than a compact mass, prospects are uncertain.