urbanMSP

A lot of talk about building owners needing to attract new business downtown but...do businesses even want to be downtown? My job is mostly remote, but I was in the office last week and walking around during a break, there's no other way to describe it other than a ghost town. It's kind of a Catch-22 situation, but unless you have a specific niche that works for downtown, why would you choose to locate there? It's empty, has a crime perception problem, is one of the harder places to find parking near where you want to be (yes, I know, I know...).

Uniqlo gets floated on here a lot and...what exactly is appealing about downtown Minneapolis to Uniqlo? Downtown is just not a place people come to shop. It would be out of the way for most people. Frankly, if one opens, it's going to be at Mall of America.

Folks are also commenting that we need something that will bring people downtown, but that's exactly what was tried and failed in the 90s and early aughts. A more sustainable approach might be luring the boring but crucial stores that make downtown easier and more hospitable. But that's a pretty tall ask when there aren't that many people living in the true core of downtown.

I'm generally bullish on the future of Minneapolis. But I'm fairly bearish on downtown as a thriving area of daily commerce anytime soon. It's actually pretty depressing how lousy most of Minneapolis' commercial areas are doing these days.

I hope we see more pharmacy/hardware/grocery type options pop up along Washington(where people actually live. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a single hardware store downtown. There are no pharmacies in Downtown East. And the only grocery stores in walking distance of north loop and downtown east are Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s respectively.


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Downtown Minneapolis in general is severely lacking in convenience stores. I wish 7-11 had a presence in this city as it would be really helpful to be able to run inside and grab something real quick while waiting on a bus transfer or something like that.

Yeah, sorry, it's not all the skyways...and some other cities have their versions of them and do just fine. But if it was all the fault of the skyway, we would have a thriving active retail (whatever form that may take) scene on the 2nd level...we don't have that either.

Yeah, sorry, it's not all the skyways...and some other cities have their versions of them and do just fine. But if it was all the fault of the skyway, we would have a thriving active retail (whatever form that may take) scene on the 2nd level...we don't have that either.

To be clear, my comments about the skyway are not that we should abolish it. But I just went downtown during the weekday for the first time in a long time. I arrived at 5pm, and had a bit of time to kill before a 7pm appointment. The only reason I was able to get a drink from Starbucks was because they had the door halfway open as they were closing and they were nice enough to let me get a last order in. Fast food places that in other cities would be operating for dinner were shut down. Target's gates were shut at 5:45.

And it wasn't like it was a ghost town, either. There was regular post-work traffic throughout the skyway almost everywhere I went, other than dead end segments. There were multiple events happening downtown at this time. But tenants that are taking up space in this system, that in other cities would be open later if they were on the street level, were closed. You can't tell me that in other cities without skyways, nobody in the CBD grabs a bite to eat from fast food restaurants on the way home. Or picks up groceries on errands. But we've created a system and incentive for business owners to pretend that nobody exists after 5pm in Minneapolis.

Maybe the Downtown Council should spend less time on empty scarecars and intervening in local politics and focus on pressing skyway tenants to stay open until... hell, even 6pm would be a start. Work up to the weekends if things go well. My comments shouldn't be read as "the skyway is the reason retail isn't working in Minneapolis", rather "we are stuck with the skyway one way or another, so it should have standardized operating hours for its tenants and not focus exclusively on serving office workers on their lunch break." Because that's a recipe for a dead city outside of business hours.

It's true that these types of retail businesses don't want to be downtown... but they do apparently want to be in the North Loop, which is "downtown" in my mental model of the Twin Cities, but a different submarket from the point of view of the consultants. I wish downtown landlords would think a bit about reasons why that might be the case.

Anyway, the skyway and highway issues are obviously the main structural ones, but downtown Minneapolis is going backwards on the former and nowhere on the latter. There's only one other solution that matches the scale of the problem (certainly there are smaller opportunities, I'd love to see landlords dividing their spaces into smaller portions), which is just to keep building more and more housing, and more and more offices that people will want to actually go to. Ultimately, only sheer numbers of people can overwhelm these structural handicaps.

The good news is that this is happening. By my count, there are at least 1,764 apartments under construction right now across the neighborhoods of downtown between NLG, Block One, 240 Portland, Duffey 2.0, and a couple of smaller projects. The 17 N Washington and Harmonia projects would add hundreds more. I think it's entirely reasonable to be pessimistic about downtown in the nearish term, but I think it's hard to justify longer term pessimism. The weight of demography will continue to increase and provide opportunities for businesses that want to take them.

Oh, and Uniqlo should move downtown because Nick and I alone will probably make it profitable.

This is wishful thinking given labor conditions and that many of these organizations are family run.

I've probably posted this before, but my prediction is that in 20-30 years remote work will be viewed similarly to the way mid-century freeway construction is viewed today: as 'gee-whiz progress' that made life more convenient for a bunch of well off white people without any real consideration given to the destructive impacts on urban communities.

Dont agree. And if we are talking about dt specifically, I think its forced transformation into a mixed use neighborhood rather than a place people drive to to go to work is going to be hugely positive, eventually.

Now Marshall’s too. Basically, nothing left for shopping.

Next week, Frey is scheduled to announce details about a "vibrant downtown storefront work group" of business and city leaders to address challenges.

The large department store model is a dying retail configuration, he said. He would like to see smaller, possibly locally owned retailers on Nicollet Mall. He also is interested to see retailers focused on experiences and is open to more service-oriented businesses such as dog day cares.