City Center

[MNdible]

I don't know about a cutout, hopefully someone is looking into it.

There are additional tricks to bring light into the interior as well.

See my post with the floorplan; cutouts work on midrise warehouse buildings (although they're expensive and so are less frequent now than in the past), but in a tower with the vertical circulation core in the middle its a non-starter.

[thespeedmccool]

Contrarian opinion: the exterior of the building is fine. It will never be the best looking building in downtown, but it doesn't need to be. It is not somehow ruining the skyline. The costs of either modifying the exterior or demolishing the building are going to be astronomical.

Full agree. The exterior is fine. Never understood the hate for it.

I guess a residential conversion would be cool, but I think that's not feasible at this scale. 1,000~ new apartments in the downtown market sounds like a financial stretch. Maybe the top floors go residential and the bottom floors remain office?

I'm not sorry to see the zombie downtown era come to an end, but I do worry about continuing to dislocate Minneapolis's property tax base. If anyone knows of any Fortune 500 companies looking to relocate, would you let them know there's a skyscraper available for cheap in Minneapolis?

[BikesOnFilm]

Here are two potential models for a City Center conversion:

The Residences at Rivermark in Baton Rouge took a building of similar design and vintage and successfully converted to residential, although the floor plates here seem to be smaller.

The Lightwell in New York - I really like this one. Instead of trying to cut one big hole, they cut two smaller ones. I know that's probably based on New York money and demand, but it's nice to know what's possible.

I also think there's an option I haven't seen anyone try - just set the apartment units back towards the interior to shrink the amount of floor plate you need to fill. That would give them the option to open up the facade a bit to make it less ugly.

My dream solution to improve the look of the tower is to double down on our LED 'cyberpunk' skyline and run LED strips between all of the windows vertically to put on big light shows like the Capella and Target buildings do. Repainting the beige to grey would also go a long way.

A lot of options on the table. I would love to see the mall subdivided out and demolished as soon as possible though. That's the part of the property where a new construction build could bring a lot of life and vitality to Nicollet Mall.

[nate]

I'm not sorry to see the zombie downtown era come to an end, but I do worry about continuing to dislocate Minneapolis's property tax base. If anyone knows of any Fortune 500 companies looking to relocate, would you let them know there's a skyscraper available for cheap in Minneapolis?

Does anyone know how many more very large, very long-term leases like Target/City Center are sitting empty? This strikes me as a major domino to fall in the zombie office market and I'm curious how many more might yet be out there.

[Oreos&Milk]

Here's a floorplate for reference. This is an upper level floor, so likely the lower floors will have additional elevator banks that aren't being shown here.

Guesstimating from the drawing that the building footprint could be something like 130'x240'. That gives you 31,200sf per floor, but that would include non-leasable square footage in the building core.

So if that's the case, and you're trying to subdivide for housing, your typical units will be something like 40' deep (130' - 40' core - 10' circulation leaves 80', divided by units on two primary building faces) which is a little bit deeper than standard but definitely could be a lot worse.

Why does a hypothetical apartment conversion need to have windows to the outside? I've seen a mall conversion into apartments that has indoor windows to the nice walkway with skylights.




The ends of the hallways could have wide windows to the outside and have LED lights to assist in illumination, and the hallways wouldn't have to be as wide to ensure more usable space. Community spaces such as washers and dryers, fitness centers, community self serve coffee stations, and couches and chairs could help bring that connectivity space to build the vibe of connectivity and socialization.

Home isn't just a place we go to look out the window. We go home to sleep, get ready for our day and leave and go back into the outside world. We don't all need windows that look outside so why do all apartments need windows to look outside?

[BikesOnFilm]

I mean, assuming the mall area sticks around, that would work for the third floor of offices.

Not sure how you think that would play out for the other dozens of stories in the tower though. I don't think people would want to live in a Charlie Munger style apartment, especially if it looked like City Center.

[BigIdeasGuy]

I know it sounded crazy before and there are real complications with the Marriott but there are much worse results than this block ended up as the new home of the Timberwolves. I can sorta see how it works, rebuild the Marriott tower facing Nicollet with a great street frontage the seating bowl in the middle of the block then have some sort of signature marquee & lobby facing Hennepin. It would be interesting fit and challenging fit but I think it would work and be great for both Nicollet, Hennepin & DT in general

[thespeedmccool]

Two problems with the "tear down 33 South Sixth proposal:"

1. Dismantling a skyscraper is really, really expensive. This would be the third tallest tower ever dismantled, and every other similarly tall tower was disassembled was torn down to build a taller tower. There's simply no way the Timberwolves, the city, the county, or anybody would swallow the cost of tearing down the building for an arena.
2. I don't know that the best thing for a city aiming to be a high-service, high-education economic hub should be seriously considering bringing down office towers. Feels a little like admitting defeat (I mean, imagine the headlines: "Woke Minneapolis tears down empty office tower.")

[mattaudio]

I just don't see it as a suitable arena site either. It's only marginally larger than the Target Center block. If that parcel was big enough, then we'd be seeing a proposal to have Lynx/Wolves play in St. Paul for a year or two while a new arena is built on the existing Target Center footprint. But it's not big enough.

[BikesOnFilm]

Not to mention that there's every possibility that, if the tower sells for a song, that bringing the lease rates back down to Earth could help bring back office occupancy.

Target signed their lease in 2015. I don't know if they were marketing their sublease at a rate that they'd be losing money (as I know some will do just to get something back) but I know for sure the current market rate of that space is far, far lower than it was in 2015.

I'd love to see us put a massive amount of housing in the heart of the city if it penciled out. Next best thing would be rock bottom lease rates to put bodies back in the building.

[BigIdeasGuy]

Even if cheaper leases at City Center pencil out for the new owners, where is that demand for office space going to come from? It's not other buildings in it's market (low class A-high class B) are exactly full. Sure it might work for some companies but lower rents don't magically create demand that doesn't exist. People searching for high class A offices, City Center isn't going to work because of ego and the back office still are work from home with people love and return to office are despised.

Look it's not a perfect solution or the cheapest and it has it's many challenges but it's a solution that kills like 4 birds with 1 stone. It keeps the Wolves DT, improves street frontage, eliminates an ugly building & removes about a million sq ft of basically dead office space. Let's not pretend a conversation to residential is a lock to pencil out either

[thespeedmccool]

The reality is that it probably just has to be an empty office building until the Minneapolis market catches fire again. Taking it down is probably economically infeasible and a residential conversion seems hard too. Maybe it could be filled up at a lower rental rate, but as others have pointed out, it's not like there's a gluten of demand right now.

Oh well, the Empire State Building was empty once too.

[Wezle]

There's no economic sense in tearing down this building and it would never pencil out. The cost would likely be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The only places where skyscrapers are demolished are in cities like NYC and Singapore where land values and undeveloped land is at the utmost premium. Like others have said, the only realistic options are either wait until there's office demand, or some kind of part/full residential conversion.

[twincitizen]

Someone brought this up with the Ameriprise building sale: if a building sells for cheap enough, the new owner doesn't necessarily have to fill it up to make money. In the near term, they just need to sign enough leases to cover maintenance & operations. If someone buys the office tower for like $10 million, maybe they only need it 25% occupied within 5 years (completely made up numbers) to make a small return on investment, with hopes of gradually increasing occupancy and/or waiting for better incentives for residential conversion to come along.

If we want residential conversions to happen sooner rather than later, and in buildings that aren't necessarily ideal candidates, the state needs to provide a big pot of incentives and tax abatements or these properties will sit as mostly empty office buildings for years. Mpls & St. Paul don't have the money because these devalued office buildings are already pushing the property tax burden onto residents. The state has to step in and put up the money.

In St. Louis, a developer is working on a $350 million conversion of a vacant 44-story office building into 630 apartments, hinging on the MO legislature creating various incentives and tax abatements. If they can make it work there with a weaker tax base and I assume less demand for living downtown compared to Mpls, then we can make it work here. Though I will say, compared to St. Louis whose CBD never became dominated by large office towers, the problem in the Twin Cities might be that there are too many conversion candidates that would be fighting over a limited pot of money (City Center, Ameriprise, half of downtown St. Paul lol). St. Louis has far less office space to begin with and its downtown has been struggling for much longer than ours, so there's likely pent up desperation to do something about it, even with a GOP supermajority legislature dominated by suburban and rural interests.