Snelling and University TOD: "SmartSite Redevelopment"

[Tcmetro]

From a quick glance, the report talks mainly about how to proceed with infrastructure and financing (presumably a lot of public financing because, you know, TOD blah blah blah). It seems that the site plans are just placeholders, as there hasn't been a development proposal yet.

I would prefer that the accesses to the parking garages be along Pascal and St Anthony, as those streets are already wastelands as it is, and we should really be focusing on the streetscape along Snelling and University.

Unfortunately, I don't think any developer is going to give up a lot of parking, and will probably want to add parking, considering a new mall is going to attract more people and because of a higher density of shops. Also with residential being thrown in, there will be a very high demand for parking during evening and weekend hours. I don't think that the parties involved assume that many people will actually be using transit. Maybe it will turn out like the Lake St KMART where there is an excessive amount of parking, because most people walk/bus or perhaps it will be more like Highland Village with a lot of people trying to find parking. Hopefully some more detailed analysis will come out of this, in any case.

[twincitizen]

Locked article: http://finance-commerce.com/2015/03/met ... reen-line/

I'm sure we'll hear more soon. Sounds like Met Council is abandoning the coordinated development dream with the Midway Shopping Center and will solicit proposals for their 10 acre site (corner of 94/Snelling) alone. This is not good. That Rainbow Foods serious cannot last much longer. Once Rainbow is closed there will be much more willingness on behalf of the mall owner to redevelop. It sounded like they were playing ball with St. Paul and the Met Council too, understanding the potentially huge financial windfall coming their way with mixed-use/TOD replacing the strip mall (especially sans Walgreens and potentially Rainbow).

[Anondson]

Who is the mall owner?

[Snelbian]

RK Midway.

This is...big. I expect I'll be hearing a lot about this soon as Union Park was juuuust about to set up a task force to coordinate with the other parties involved. It's bad in that there might be some coordination issues with road construction and the like. But I can see a major upside to this - my impression of RK Midway has been distinctly negative in this. Their lawyers took a mafioso approach to community meetings, implying that if we didn't vote to approve an utterly terrible one-story cafe at the SE corner of Snelling and University they would not be able to move forward with the rest of the superblock. Which makes total sense - if a tiny, tiny fraction of the land isn't approved for massively underutilized retail, all that economic potential of acres and acres of land just disappears, right? "Nice development you got here, be a shame if something happened to it..." Maybe now some real progress can be made on at least part of that land.

[mulad]

I like how the Ramsey County property map breaks out building value versus land value in their tax assessment data. The bank building on the corner is valued at $2.56 million, compared to the strip mall buildings (the one containing Rainbow plus the one next to Snelling with the liquor store in it) which were valued at $3.39 million in 2013, but dropped to $2.81 million in 2014.

Of course, the building value is dwarfed by the value of the huge 17.75 acre parcel -- $20.3 million. They paid almost $1.1 million in taxes for the main parcel against its 2013 valuation, and 86% of that money goes to paying off taxes against the land value. With the building value dropping in 2014, the percentage of taxes from land value will rise to 88%.

Things even out a little bit if you include the other parcels on the block -- The McDonald's parcel has parking on it, but the ones for Perkins and the other outbuilding with Little Caesar's do not. If you look at all of the RK Midway property, 79% of the current value is in the land versus buildings (this would rise to 83% [Edit: I previously said 93% -- a mistake in my spreadsheet] if they also owned the Metro Transit parcel and left it bare). Taxes against the whole block were $1.6 million for the most recent year (Metro Transit is tax-exempt, of course).

[David Greene]

Locked article: http://finance-commerce.com/2015/03/met ... reen-line/

I'm sure we'll hear more soon. Sounds like Met Council is abandoning the coordinated development dream with the Midway Shopping Center and will solicit proposals for their 10 acre site (corner of 94/Snelling) alone. This is not good.

Why? Don't we usually prefer that entire blocks (and superblocks!) not be developed by a single entity?

[mulad]

The whole block is currently valued at $43 million, including the Metro Transit site at $8.7 million. I'd prefer to see it bought up by an entity like the city's Housing and Redevelopment Authority or maybe the Port Authority, then have it re-platted with new roadways/alleys with the blocks divided up into many small parcels similar to the layout in the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Larger buildings could still go in, but developers would just have to buy up some number of the small parcels to construct them.

[twincitizen]

Don't we usually prefer that entire blocks (and superblocks!) not be developed by a single entity?

Obviously yes, but I think this is a special case where the Met Council's parcel along the freeway will be very difficult to develop, period, let alone absent participation of RK Midway. That said, I don't think the independent development of Met Council's 10 acre parcel necessarily harms future development of Midway Shopping Center. It's a smallish parcel laid along the freeway. I thing the biggest problem is that developed independently, Met Council's property is not likely to amount to much. Met Council should just hold this property indefinitely. Redevelopment will come eventually when area rents have risen. The Green Line hasn't even been running for a year and the A-Line for less than 0 years. Let's maybe give this land some time to appreciate before making any rash decisions.

[mattaudio]

The reason why this needs coordination is because it's a superblock. The less desirable parcels on the superblock are thus less likely to get developed, and especially in a transit-oriented manner, if there's no coordination for connecting across the auto-oriented strip mall landscape.

[RailBaronYarr]

The whole block is currently valued at $43 million, including the Metro Transit site at $8.7 million. I'd prefer to see it bought up by an entity like the city's Housing and Redevelopment Authority or maybe the Port Authority, then have it re-platted with new roadways/alleys with the blocks divided up into many small parcels similar to the layout in the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Larger buildings could still go in, but developers would just have to buy up some number of the small parcels to construct them.

This was my thought for the best path forward. The city/SPPA could auction off lots over many years as demand warrants (starting at the corner of Snelling/Univ, perhaps), maybe setting aside a % of them for local developers and/or "not to exceed" lot sizes.

As always, I wouldn't be opposed to an redevelopment area that's highly transit-accessible like this one to forego the exact grid of its surroundings & go with something more traditional with narrower, slightly curving (but still grid-like) streets. Put district parking+access up against the freeway with office above it or whatever.

[Snelbian]

The problem with that is that the most desirable spots - near University - are the spot owned by R.K. Midway, not a public entity. The city would need to buy the property before auctioning it off, and R.K. Midway is unlikely to sell it cheap.

[mulad]

Turns out that the whole area below the main shopping center may be available -- Metro Transit has their site, but the HRA already has an option on the parking lot next to it (or at least they did as of June last year). I'm not sure how much the HRA site would cost to acquire, though. The Metro Transit land is essentially free by comparison.

I think there is a certain advantage to developing those parcels first -- their distance from the station make it a bit more okay to screw up or build small if there isn't a whole lot of market demand. I mean, there probably should be something like a 12-story tower right on the corner at Snelling and University, but I doubt many developers are thinking that big yet.

Here's a map I made up showing a really basic plan for redeveloping the site by dividing it up into lots of small parcels. I've tried to align the parcels with the existing buildings (including the multiple structures that make up the existing strip mall), so there should be tons of options for phasing development if the whole site could actually be acquired. I also tried to align things so the Metro Transit and HRA parcels could be developed independently.

My map just extends the grid south, with a couple of minor alignment tweaks (there arguably could be a few more, but I wanted to keep it pretty simple). The clear space is right-of-way that could be built into streets/alleys immediately upon getting ownership of the original parcel. I divided the superblock up into 12 blocks with 224 salable parcels, which are typically around 0.1 acre in size. The Metro Transit site makes two full blocks and two half-blocks (59 parcels), while the HRA site makes another one full and one half block (33 parcels).

That's a lot of lots, but I believe that it's better to make a lot of small bite-size chunks. Hopefully that would encourage buyers to only take as much land as they really need. I would expect 2-4 parcels to be bought up at a time in many cases. The parcels that currently have buildings on them would initially be leased to existing tenants (who would have the earliest option to buy), though any marked in red would never go up for sale, except to the city in order to convert them to public right-of-way when the relevant buildings ultimately come down.

Looking through the redevelopment plan, it looks like if you ignore the cost of parking structures and parks to start out with, the cost for streets and other infrastructure adds up to about $350,000 per gross acre. It looks like the market values across the whole site probably vary from around $800,000 to $1.5 million per acre, probably averaging around $150k per parcel. The Metro Transit and HRA sites would probably be toward the lower end of the scale.

Metro Transit is in the best position here, since they have tax-exempt land. It's free money to them whenever and however they decide to sell or lease it. I'm not sure who would be in the best position to pay for the initial street construction -- the city has been shoving money around to try and get some arterials rehabilitated last year and this year, so I don't know if there's much available funding. It should be pretty easy to get some bonding or a loan to pay it off, though.

But it is really annoying that this whole project is literally getting held up due to the high cost of free parking. With a deficit of $30 million on free parking in a set of structures, they should look at trying to get a few dollars per day out of each stall with paid parking.

Of course, there's more than enough parking in the area as it stands now. I'd rather have future developers come up with their own plans for parking structures, with the caveat that any structures in the area should have some amount of public paid parking. I think the existing plan is trying too hard to start out with district parking when there isn't enough demand for it as things are now.

[ProspectPete]

I was looking at the site from google maps today. If it weren't for the Bank (soon Walgreen's) and the Mc Donald's, there would almost be enough room to put the stadium facing University Ave in the vast front parking lot of Rainbow! Plenty of parking in the back:-).

[seanrichardryan]

Walgreen's is likely dead as was originally proposed. The Stadium has to stay on the 'bus barn' site on the SW corner of St. Anthony Avenue & Snelling to be tax exempt. Except for the SE corner, the remaining vast parcel is owned by RK Midway, which intends to redevelop it (which was the plan, stadium or not.) We'll see if they announce partnerships with anyone else in likely future press conferences.

[Mikey]

I wonder if it's possible to do a land swap - as long as the Met Council still "owns" 10 acres, possibly including some of the original site...

[Wedgeguy]

I'd rather have the stadium closer to I-94 than to University. You want to keep the urban presence of retail, office, and residential to be what you see along the green line. I don't think looking at 3 blocks of stadium concourse is what we want on University.

[Minnehahaha]

Agreed! Moving it closer to University would also make it a tougher sell for the neighborhood.

[nate]

I'd rather have the stadium closer to I-94 than to University. You want to keep the urban presence of retail, office, and residential to be what you see along the green line. I don't think looking at 3 blocks of stadium concourse is what we want on University.

I agree, and it sounds like the Pohlads do too. Curious, very curious about the "large office tenant"

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