Nicollet Mall

[Bakken2016]

Speaking of Nicollet Mall... It seems like the city has been pretty quiet about whether or not the Mayor's pet project of removing buses is going forward or not.

[COLSLAW5]

It doesn't help that we cut ours off with freeways and the convention center. I know a map isn't perfect but I think Minneapolis needs to develop visitor maps that show walking/biking/busing routes connecting our important features and then focus on improving the experience and wayfinding on those routes. Nothing is really that far apart here, but if you don't know where you are you might not realize your blocks from the river.

[BikesOnFilm]

I think what's so mind boggling about the situation with Nicollet is that you can go walk down the street to Washington and see that Downtown Minneapolis, and Minneapolis at large, is not having a retail crisis. It's just having a hand-wringing crisis that they keep throwing money to change the set dressing of the street and it doesn't fix that the office buildings are, have always been, and will continue to be the problem.

We don't say that Washington Ave needs a makeover because there isn't street activity near the data center building - we recognize that having terrible buildings with no active frontage suck the life out of any area. The places on Nicollet where there are better frontages have things, the places on Nicollet where the frontages are terrible (City Center/IDS) or there was some grand, untenable plan (Dayton's Project) don't. You see this same thing playing out in Uptown too - the little retail stores are still there, the gigantic ones are empty, and the dead mall will keep being a dead mall until someone finally tears it down and builds housing there instead.

It's why the persistent brain fart of "City Center should be torn down and replaced with a basketball stadium" is so frustrating. Let's take one ugly fortress-like building and replace it with another! Surely we won't be writing think pieces 30 years later about yet another public-private disaster that promised to fix everything and ultimately solved nothing at the cost of millions! Because the only way that becomes a stadium site is if the city and/or the state foot the bill for demolition. It would be ironic, considering how involved the city was in developing City Center to begin with, if it ended the same way it began - with misguided idealism about how to fix a struggling neighborhood.

Maybe once the Timberwolves inevitably announce they're building at the Farmer's Market site, we can take some of that energy and political will that was pointed at the City Center tower and direct it at the retail building fronting Nicollet instead. Put 400 units of housing directly on the mall, with a normal amount of retail instead of a brutalist shopping mall, and you would see the narrative around Nicollet change almost overnight.

No matter how many slide decks the Downtown Council puts together, no matter if Metro Transit gets bullied off the mall or not, no matter how many way finding signs or fixes on the margins we make, it really doesn't matter until we get residents living in this part of the CBD.

[twincitizen]

Well said. The other thing that's frustrating about the Nicollet Mall situation is that the bar for "success" is incredibly low. It wouldn't actually require that much change to turn the tide. What would success look like on Nicollet? In the short term it would feel like an extraordinary success if there were just two sidewalk-fronting businesses per blockface.

It's true that a lot of buildings have terrible frontages, but many of the bad frontage buildings are already capable of meeting this very low bar. City Center in recent memory had a Sports Authority (or whatever came before it), Marshalls, and Office Depot. Marshall's was technically in the basement, but it had a door on Nicollet. Sure, those spaces probably will not get leased without being subdivided, but it's not like the building is physically incapable.

I like the idea of using both carrot and stick to turn the tide on Nicollet. The carrot would be drawing funds from the Nicollet TIF district to create a grant program for facade subdivision and beautification. Building owners could apply for grants to subdivide large retail spaces, add storefront glass, awnings, etc. The City/DID could also draw from these funds for physical improvements to Nicollet, now approaching 10 years old.

The stick would be some kind of vacancy tax specifically targeted at large "unleaseable" spaces that have been vacant for 3+ years. Building owners could avoid or delay the vacancy tax by subdividing and putting transparent glass and doors on those spaces. If they still don't get leased after those improvements, well that would suck but at least we tried something.

[SurlyLHT]

Do the building owners even care with the buildings being investments and etc? Could another organization buy, or get get rights to retail spaces and then lease them out, subdivide, make improvements and etc?

I also believe we need to create a corridor with some marketing name that starts at the river, connects to Nicollet Mall and goes to the Sculpture GArden. We need to get rid of that post office garage. This route is super easy to do via scooter or ebike. Which are easier to stop and get food or shop from. The Sculpture Garden/Nicollet/River are separate areas of activity and Nicollet is a deadzone inbetween.

[BikesOnFilm]

It's true that a lot of buildings have terrible frontages, but many of the bad frontage buildings are already capable of meeting this very low bar. City Center in recent memory had a Sports Authority (or whatever came before it), Marshalls, and Office Depot. Marshall's was technically in the basement, but it had a door on Nicollet. Sure, those spaces probably will not get leased without being subdivided, but it's not like the building is physically incapable.

There are a lot of problems that can be solved by throwing money at them, and unfortunately it seems getting a building owner to help themselves by making their own untenable property useful again has become one of those problems. But that City Center retail building has way more unwanted space beyond just the Mall frontage.

A specific example that I think illustrates the point is that both the Seven Points mall and City Center have recently been home to roller rinks, a very niche use that requires a lot of space with limited ability to draw the revenue per square foot necessary to be viable in either location long term. City Center made a temporary one as a part of Holidazzle a few years back in the Office Max space, the Seven Points one lasted longer as an interim use for unwanted space while the redevelopment plan was worked through, and ultimately closed last year. To quote the meme, "If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice."

When the Downtown Council puts out yet another slide deck they paid consultants millions to produce, with ideas like an ice skating rink or restaurants on top of skyways, I think of the City Center Holidazzle roller rink. Yeah, it would be really cool if we could devote 13,000 square feet to a fun, retro activity that is unique enough to bring people downtown. The faceless conglomerate that owns City Center still thinks unwanted space large enough to host a roller rink is worth $20 per square foot, and is currently playing a game of financial chicken with their lender where if neither of them admit that finding a tenant to fill 13,000 sq ft in Downtown Minneapolis at $20 a sq ft is fantasy, neither of them have to put it down as a loss in their financials.

Anyone who wants to do anything with that space also needs to entertain the fantasy that the space is worth $20 a sq ft until the music stops - which for a space like the roller rink, amounts to a $260,000 a month subsidy. And then you have to do it down the block to support a sports memorabilia museum in the Dayton's Project space, or an art gallery in the DGX space. Suddenly, you're finding you're spending a lot of money for very little return on investment, all because the financial system is designed to award the bank and building owner for pretending they don't have a problem for as long as possible.

The problem becomes a multi-headed hydra because there's too much retail space, the cost per square foot is baked into pre-pandemic loans that banks are unable/unwilling to foreclose on, and the configuration of that square footage is incompatible with the kinds of pioneer recovery tenants that would be needed to re-establish the retail corridor in the modern era. And it would be one thing if it was just City Center, but it's also City Center, Crystal Court, Gaviidae, and the skyway system in general.

If there's the possibility of using the streetcar funds to improve Nicollet, there needs to be a discussion about using that money to get rid of the last century's worth of compete-with-the-suburbs urban malls that line Nicollet. As I said, I think City Center's is the most obvious starting point because it's been demonstrated to be unwanted, it's the ugliest, and you've already got plenty of important people calling for it to be demoed anyway. Just stop short of the tower and get some residents on the Mall.

[angrysuburbanite]

The section of Nicollet between 9th and 12th Streets is actually doing pretty well. That section isn't even fully occupied but goes to show you really don't need much space leased out to create an activated street. It's just unfortunate that none of the property owners to the north of that segment are willing to take any hints as to why that portion is doing comparatively better.

City Center and frankly most of the buildings north of 7th street need quite a bit of work, but the block with Crystal Court and Dayton's actually has pretty decent street frontage; it just needs to be filled with something! I mentioned it on the last page of this discussion but I stand by my opinion that a Barnes & Noble in the Dayton's Project retail space would be a great fit given their current business model. If both could just get one active retailer or restaurant on their ground floors (not even all of the frontage, either) it would make a huge difference.

I found an article on the Crystal Court from a year ago (https://tcbmag.com/crystal-court-banks-on-better-days/) which explained that part of the hold up with the former Nordstrom Rack space is that their lease actually doesn't end until next year (2027). Apparently an actual retailer was considering that space last year but the subleasing with Nordstrom made it complicated. Of the "urban malls" in this cluster, Crystal Court is easily the most approachable from street level and probably requires the least major changes.

[BikesOnFilm]

I know their new store formats are open to unique and ranging space sizes, but even if we assume a 7500 sq ft Barnes and Noble, I don't see that happening. Even if we're extremely generous and say they can find a space on Nicollet Mall for $15 a square foot, that's still $112,500 a month before any sort of operating expenses. I don't think there's enough foot traffic to support a book store of that scale, especially considering it can't reliably expect customers from outside of downtown, and its main customer base - the 60,000 downtown residents - could just as easily walk to the Hennepin County Library for free, or have any book delivered to their apartment from Amazon. I just don't see that math mathin'.

As for the Dayton's Project, they don't have their lease rates easily accessible, but even in the dire straits they're in right now, they're asking $25 a month for office and that won't change until their lender finally sees the light and wipes the project off their balance sheet.

I do agree though that Crystal Court is in the best shape. I feel like I've heard that there is city funding available in the next few years to help buildings downsize retail spaces, and if that's the case I hope the money goes to places more like Crystal Court than lost causes like City Center. But knowing our luck, it's going to get wiped out by budget cuts and go to police overtime anyway so maybe that's a moot point.

[BBMplsMN]

The Dayton’s Project will get a data center that will subsidize/lower the rent for everyone else. Just a guess.

[mattaudio]

Honestly maybe that's not the worst use for the inner floorplates of large downtown buildings, if it comes with better streetfronts, more residential, etc.

[BikesOnFilm]

Would love to see those benefits guaranteed in writing. The data center ordinance was a good start, and a vindication for the council members who fought for a moratorium to study the issue.

But it's also clear that the Sleep Number and Wells Fargo data center properties are not models for good street level activation, or skyway level activation for that matter. There would be nothing stopping a property owner from pocketing the profits from a data center tenant instead of reinvesting them in their property - that's just good old American business practices at this point.

I don't think new data centers have to be a bad neighbor in downtown, however I would vastly prefer Dayton's Project just end up in the hands of someone who wants to fill it with people for a fair 2026-era valuation of the property. Even if office uses are going to be less a driver of downtown's success going forward, it's certainly preferable to empty buildings full of hard drives. Especially so on the street that everyone views as a bellwether for Minneapolis' health and vitality.

[minntransplant]

Do the building owners even care with the buildings being investments and etc? Could another organization buy, or get get rights to retail spaces and then lease them out, subdivide, make improvements and etc?

The owners of these buildings make their money with office leases. The retail spaces are often viewed like a tenant amenity and not a profit center. I've never thought there was much interest from owners to invest in the ground floor of their buildings so that Minneapolis can have a more active retail corridor that is busy outside of standard office hours and happy hour. These are, after all, owners who have decided to make their buildings unfriendly to anyone other than their tenants. It's why there aren't public restrooms anywhere. They don't want to deal with that. You're probably right that it's going to take a third party (possible the city) to step in, lease space, make improvements, and then sublet it.

[angrysuburbanite]

More broadly, I get that there is online shopping, plenty of fairly successful suburban malls nearby, etc. etc. but a quarter million people live within a few miles of downtown! Based on local discourse I assumed urban retail was a dead thing everywhere but I've visited several other cities in the United States in the last couple of years and every single one of them had at least some retail in their downtown. Yes, there are signs of vacancies or a general downturn in activity, but none have lost like 99% of their commercial frontage. Right now, Minneapolis has Target (which is only really there because it has to be) and a handful of high-end retailers in the North Loop. If you want anything else and need to go in person, you're looking at a 30+ minute bus or train trip to a suburban retail node basically no matter what. The closest one is probably 50th & France and if you aren't a suburban mom you're not finding anything you want there.

I don't think the department store era of downtown is something worth trying to get back (or even replicate), but if people are expected to live car-free downtown there needs to be some level of urban retail right in the core. Like, if Denver, Portland, Seattle, heck even Pittsburgh can have some of this sort of retail post-COVID, Minneapolis should be able to as well. Those are not downtowns known for having great post-covid recovery either, but they still have smaller places to shop in their CBD.

There are definitely lots of issues with the loss of suburban foot traffic but I don't buy the idea that there isn't any demand for this sort of stuff. The main barrier of entry seems to be that the current spaces just aren't fit for the type of retail that can still perform well in our current society. Most of the spaces along Nicollet are either too large, lack outward-facing frontage to attract customers from the street, are way too expensive to rent, or some combination of all three. Even pre-covid, a lot of the smaller stores you'd typically expect of a downtown retail district never had any presence because of the oversaturation of full-sized department stores.

Maybe I'm naïve and don't understand how retail works! I just don't think downtown (and its vicinity) is a completely dead market for commercial as a whole. Nicollet Mall just was dealt a hand of all of the worst cards for succeeding as a post-2020 retail strip.

[BikesOnFilm]

Like, if Denver, Portland, Seattle, heck even Pittsburgh can have some of this sort of retail post-COVID, Minneapolis should be able to as well. Those are not downtowns known for having great post-covid recovery either, but they still have smaller places to shop in their CBD.

I looked up what the downtown population for each of those cities was, and of the four, only one exceeded our downtown population of 60,000. Denver was around 34,000, Portland with 12,000, Pittsburgh at 5,000, and Seattle won out with 109,000.

On a more local note, downtown has as many people living there as Eden Prairie, so why are there a third of as many grocery stores as the suburb of the same size? Where are all these people getting their food, their medicine, their little treats? This would be a great thing for the Downtown Council to study instead of more slide decks with renderings of downtown as a playground, IMO.

Unfortunately, peer cities with smaller and larger downtown populations than us having similar downtown retail success as each other leads me to believe the the larger issue with the vacant retail on Nicollet (beyond the challenges with dragging office building owners disinterested in reinvesting in retail spaces that better fit modern retail) is something more specific to Minneapolis.

So it's either the skyways giving downtown twice as much retail space as it really needs with operating hours that wouldn't be out of place in a rural village, or having two downtowns in a metro area does have some effect on whether suburbanites are more likely to go to a hub or not. That's a theory to investigate if you make it out to Dallas-Fort Worth.

[angrysuburbanite]

One thing I tried doing, and part of what inspired the thoughts outlined above was literally going on Google Maps to the center of major American CBDs and just looking up "stores" and see what pops up.

What I noticed immediately about both Portland and Seattle is that their main downtown retail districts are actually based around indoor shopping centers we have such an abundance of. And while I'm sure both are far from their heydays, they host a pretty impressive list of national and local retailers. The biggest difference I noticed between these and our urban malls is that the enclosed shopping centers in these cities are entirely separated from office towers and presumably operated by retail-first owners rather than being obligatory podiums for office landlords.

It's been really eye-opening both in visiting our nation's best cities in person (I visited Boston, San Fran, DC, and Chicago in the last two years for the first time, admittedly a completely different level than MSP) and just streetviewing around our direct peers and discovering that Minneapolis is a bit more of an anomaly in how much has been lost since 2020 than we might believe as locals. Denver's pedestrian mall--probably the closest parallel to what we have--still has a pretty substantial presence by several national retailers. Seattle's Westlake area appeared to have a bit of an exodus a year or two ago but they are already filling things up as they become vacant rather than letting the spaces sit in limbo for several years.

This would be a great thing for the Downtown Council to study instead of more slide decks with renderings of downtown as a playground, IMO.

I do agree 100% that the Downtown Council should be focused on figuring out what exactly is different between our downtown and those of other American metros. On paper, Minneapolis has a leg up on several key metrics over its peers, but there is clearly a lot negating those positive indicators. I think we've touched on a lot of them in this discussion but it is surprising that our local leaders seemingly haven't been able to put their fingers on these issues. And if they have, there doesn't seem to be much urgency in resolving them.

Maybe the Downtown Council should go on a tour of other CBDs across the country and take some notes on what is and isn't working in those places. Some of the ideas on my long post on the last page of this discussion were directly influenced by what I saw working in other cities.

[Wezle]

I know that people love it and to try to remove it would be prying it from the office crowds cold dead hands, but I really do think that the skyways are more of a cause of the downtown malaise than people think. Having a second, separate pedestrian system completely separate from the street means that neither the sidewalks or the skyways can have enough foot traffic on their own to support small scale retail. As a non-downtown resident, the skyway is shockingly inaccessible due to weird hours and lack of visibility.

As is, nobody who isn't an office worker wants to go downtown because there are no businesses, and there are few people on the street. I truly believe that if office workers also used the street level to walk around, there would be enough combined office worker/non-office worker activity to support more businesses, and would lead to a more vibrant downtown street life.

[mattaudio]

At least from my days working downtown, the skyways also stratified the population - it was rare to see vagrancy in the skyway, something that made it more comfortable for the office worker crowd.

[BikesOnFilm]

If the leadership of the city wanted to use their cozy relationship with downtown leaders (and donors), leaning on them to finally set standard skyway hours would be a major improvement. If half of the retail and restaurants downtown are only open for four hours a day, five days a week, that’s a major structural problem with how you’ve laid out your retail.

Any worries they have about vagrancy are sidestepped by the skyway being private property - you can’t loiter there. Buildings would just have to actively use their security they’re already paying for, and for some reason they view that as some kind of taxation or other nonsense gripe to avoid actually operating the system as intended again.

If you don’t want to pay for the costs associated with an amenity like the skyway, which includes the cost of securing your building from the public walking through, you shouldn’t have a skyway. Full stop.

[BigIdeasGuy]

It looks like the 60k DT resident number includes the North Loop, Mill District, Elliot Park, Loring Park and core of DT, so basically the area bounded by the interstates and river. That's a pretty big area with unique and disparate subdistricts all surrounding a relative housing desert in the middle, a 4 block radius around the IDS contains minimal housing which makes it hard for people connect to the other side naturally.

Point being if you lived in the North Loop or Mill District are you walking to the Lunds on Hennepin in Loring Park, probably not. Factoring in the easiness of delivery apps for get food/grocery without having to get in your car and go anywhere etc. If you are already in your car running errands are you going to do you grocery shopping at the Lunds in Southdale on the way home or the one in DT?

I don't think there is any magic bullet solution to that. It's probably pulling a lot of different levers like increasing walkability, incentives for filling in empty street fronts, building more housing, making parking easy (unpopular I know) and improving the skyway wayfinding/access

[Mdcastle]

Questions-

Are people living in downtown or a couple of miles aways shopping at cute local expensive stores downtown, or are they driving out to the Home Depots and Walmarts in the suburbs to get free parking and cheaper prices? There's a huge amount of big box stores at the Quarry and suspiciously just outside the edge of Minneapolis city limits by Rosedale and 66th and Cedar. I sort of asked this question in a streets.mn article some years back.

Are people actually going to a hub from the suburbs to go shopping or hanging out in the "peer cities" or is there something else going on. That people from the suburbs would go downtown to shop seems like a trope out of a 1950s Christmas movie, my family stopped going downtown in the early 80s, I only have vague memories of Daytons or eating at restaraunts downtown. . I recall when they were talking about building a waterpark at Block E I was really excited to go because we had nothing like that in the suburbs at the time. Then the built what the did on Block E and I only went once, when a friend was paying at one of the bars. Why would I go hang out at a bar on Block E when there's bars in Bloomington that have free parking? Why would I go shopping at City Center when Southdale has the same kind of stores by a freeway exist with free parking.