A Young Sibling for the Twin Cities?
The Mall of America (MoA), located in the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota, is an international cultural symbol. It is, of course, the largest enclosed shopping mall in the United States, and it’s the only Minnesota landmark that was familiar to most people in my Connecticut hometown when I told them I was going to college in Minnesota.
When you actually visit the mall, however, it’s not all that impressive, at least to me — certainly not the gee-whiz tourist attraction it seems like it ought to be. Sure, it’s got a small amusement park between the wings, but aside from that it’s just a very large mall. There are some people who find four different Gaps exciting, but I am not among them.
Even though the mall renders suburban culture on a gargantuan scale, it suffers from being a little too suburban — safe, consistent, and just a tad boring. It’s fitting that this icon of suburbia is in Bloomington, the largest of the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs in a metropolitan area that continues to experience rapid suburban growth in all directions.
It sounds unlikely, then, that such a place could spark the growth of a new urban downtown. Yet it now appears that the MoA will anchor an area of dense development to its east — bounded on the north by Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) and the south and east by the Minnesota River — that will look surprisingly urban (see Figure A). A few have even said there’s the potential for a “third downtown” to go along with Minneapolis and St. Paul. Such talk still has a whiff of hyperbole, but several factors are combining to drive ambitious development in the area, and it could approach the vision of a third regional downtown within a decade.
East Bloomington has historically been home to light industrial facilities and a few offices (and in decades past, the Minnesota Twins’ Met Stadium, where the MoA now stands). The behemoth mall crash-landed here in 1992, but changes in the mix of land use in east Bloomington have been surprisingly incremental. In addition to a cluster of Chili’s-variety chain restaurants on the south edge of the mall, there are now several shiny ten-story-plus office buildings that have joined the scrubbier offices that have been in the area for years. Business-services firm Ceridian recently built a snazzy headquarters building on the Minnesota River bluff at the far eastern end of Bloomington, with a view of the wildlife-preserve-protected river valley below (though a glance at Ceridian’s website shows that they insist on saying this location is in Minneapolis proper). And the presence of MSP just to the north has also brought eastern Bloomington the usual collection of airport hangers-on — hotels and a couple off-airport commercial parking lots.
Change is now accelerating, however, and taking a noticeable turn toward the urban. The main impetus is the Hiawatha Light Rail line, which began service last year from downtown Minneapolis to MSP and the Mall of America. Including the MoA station, which is the line’s southern terminus, there are three stations in east Bloomington, with plans to add a fourth at the east end if warranted by future development.
By far the largest project pushing the area to become more urban is Bloomington Central Station, a mixed-use development by Twin Cities-based McGough Co. centered around the light rail station of the same name. The project site is huge, and the plan (see Figure B) calls for a thousand housing units, more than a million square feet of office space, a 600-room hotel and retail space by the time it’s completed in a few years. Usually a project as ambitious as this one would be endlessly controversial, with residents up in arms about the changing character of the area. But because east Bloomington is populated mostly with industry and offices and is hemmed in by existing buffers — the mall, the airport and the river — few people are upset about its rapid urbanization. This is unique within the densely developed inner rings of metropolitan areas, and it’s because of this unusual combination that talk of a third downtown isn’t as far-fetched as it might first appear.
McGough is starting things off dramatically, with the first phase being two 17-story glass-walled condo towers — dubbed “Reflections” — that are now under construction. This is happening right across the street from my office, and I stopped in the condo sales office one day after work to investigate; I talked to David Brown, one of the real estate brokers for the complex.
He said that McGough hadn’t originally been planning much residential development for the parcel — the first announced plan for the site emphasized a huge water park, more along the lines of what you might expect near America’s largest mall. But consultants and developers who had handled projects near rail transit stations elsewhere were adamant that the Hiawatha Line station would make high-density development desirable and profitable, so McGough went back to the drawing board for a more ambitious vision.
So far, so good: As of our conversation in early March, 85 percent of the units were sold — “much faster than expected,” said Brown — and they appear to now be sold out. This is impressive considering that the prices ranged from around $200,000 to over $1 million, the area isn’t a residential neighborhood at the moment, and the move-in date is more than a year away.
“We thought that light rail would be one factor drawing potential buyers,” said Brown, “but it’s actually been the primary factor.” The car-free mobility offered by the train (only five minutes to the airport and 25 minutes to downtown Minneapolis) has a strong appeal to the buyers, many of whom are either young childless couples or empty nesters.
At this stage, the urbanization of east Bloomington is happening almost as much in spite of the MoA as because of it — the Hiawatha line is driving development, making urban density possible. But as the plans of McGough and other developers take shape over the next decade, and more projects play off of the mall, the combined economic pull of the MoA and east Bloomington will create an important regional center.
An important part of this development will be an expansion of the mall itself. “Phase 2” of the MoA has been talked about since the mall’s initial construction, but hasn’t yet materialized (except for an Ikea store). However, a dispute between the owners was recently settled, with Nader Ghermezian, the MoA’s original booster, obtaining a controlling stake. He announced his Phase 2 plans in February, and they were characteristically grandiose — a doubling of retail space, an indoor ice rink, a performing arts center, a casino and sections that replicate Venice and Paris. If the process of getting this built at all resembles the initial development, most of the fanciful stuff won’t survive beyond the conceptual phase, but the mall is almost certainly going to get much bigger than it is today. The plan overall looks to be less of a self-contained box than the current setup, possibly increasing the chances of complementing the other development taking place.
It will be some time before it’s clear if an even bigger MoA can serve as a core for this developing district. Whether or not it does, east Bloomington will continue to see more urban-style development in coming years, with light rail as the main catalyst. It’s not impossible that the area could become a third urban center of region; the Metropolitan Council, the planning agency for the Twin Cities metro area, has made the realization of the “third downtown” vision an explicit goal. If it truly does become a downtown, it will almost certainly be the first urban center anchored by a mall.
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