Although the more central Southdale area has been doing great, it has been really, consistently hard to get anything to happen in the Pentagon area
But has it been for only 1 reason that nothing has happened at Pentagon Park, or have the market conditions changed several times over the past 20 years?
It seems that, pre-2008, Pentagon was dealing with the slowdown in office construction, and floundered.
2008-2012 was a very slow economy.
2013-today, you could build an apartment building in a swamp and you’d have renters.
So it’s moved from mostly office to mostly residential.
On top of that, the city decided to decommission Fred Richards Golf Course, and it took them several years to come up with a replacement park. And of course the decade of bickering over Nine Mile Creek Trail.
All these things affected what Pentagon Park would end up as today. It’s clear that a substantial residential portion would be successful next to a fantastic trail and plans for an amazing city-wide park.
It just seems very short-sighted to think, “OMG we have to build something, anything, so we’ll just take this suburban apartment building and forget everything we’ve been pushing for about multimodal transportation, place making, and human-scaled streets.” Because, like the person who calls this kind of development “drivable urbanism” in the Southdale area, we can call this exactly that.