Some pictures of The Shale Apartments by Minnehaha Parkway and Hiawatha Ave from Thursday. The construction zone for sewer work that had blocked off the north side of the Minnehaha Parkway bridge for the past 18 months or whatever is finally being cleared out, so it's possible to get a relatively unobstructed shot.
Also, a big chunk of the bike path on the north side of Minnehaha Parkway has been ripped out to be repaved. This is looking toward the roundabout at Minnehaha Ave.
Sub-$1100 for studios. $1275 for a 575 sq. ft. 1br on the 2nd-4th floors, not bad IMO. The building doesn't have much in the way of amenities, but what a location. Nothing will ever get built between this and the park. Can't imagine the tiny retail space (~600 sq. ft.) will be successful, unless they lease it out for way below-market rents. If the park got more wintertime visitors maybe a coffee shop could make a go of it.
You mention the area between this and the park, which actually is building sized. But I assume it's owned by the Park Board and likely to remain as a park. Regardless, it's a large area that I hope is landscaped in a more interesting way than just sod. Currently it's all dirt, and I imagine that sod is what they have in mind.
Hero wrote: June 24th, 2021, 12:07 am
Noticed a couple weeks ago fencing going up around the dentist office across the street from cub. Hopefully something good is happening.
Looks to me like they are adding an addition. They've dug a hole on the west side of the building and have the dirt piled in front of the existing building.
The addition is taking shape and looks to be coming along well.
I'm not sure how I feel about the color scheme, but the brown tones of Amber Apartments (4525 Hiawatha Ave) was blending well with fall colors when I took this photo on Oct 23rd.
They put on a nice show about renovating the service station as their office, but I guess when they realized nobody wanted them to build self-storage there anyway, they didn't feel it was worth the extra expense to try and win over the neighborhood.
Neighbors at previous meetings pointed out that there are already several self-storage facilities along the Hiawatha corridor. One of these is literally just one block to the south.
In exchange for giving up the potential for a better, higher use for the land and (assuming that higher use would be an apartment) more residents to patronize the small businesses along Minnehaha, the city gets few permanent jobs and an ugly building while a private company harvests passive income. There are few places where this trade-off makes sense from a community point of view.
Minneapolis ought to consider a moratorium or zoning restriction on self-storage here going forward like Columbia Heights did towards auto businesses on Central Ave. They didn't create a self-storage district in the 2040 plan, but now that there'll be three between 35th and 46th, they might end up with one.
Not only are there several but they span entire blocks. The old Donaldson's warehouse spans the entire block from 36th to 37th and is at least 3 levels. I keep getting flyers in the mail from these guys so I'm guessing they aren't full. Is there really that much demand for storage?
I'm assuming there's demand for storage or they wouldn't be building them.
Bloomington wound up as dumping ground for a bunch of them because other cities had restrictions and we didn't. So now we do but we still have more than our fair share of already built ones, in one class replacing a plastics manufacturing business that had over a dozen livable wage jobs. We already had regulations protecting the core industrial areas, but these were being built on the unprotected industrial areas (the unprotected areas are generally around the periphery and adjacent to major streets) and commercial zones, so we added restrictions specific to self-storage. There's also the stipulation that the provide a set number of spaces for boats and RVs.
These storage unit buildings spreading metastatically over the last decade aren't built on supply/demand, they're built due to cheap capital trying to cash in on the latest CRE craze. It's high margin and you probably don't need a huge amount of occupancy to cash flow and recoup investment. I read recently that the gravy train is starting to end, or at least catching up with reality (eg supply/demand).
Crazy to hear in Bloomington that one replaced a viable business! Besides the egregious example of the Hiawatha corridor, why did Minneapolis allow a brand new one to be built ON THE LITERAL RIVERFRONT just a block down from Park Board headquarters? Plus another one two blocks away from that a few years later.
Self-storage is a symptom of our consumer culture. Most are filled with junk that should have been given away, or simply not purchased in the first place.
A look at the 280/Como U-Haul shows rates of appx. $15-$40 per sq. ft. per year. Cushman & Wakefield says the Grade A office rental rate in Downtown Minneapolis is $34 per sq. ft., so I guess storage units are money printing factories.
Maybe you shouldn't be living in an apartment if you need a self-storage facility to hold your stuff? Although I do wonder how much of it is people that see those "tiny house" shows on TV or have a fascination with living in a downtown loft but won't give up their detached house volume of stuff as opposed to other people using them for other purposes.
The last time we talked about this, someone mentioned that they were increasingly being used by eBay and Amazon sellers for inventory storage as well as the usual hoarders and people in the middle of moving.
As far as Bloomington "allowing it to replace an industry", my recollection at the time it was a by-right use so the city couldn't stop it. That particular one and a very highly visible one on Lyndale is when the city took notice and put a moratorium on them until they could revise the ordinances:
Current restrictions:
Not in the Lyndale Ave Retrofit Study Area
Not in protected industrial areas
Not within 1/2 mile of LRT/aBRT stations
At least 500 feet from residential.
RV / boat storage spaces required.
The last is because recently the city quit granting variances for parking RVs in front of houses due to the amount of staff time they were taking up and them creating / inflaming neighborhood feuds- , so they're trying to make sure reasonable alternatives are created.
Last edited by Mdcastle on May 31st, 2022, 8:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
