East 38th Street & 38th St Station Development

Calhoun-Isles, Cedar-Riverside, Longfellow, Nokomis, Phillips, Powderhorn, and Southwest
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Realstreets
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Future of Standish-Ericsson Bicycle and Pedestrian Infrastru

Postby Realstreets » April 29th, 2015, 7:48 am

https://www.facebook.com/events/861596910565378/

This meeting will be an opportunity to receive community input and give insight to any progress that is planned for the Standish Ericsson area (including 38th Street East, 28th Avenue South, River/Lake Greenway, 42nd Street East, the Minnehaha Creek, and Cedar Avenue South).

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby Realstreets » May 4th, 2015, 7:19 am

The event had Minneapolis' new bike and pedestrian coordinator Matt Drydahl and the Hennepin Co. counterpart Kelley Yemen, with some mapping exercises. The city is currently updating it's bike master plan. A lot of people expressed the desire for better bike facilities along E. 38th Street and at Hiawatha intersections.

The 2014 update of the Minneapolis Bike Master Plan only focuses on building out the city's protected bike lanes, which is unfortunate as little attention is given to the neighborhood. The E. 40th bike boulevard, is frankly a joke as far as bike infrastructure goes. And E. 38th which sees twice as much bike traffic as E. 40th and E. 42nd (which has bike lanes), is not eligible for any sort of improvement until a reconstruct (20 or 30 years), according to the 2011 plan.

With all that said, I really appreciated CM Johnson putting the event on and his commitment to trying to improve the bike and pedestrian environments in his ward.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby mattaudio » May 4th, 2015, 8:17 am

The "plan" is not set in stone or comprehensive it seems. We're getting painted lines on Chicago Ave from 46th Street to Lake Street this summer as part of a repaint.

I wish I could have attended the S-E bikeway meeting just to see how it went. FRNNG had our annual meeting the same night. It's cool that your CM on that side of Cedar is so engaged in these issues.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby gpete » May 4th, 2015, 8:32 am

Bummer that 38th St isn't due for reconstruction for 20 to 30 years. That street is just way too wide.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby mattaudio » May 4th, 2015, 9:36 am

E 38th St looks to be 44' curb to curb. A 7/5/10/10/5/7 arrangement for bicycle lanes would work, but I think that arrangement is uncomfortably tight.

Really, there's not a lot of on-street parking demand on E 38th St outside of business nodes. It could easily have one-sided parking instead of two-sided for over half its length. This would allow much more comfortable bicycle lanes: 8/10/10/8/8.

E 42nd Street got this treatment (though half-assed) east of Cedar. And hopefully west of Cedar soon. And we're working on a similar arrangement for E 46th Street.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby Realstreets » May 4th, 2015, 10:06 am

The "plan" is not set in stone or comprehensive it seems. We're getting painted lines on Chicago Ave from 46th Street to Lake Street this summer as part of a repaint.
E 38th St looks to be 44' curb to curb. A 7/5/10/10/5/7 arrangement for bicycle lanes would work, but I think that arrangement is uncomfortably tight.

Really, there's not a lot of on-street parking demand on E 38th St outside of business nodes. It could easily have one-sided parking instead of two-sided for over half its length. This would allow much more comfortable bicycle lanes: 8/10/10/8/8.
That's good to know that we could at least get paint on 38th. It is oversized and that much on-street parking is gratuitous. Literally the only businesses that use parking on the street are Everetts (has parking lot) and the business at 28th (however there's not much parking to begin with and most park on the side streets). Removing parking on one side would go a long way.

On a side note, lighting was also brought up at the meeting and I think getting pedestrian-scale lighting from 23rd (which already has some) all the way east to Hiawatha or even to Minnehaha would tie that corridor together.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby intercomnut » July 6th, 2015, 9:55 pm

"Big investment arriving on E. 38th Street in Minneapolis"

http://www.startribune.com/investment-f ... 311900661/

If this corridor keeps expanding, maybe the 23 will be bumped up to Hi-Frequency sooner than we thought!

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby MNdible » July 7th, 2015, 9:15 am

From the article above:
That activity is a far cry from the climate of the 1990s, when a study commissioned for the city’s development agency suggested that in a post-streetcar era, many of the city’s smaller, less-profitable business intersections lacked the retail space or the customer base to survive.
I really appreciate the Strib, but would it kill them to hyperlink to studies that they're reporting about? This study is obviously sort of an aside to the main thrust of the article (and it may be old enough that it's not digital), but it's not uncommon for an entire story to be about a newly published report or study and there's no link to the study itself.

So, that said, has anybody seen the study mentioned above?

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby EOst » July 7th, 2015, 9:30 am

I saw it referenced once in the Nicollet Avenue revitalization plan from 2000. Here's the reference, if you can decipher it:
Minneapolis has approximately twice as many commercial nodes as its population can support (City Business, July 1996).
edit: Looking closer, that looks like a reference to what is now MSPBJ. So, if anyone has access to their archives from 1996...

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby EOst » July 7th, 2015, 11:42 am

Since I was at Wilson Library today anyway, I pulled out the issue. It's a short article (surrounded by wonderful vintage stories on the growth of cassette tapes and radio), so I'll just copy it below:
"Study finds commercial node overload" in City Business July 5-11, 1996, by Peter Kafka

Pouring time and money into local commercial districts is a time-honored tradition among Minneapolis' neighborhood groups. Fix up the cluster of shops down the street, the thinking goes, and the entire community benefits.

But a recently completed study, commissioned by the city's development agency, suggests that those efforts might be futile.

Changes in Minneapolis' demographics, coupled with trends towards large "big box" discount stores, has made the neighborhood retail center an increasingly dubious proposition, according to the study's authors.

"You've ended up with a bunch of retail that at one time was viable but is no longer," said Ralph Chido, head of Cumberland, Wis.-based Economic Research Corp., which conducted the market study for the Minneapolis Community Development Agency (MCDA).

Minneapolis has roughly twice as many commercial nodes--small concentrations of retailers along a block or an intersection--as its population can support, Chido's report concludes.

In addition, the study suggests that many of the traditional anchors for a neighborhood center--grocers, for instance, or hardware stores--have left the city and aren't likely to return.

The study estimates that there are 57 commercial nodes in Minneapolis, excluding very large commercial centers like Uptown and very small pockets of commerce. Chido, who surveyed all 57 of the nodes, cnocludes that there's only enough population to support up to 25.

City officials say they're not surprised by the study's conclusions: "Anybody who's been out in the neighborhoods could tell this was going on. These are not revelations," said Bob Miller, director of the city's Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP).

Still, programs like Miller's, which supervises the distribution of $400 million to city groups over a 20-year period, may be asked to reassess how they're spending it.

Miller said efforts to boost local commercial districts are usually neighborhoods' second-most common projects, following housing. Out of $15 million the program has dispersed in "transition projects" between 1991 and 1993, for instance, $3.7 million has gone into commercial rehabilitation projects, he said.

At the same time, the city has helped fund seven different commercial "corridor" studies, designed to plot out strategies to revamp multi-block stretches of commercial neighborhoods.

City officials say they don't have immediate plans to respond to the study; rather, they anticipate weaving in its findings into both "big picture" planning and decisions on specific projects.

"What this does is provide us with raw information about what the market is doing," said Ann Calvert, manager of business development for the MCDA. "On individual projects, then, we need to decide if we should be bringing in more spending capacity in some areas and focus retail better there, and maybe in some other areas deciding that there will be some benign neglect."

Chido, a former Dayton Hudson Corp. executive, said that makes sense.

"They should be careful about trying to save every corner," he said. "We're not saying you should go in and wipe them out. But if you decide you've got four corners and you want to make a mall, you may want to think about it again."

In general, the report concludes, commercial areas need to draw from a local population of 10,000 people or more, and need at least 40,000 square feet of space to draw in customers who might otherwise head out of the neighborhood to do their shopping. Given those criteria, the city now has about twice as many nodes as it can support, the study concludes.

"What that tends to do is make it hard for any of them to be successful, since there's no kind of concentration of goods and services people want to see in their neighborhood perforce, people have to leave their neighborhood for those services," Chido said.

Besides sheer mass, there are other issues that make it hard for retail to survive as well, Chido's report argues. Changes in health care and the financial services industries have made it less likely for banks or drug-stores to locate in modest retail strips, and the same holds true for hardware stores.

Perhaps most discouraging for neighborhoods bent on revamping their shopping areas, the study suggests, is the dearth of "traditional" grocery stores--the ones that existed in most communities prior to the advent of "warehouse" grocers like Cub Foods or Rainbow.

Those traditional stores have been steadily disappearing--in 1995, Minneapolis had 16 of them, according to the report, down from 23 in 1980--and aren't likely to be replaced. Instead, local shoppers are almost forced to leave the area to do their grocery shopping, the study notes, guaranteeing that much of the area's income will be spent in other parts of the city or in outlying suburbs.

The study is chock full of similarly grim assessments about the future of small retail centers in the city, and even its suggestions aren't likely to cheer some residents: Chido's group, for instance, suggests that any redevelopment efforts the city does undertake will have to include off-street parking in front of the stores. That runs counter to the "New Urbanism" tenets now cherished by many neighborhood groups and city planners, who envision tightly clustered developments that promote pedestrian travel instead of cars.

Still, Miller of the NRP suggests that many of the study's conclusions have already been accepted by neighborhoods on their own. He points to the Stevens Square area in south Minneapolis, for instance, which has tried to attract a grocery to the area for years, and has now abandoned that plan, and to Powderhorn Park, a struggling south Minneapolis neighborhood that has already decided to replace some of its commercial areas with new housing projects.

"The fact is, neighborhoods have been concerned about this for quite some time, and they're beginning to come to terms with it," he said.
The study itself is called the "Market Study of Neighborhood Commercial Areas and Nodes”.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby MNdible » July 7th, 2015, 12:02 pm

Fascinating. Thanks for posting this.

It's amazing how much things have changed in less than 20 years. Although in the study's defense, it seems like the one point that they completely failed to predict was the rise of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars as a savior for many of these nodes. They were mostly right about the fate of retail.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby mattaudio » July 7th, 2015, 12:22 pm

They were sort of right, but sort of wrong. Online retailing has been a game changer, and I think online has also changed how things are commoditized: We now increasingly value specialty products, whether procured online or at a store, over lowbrow commodity items. Here's Ian Rasmussen discussing how online can actually coexist with neighborhood retail. And it is much more likely to be the big boxes that get pushed out of their space as this transformation continues. http://www.strongtowns.us/strong-towns- ... prime.html

It's sad to think that back in the 90s, the city thought Hi-Lake and the Quarry were the future. And now they are painful reminders of our past, while co-ops like the one being built on 38th Street are the future.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby FISHMANPET » July 7th, 2015, 12:40 pm

Yeah, online retail is a threat to the big box model of large stock and little human interaction (with the bonus that you can often get more information about a product online, though not necessarily knowledge though you weren't getting that in a big box anyway).

A little store that provides a smaller stock but the same limited knowledge of a big box store just has no right to exist anymore, and should go out of business post haste. But a small business with actual product knowledge, that's invaluable, and very hard to replicate online. Smitten Kitten (I guess this is my example because I'm a sex pervert or something) is the perfect example of that, the staff there has the knowledge that make the grossly "inflated" prices (compared to online) well worth it.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby MNdible » July 7th, 2015, 12:55 pm

While there are exceptions to the rule (and Smitten Kitten seems to be one), most of the remaining retail in neighborhood nodes probably falls into one of two categories: legacy retailers who are working harder than ever to eek out a living on an ever-decreasing customer base, or vanity projects where already wealthy individuals think it would be fun to run a retail store and slowly (or quickly) lose money doing so. The fact that some specialty stores are making it may have more to do with an older customer demographic (less likely to shop online) than the fact that they've hit on some magic answer to the retailing problem.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby David Greene » July 7th, 2015, 1:24 pm

I don't know. I enjoy shopping at Scale Model Supply in St. Paul. They're both a legacy and specialty retailer. I don't really ask questions there. I go there because they have tons of stuff and it's fund to look at. Many times I'll see something that I consider purchasing another day.

ABC Electronics is another such place. Lots of fun junk to look at and oftentimes I'll turn up a treasure.

I'm sure I could get it all online but it wouldn't be nearly as fun.

I think specialty retailers can definitely make a go of it.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby MNdible » July 7th, 2015, 1:46 pm

Sure, and so do I. But it may be worth considering that, in addition to our obsession with urban issues, there may be other ways in which we are not a representative sample of the population at large. Our shopping habits may not be a good way to gauge the way most people act.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby FISHMANPET » July 7th, 2015, 1:55 pm

And David's 2 examples are things that an online store can't give him. Physical stores shouldn't compete on price and stock, because they just can't win.

My last Amazon order was 250 pirate sword cocktail picks, a pair of white linen pants, white suspenders, and two bow ties (one that I tie myself, another pre-tied in case I couldn't figure it out in time). Where in the hell would I begin trying to find all that stuff locally.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby clf » July 7th, 2015, 2:29 pm

My neighborhood shopping has changes over the last 20 years in my neighborhood largely do to bodegas. There used to be little bodegas all over in the Uptown/Wedge area, and I would end up stopping in other shops on my way every few days I went to the store. Now I have to go to larger grocery stores, and try to get more and shop less often, so with more to carry walking longer distances, I never stop at other places unless I am in the need for something specific.

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby versitalex » July 8th, 2015, 8:28 am

A friend posted on FaceSpace that the boarded up storefront at 3801 Bloomington is in the process of being demolished. Based on http://www.minneapolismn.gov/inspection ... h249online this property has been on the vacant building list since Talk Like a Pirate Day 2011 and was ordered to be demolished in December 2014. That said, http://apps.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/piapp/ ... 2824110077 still lists Wei Wang as the owner, but it has prior delinquent taxes, so at some point it will likely become property of the city?

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Re: East 38th Street Corridor & Standish-Ericsson

Postby VAStationDude » August 10th, 2015, 1:05 pm

https://twitter.com/cardinalbarmn/statu ... 80576?s=09

The cardinal bar is getting a retractable door along 38th Street.


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