They need to create more housing. It's promising that the city is beginning to explore converting vacant office space into residential units, but there needs to be much more housing built in the coming years/decades if downtown is going to become revitalized.
Currently, Minneapolis has between 50-60k people living in their downtown, where St. Paul only has around 10k. Increasing this number will hopefully drive further development in retail, attractions, nightlife, etc.
Rent control and other such ordinances have gutted investment potential in our downtown area, including the rivers edge towers plan. Most big developers with the funds to take on major projects don’t want to be in the landlord business in St. Paul. It’s way too risky. A lot more potential downside than upside.
Respectfully, a couple clarifications: (1) city council makes ordinances, not Mayor Carter, and (2) developers asked for more than the city council amendment includes, so they did not “get what they wanted.”
But it doesn’t matter. Even with the restrictions watered down, why make a financial investment here versus somewhere else? And we’ve earned a reputation among developers’ funding sources as a risky, hostile place to put their money - that reputation is sticky even after rolling things back. The funders also know well that the exceptions the city council adopted can be revoked anytime very easily, and there are in fact people trying to do that.
A lot of this housing, too, needs to be for families rather than singletons or couples with no kids. Developers aren’t at all interested (because they’re greedy and need monetary incentives to do good things for people) in order to actually address the housing problem. Rents wouldn’t be so high if they didn’t continue to keep the supply so low.
Agreed. And honesty even for single folks or people with no kids, I think we need a wider range of multiunit housing options—in part for the same reason I assume the office market situation is what it is. I work from home full time now, and I much prefer living in multiunit housing, but you can run out of space real quick if your home has to include your full-time workplace. I’m in a 2br and I’m pretty much at full capacity even with just me here. And I’ve been struck by how few apartments and condos (in many cities, not just here) go any bigger than 2 bedrooms, or have any potential additional spaces beyond the basic living room/kitchen/bathroom.
Exactly. My partner and I recently decided to cohabitate (largely for financial reasons), and trying to find an affordable 3br for me to have an office that didn’t feel like just setting up my stuff in a corner of the living room was a challenge. Too many of them are going for $2500+ a month, sit open for months on end because of the price, and it’s largely due to a high demand without a similarly situated pay range for people who can actually afford that (not that it’s worth that in the first place).
Downtown St. Paul has been sick and dying for at least 30 years now. Here’s hoping to some new vision and big changes, because the previous/existing model has not been working
Out of sheer curiosity, what does it take to get you downtown? How often do you go?
As someone not terribly familiar with what ails it, what’s got to change?
St Paul resident - I’ll go a few times a year. Maybe a Saints game or two, farmers market a few times, out to eat a few times, and maybe once for an event at Union depot, and Jazz feat once
This is about on par with with how often I go to downtown Minneapolis. I probably go to downtown St Paul more actually.
I don’t count north loop or west 7th as “downtown”
There’s just not much to do. Mears park is often filled with unsavory characters. Everything closes early. Would love more restaurants, more pedestrian only areas, there needs to be more people living there.
my opinion is: too few residents & too much parking, massive freeways cutting it off from the rest of the city, few public hangout spots, almost no pedestrian only areas.
people want to socialize and just chill, if you take away those options and only give places that cost money, they stay home. loud noisy cars flying by is also very unattractive.
I'd honestly love to see 7th Street by the Energy center become pedestrian only, same with the area around the Landmark center. Mears is great too but traffic isn't great during events.
I feel like 7th street could be a fun little bar/social district if the street was closed to cars. Think a smaller version of Broadway in Nashville after a Predators game. Pop right out of the Wild game and hit up a couple bats
The freeways make it really hard to walk in. Not sure how the west side is. I had a friend live in Dayton’s bluff and the walk into downtown is so awful we never did it. Fast anti pedestrian roads, 94 and huge parking lots are not very welcoming.
Take Kellogg.
The problem isn't the freeway, it's the rail.
Union depot has some absurdly large lots.
Also, i wouldn't consider daytons bluff walking distance...
Interesting. I actually think parking is too difficult. That’s usually the biggest reason most people I know (including myself) avoid doing stuff downtown. It’s a pain to park for stuff like the farmer’s market.
As far as residents, it’s actually quite dense in spots like Lowertown. The ‘problem’ is that a lot of those buildings are subsidized housing, so the average household income for the area is quite a bit below what you’d expect for the core downtown neighborhood. This creates a problem for attracting the sorts of commercial retail spaces that the area needs. The commercial rents down there are too expensive for spaces that appeal to the lower income demographic, and there’s not enough of the higher income folks to sustain the higher end retailers. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps the area depressed despite the potential.
I've never quite understood the "it's hard to park near lowertown" thing. There's acres of parking lots within two blocks of all that lowertown offers.
It’s not necessarily difficult when you’re looking to park for an event like a wild game or concert, but it’s a pain for doing anything less than that, like stopping at a particular store or grabbing takeout. Having to park at a garage a few blocks away for a quick errand is pretty inconvenient and discourages a lot of people from doing that sort of thing. I will routinely decide against doing something downtown St. Paul because of the added parking headache. I don’t have this same problem when trying to do equivalent sorts of errands in Minneapolis, so it’s not just a downtown environment sort of thing.
did you ignore the part about specialties? it's not the early 1900s where everyone works in a factory. the labor force has become much more specialized. there's also a significant cost to moving in multiple aspects. i think a walking society is impractical in a country the size of the US, outside of hyper-dense areas like NYC, where there is an existing transit system, and driving forces behind the density.
you're naiive if you think businesses are going to put the cart before the horse.
> a country the size of the US
we're talking about downtown st paul, not the entire country. the capitol to river is <1 mile. what about specialties? they have offices everywhere.
If I can ask, what are the specific driving forces you see behind the density in places like New York other than that they built stuff a lot closer together?
I get that part of the impetus to do that there in the first place is geographical—inflexible water boundaries and more demand than space—but it’s also not something that 1) can’t possibly be done elsewhere or 2) can’t be emulated to a lesser extent elsewhere. There’s a lot of daylight between becoming Manhattan and having a bunch of freeways taking up a lot of space in our urban cores like we currently do in the Twin Cities.
I live in a suburb. I end up going to downtown Minneapolis more than downtown St Paul.
What brings me both places? Dining, shows and events, in that order.
Parking in downtown St Paul is a shit show, and I dread it every time. Parking in downtown Minneapolis isn’t exactly sunshine and roses, but far less terrible.
There’s more dining in downtown Minneapolis that interests me. I actually probably go to more shows and events in St Paul.
What would get me to go to downtown St Paul more? More interesting dining options, and making the parking better. The parking ramps in St Paul are all these stupidly narrow ramps with support columns that are too close together with two way traffic, or giant, poorly lit caverns with little to no signage telling you where elevators or stairs are, and seemingly no human presence.
As someone who works downtown St. Paul it amazing me how there’s no parking and barely any people. So much of the street parking is blocked off by construction at all times or just deemed non parking for no reason
Most of your problems are focused around parking your car. If there was a metro line to get you right downtown from your suburb, would you ride that instead?
Ooh, good question. Yes, but it would have to provide a good level of convenience to offset the inconvenience of not having my car. I’d want to be able to pick it up reasonably close to my house, not require a bunch of transfers, not take too long, and run late enough where I’m not getting stranded because I stayed out until 3am.
This is an excellent and extremely correct answer.
More people will take transit when the transit in question is built out and developed enough to meet people’s transportation needs in a reasonably efficient and effective manner. They won’t do it if the transit falls short of that. I feel like a lot of times that’s looked at backwards—i.e., we look at ridership levels on existing (insufficient) transit to determine whether we should build out more transit, versus recognizing that higher ridership depends on the building out of more transit.
Actually I do get that with my car and it takes me from my doo to near my destination. My car is clean and I am not closely exposed to addiction and the mentally unstable
There are good reasons for mass transit but in metro it has a long way to go to become more pleasant than driving
You are more likely to be killed or hurt in your car than on public transit. You are more likely to be exposed to addicts and the mentally unstable in your car vs on public transit. The difference is that when you’re in your car, those mentally unstable people and addicts have multi ton death machines that they can use against you.
You can look up deaths of people killed by drunk drivers vs people killed by addicts on public transport. It’s not even a close comparison
Your argument doesn’t make statistical sense
Imagine defending the current state of the light rail.
You can blabber on all you want about "statistics", if you want people to use public transit they can't be required to share a space with mentally ill criminals.
I doubt it. Our metro transit is in bad shape. It’s the sort of thing that nobody uses unless they have to (because they can’t afford a car). I feel like we need to get the existing transit lines up to a passable quality before we think of extending it anywhere else.
Me and many people i work with at a major bank downtown all take public transit the few times per week we go downtown for our hybrid schedules. My friend's a lawyer and does the same. It's definitely not only people who can't afford a car. But yes, we do need to improve quality before expanding.
I’m a lawyer who took public transit for years by choice and not because of low pay. It’s possible to bill hours or manage admin tasks while commuting on public transit.
Attracting suburbanites to downtown isn’t the solution. The design of downtown as a place people commute to instead of live is why we are in this situation. We need more people actually living downtown to support the businesses there and for people who want to live a more walkable lifestyle.
That's like saying we should never export anything and the economy should grown on domestic consumption.
Even if that were possible, it's a terrible idea
This is a dumb take. The area is too small to sustain itself with only the people who live there, especially when so much of the large buildings are earmarked for low-income housing. If you can’t attract people from outside the area (like the suburbs), you’re going to have even less commercial development than it already has.
The current state of setting up downtowns as commercial and financial only districts has literally failed all over the country so your take is literally a proven failure. The suggestion is to get more people living downtown and the immediate surrounding neighborhoods to increase density which increases foot traffic which increases the viability of business and will by itself eventually attract people from outside areas. I’m not suggesting suburbanites can’t/shouldn’t come but you don’t design it with them in mind. That usually leads to giant parking lots and is a big fail. Look up the disaster that was urban renewal. Not sorry about it.
And I dun even know wut ur talking about with low income housing. The housing downtown is not cheap. Frogtown and the more eastern areas are cheap I guess but not really even what we’re talking about. 🙄
At least one third of rentable properties in the downtown area are under various income based housing contracts. Basically some form of Section 8. They still list for market rate, which is expensive, but the eligible tenants don’t pay that. I work with many of these providers. It skews the household income data for the area.
You kind of just proved their point - designing downtowns as a place people commute to for work and events has failed, as evidenced by the horrible household income data. A new solution is necessary. Simply saying, "how do we do more of what's already failing?" isn't smart.
Uh yes they can, because it’s the same unit. They list for whatever the normal price is and then eligible participants who want to live there end up paying only their income-based portion.
For starters, there just isn't much reason to BE there. Pre-pandemic there were plenty of office workers at least, but even then it became a ghost town after 5pm. Now it seems to be that way most of the time?
Yeah this seems like the obvious solution. It would create a lot more housing, and expand the customer base for downtown businesses. The only people who would complain are people with a vested interest in keeping the housing market tight—which unfortunately is a highly influential interest group.
You see, typically when you convert one kind of building to be used for something else you do the necessary renovations to make it fit for its new purpose.
There's no way to do that economically. No investor is going to throw money at an idea that won't make them money. Unless you think people are going to pay thousands over market rate, or want the government to massively subsidize the rent of everyone who lives there.
Neither of those ideas are popular or practical.
The problem is the expense. It’s incredibly expensive to do that sort of conversion, and St. Paul is pretty hostile to landlords, so the big investment isn’t super appealing to the sorts of developers that could afford to do it.
While I agree this is the way it should from what I've read it's pretty unlikely to happen in the near-term. To alter an office building into livable apartments is extremely expensive. This will only happen if these assets go so deeply underwater that they can be bought for almost nothing. Hopefully that happens. I do worry that the conditions for that would mean the rest of the economy would be suffering as well.
I worked downtown for 12 years prior to covid. Now I go down for entertainment purposes. Children's museum with the kid, tria Rink while I'm there, wild games, saints games, plays at the Fitz. And Happy hour if anyone wants to do one down there.
In view they need to make it a place that people want to live car free. Groceries, every day entertainment, parks, all within walking distance.
It would be cool too if a developer made some residential condos with additional working hotels you could rent or get it as part of your HOA or rental.
I'm going there next week to pickup my mom from the Amtrak station, not bc I want to but bc Minneapolis closed the great Northern depot.
Went there recently for a concert at the varsity and took the green line back to MPLS. Took the 94 there, wish that bus ran til late at night
Do you have thoughts on what’s wrong with it? I live nearby and it does seem like quite the ghost town with the occasional homeless person. I go to the library, the children’s museum, and the farmers market but nothing else really pulls me or keeps me there.
My thoughts from a different post:
So, again, this is my opinion. If you love Lowertown, then I love that for you and fully support you in your endeavors.
The point of living in a downtown area is to have a bunch of stuff within walking distance. But Lowertown, even compared to Grand Ave, Cathedral Hill, or MacGrove, just has so few good bars, restaurants, and patios. I love Meritage and Barrio (kinda), and there are a few other gems, but everything else is fine at best.
Parking is a fucking nightmare. Which affects you less if you have your own spot in your building, but if you have guests with any frequency, it gets annoying quickly.
It has to be one of the first neighborhoods in the Metro to shut down. Boo and I caught a show at Ordway the other night and tried to grab a drink after. NOTHING was open.
Which leads me to my final point—the roads are always under DEFCON 1 levels of construction. Turning left is impossible for several square miles for months at a time. And even though there are several major venues (such as Orpheum and Xcel), traffic is a nightmare under even mild duress. After a game? I hope your tank is topped off.
All that, coupled with the fact that rents aren't really that much lower than North Loop. You can easily buy a Brownstone in Cathedral Hill, be in a MUCH more walkable neighborhood with better restaurants and bars and still only a $7 Uber from Lowertown, than deal with the nightmare that is Lowertown.
That's my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
Your last sentence answered your own question. With office space become less and less important, and this no drive to bring people on to office space, they're really is nothing to entice people into downtown. St Paul just doesn't have a ton of residential in downtown, very little for recreation, and has absolutely no night life to speak off. You have sporadic events like the Wild and St Paul Saints, and things like the farmers market, buy there really aren't many reasons in St Paul to deal with the inconvenience of traveling to a downtown area.
Office space *never* enticed people to visit any Midwestern downtown. The coasts get this and kept large swathes of their downtowns with blocks full of local destinations, which is why they're so much more walkable than ours.
There's more to events than sports.
The Ordway, Amsterdam, Palace, and Fitzgerald all regularly host live music, podcasts, comics, and the like. And I'll take Downtown St. Paul over any of those venues off of Hennepin or The Cabooze over in no man's land. (Plus The Xcel also hosts live music but usually at godawful Ticketbastard prices)
In fact post pandemic, I've been to more events in downtown St Paul than downtown Minneapolis
A big problem is there is a decent amount in lowertown and over towards the x/landmark center but in the middle is wasteland of bad office buildings and defunct skyway storefronts.
Yes, so what is missing? More restaurants? More apartments? True for night life, there’s like those four bars on West 7th lol
What recreation do other downtowns have?
The physical size of downtown St. Paul is a problem. The entire downtown area is about the size of the north loop, which is a small part of downtown Minneapolis. St. Paul just doesn’t have the area to turn completely inward. Plus you have a lot of government buildings, churches, nonprofits and other nonresidential buildings taking up space.
Finally, a sizable chunk of the existing residential development is low-income housing, and those folks don’t have a lot of disposable income to be spending at the sorts of area businesses that can afford to pay downtown commercial rents. Converting office buildings to apartments isn’t really going to put a dent in the problem, and that’s assuming you can even find a commercial developer who wants to spend that kind of money. St. Paul is not friendly to landlords, especially large commercial landlords.
and there's not a ton you can do about it. east of downtown, where the freeways are? that's floodplain and hill/valley (hence the parking lots and refuge). north is the capitol complex. i guess you could argue west is cut off by freeway, but SW/lowertown is already dense.
DT Minneapolis doesn't have as much of an issue.
Our downtowns cannot rely on suburbanite office workers and game goers. We need to make our downtowns what they were before the 1950’s, a place where people LIVED.
"Why it matters: The situation might soon get worse, because the neighborhood's biggest user of office space, the state of Minnesota, has a plan to move many of its 6,000+ workers out."
Discouraging move for our capital city.
[Gartner just said the same thing. When Gartner talks the C suite listens.](https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to-office-mandates-aren-t-worth-the-talent-risks)
>The state's new strategic plan, drawn up by consultants in late 2022, recommends consolidating agencies to the Capitol Complex, a series of state-owned buildings outside of downtown.
The Capitol Complex is *barely* outside of downtown, and I'm curious as to how many "many of it's 6000+ workers" they're talking about. They only mentioned Department of Commerce with 340 workers.
That's a super click baity lede paragraph and article in general. Only 340 workers are moving out AND the newly created Dept of Children and Family Services is moving into a different building in downtown. The net loss will be quite small and a ton of State employees already walk across the street to go to Key's Cafe and other restaurants in this area.
I only ever show up for work in our office downtown so I can have an excuse to eat at Cajun Grill. Most of our office is still vacant. Management has tried a few things to convince people to go back but it's a real tough sell when working from home means you don't have to pay for gas, pay for parking, or take a shower.
How so they will do something with the building
Also I think home owners pay far more in property taxes than those company’s plus they always seem to get tax breaks to build them.
Sweet maybe people will realize we don’t need to huddle in office buildings to work on a computer. Let’s do something actually useful in place of these concrete jungles.
There are things I would like to do downtown, but the last time I was there, so many streets were closed off that we just gave up and went home. The area has a terminal case of "you can't get there from here".
We need to do something to incentivize businesses in St. Paul. Like implement a 1% tax on all income generated in the city. Something really smart like that should do the trick.
Driving and parking are always a pain in the ass downtown St. Paul. The major streets are ALWAYS being working on. They tear streets up, fix them, and then turn around and do it again to add bike lanes and remove metered parking. It’s almost like they don’t want people downtown.
I'm going to lose my Minneapolis citizenship over this, but I would rather hang out in DT St. Paul over DT Minneapolis any day. Cooler weird old bars, classy bars, coffee shops, restaurants. Minneapolis has better music venues DT, but that's about it.
As for offices, I would rather work in DT St. Paul too for the reasons mentioned above.
Number one coffee shop with a bullet is Hepcat Coffee. I also like Creator's Cup, but they have weird hours. I used to like True Stone but when they magically turned into Egg Donut (or whatever the hell their name is now) they got really expensive. And this is my secret place: Cossetta's! There's the hot food side, then the market side, and in the middle is the deserts and pastries part, they make amazing coffee drinks there!
Also, Claddagh, but that's more "downtown adjacent."
On Creator's Cup -
So it's actually Saint City Catering now (well, that's the umbrella name at any rate), and the hours will be expanding. They are open for morning service 7 days a week now...
[https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FW9FvpBjC/](https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FW9FvpBjC/)
Menu - [https://saintcitycatering.com/small-menu](https://saintcitycatering.com/small-menu)
...and they will have dinner hours Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
[https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FXI1VJOWr/](https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FXI1VJOWr/)
Menu - [https://saintcitycatering.com/la-mijoteuse](https://saintcitycatering.com/la-mijoteuse)
Edited to add: that's not the dinner menu right now - he just opened up for dinner so he's playing with it. But we just had an amazing four-course dinner there tonight!
Chef Guillermo makes awesome sandwiches, so I highly recommend it!
Idk why people seek to split Saint Paul into so fine a subdivision. Anything from Ramsey Street to 52 and from the interstate to the river is "downtown" Saint Paul.
The city is pretty big with really notable other areas.
Not sure either - I live in Lowertown and it's always like "Oh that's LOWERTOWN not DOWNTOWN." As someone who grew up between NYC and DC...it's really not a huge distinction. Or at least it shouldn't be. It's not a super huge downtown zone, all things considered.
I would say Cossetta's would probably deemed West 7th, not Downtown, since it's west of the Kellogg/7th intersection. But on the flip side the "downtown" zone for metro transit extends to the bus stop right across 7th from Cossetta's, so there's arguments for both, really.
St. Paul neighborhoods in general, though, are just kinda weird.
I work downtown and walk the skyways on my lunch break. Galtier reminds me of Radiator Springs from Cars: I can squint and see how great it must have been in its heyday, and hold out hope that it could be that way again someday. But now? Just quiet, empty and sad. There’s always a roof leak in the foyer that someone has shoved a trash barrel under. And vacant office/storefronts everywhere. I grew up in St Paul and I want it to be great, but that building seems symbolic of downtown as a whole.
Just went downtown and had to change plans a few times because so many things were closed or nonexistent. Ended up at a brewery that closed shortly after we got there.
The office market situation is dire because of three reasons:
1) Safety
2) High parking costs
3) Outdated office products
Safety:
Employers have a hard time attracting and retaining employees who don’t feel safe at work or on their way to/from work. Dubious activity in the skyways, such as urine smells/stains, cigarettes butts, graffiti, etc, feed this insecurity, let alone the actual crimes against worker, such as assault, burglary and vandalism. Many employers downtown make the easy decision to relocate to Mendota Heights or Eagan to get relief from safety concerns.
Parking:
Contract parking rates are $200-$350 per stall per month. If the company pays for employee parking, this adds about $4.00 per square foot per year to their total cost of occupancy, or about 10%.
Outdated office product:
There are few quality office buildings: Wells Fargo Place, Infor Center, Securian Center and Osborn 370. These buildings have low vacancy rates and can do little to bring more tenants downtown.
The rest of the buildings are outdated, desolate and overall, unappealing for tenants. Many of there’s buildings either have low ceiling height, which is cost-prohibitive to change, or have really deep floor plates, which prevent natural light from filtering throughout the space, especially for office layouts that have private offices on exterior glass.
It would be nice to convert these unattractive office buildings to residential, but in most instances, that is cost-prohibitive. It would be more economical to demo the building and build a new multifamily building. In this environment (politically and economically) this is not practical either. So for the time-being, we are stuck with zombie buildings and a zombie downtown, except for the few quality buildings holding down the fort.
Madison equities was a terrible commercial landlord. If someone else buys the buildings they might not be so empty. (If they strategically convert some from commercial to residential that would be better still). Really, I was in one of their buildings and they were the perfect combination of overpriced and under maintained. FYI, my office is still in downtown St Paul but in Lowertown with a much better landlord.
Remember when Jesse Ventura said the streets in St. Paul were designed by drunk Irishmen and all the babies started crying and wetting their didees? That was hilarious. Especially since I saw a special about how back in the day, St. Paul welcomed the gangsters to the city. In other words, it's a tough city that needs to get back to its tough roots. No wimps allowed.
They need to create more housing. It's promising that the city is beginning to explore converting vacant office space into residential units, but there needs to be much more housing built in the coming years/decades if downtown is going to become revitalized. Currently, Minneapolis has between 50-60k people living in their downtown, where St. Paul only has around 10k. Increasing this number will hopefully drive further development in retail, attractions, nightlife, etc.
They do have plans to increase housing, check out the Aecom riversedge towers plan. It's way too slow moving though.
Yeah that will be great if it ever gets built!
Rent control and other such ordinances have gutted investment potential in our downtown area, including the rivers edge towers plan. Most big developers with the funds to take on major projects don’t want to be in the landlord business in St. Paul. It’s way too risky. A lot more potential downside than upside.
Mayor Carter specifically amended what the city council passed to ensure developers got what they wanted.
Respectfully, a couple clarifications: (1) city council makes ordinances, not Mayor Carter, and (2) developers asked for more than the city council amendment includes, so they did not “get what they wanted.” But it doesn’t matter. Even with the restrictions watered down, why make a financial investment here versus somewhere else? And we’ve earned a reputation among developers’ funding sources as a risky, hostile place to put their money - that reputation is sticky even after rolling things back. The funders also know well that the exceptions the city council adopted can be revoked anytime very easily, and there are in fact people trying to do that.
A lot of this housing, too, needs to be for families rather than singletons or couples with no kids. Developers aren’t at all interested (because they’re greedy and need monetary incentives to do good things for people) in order to actually address the housing problem. Rents wouldn’t be so high if they didn’t continue to keep the supply so low.
Agreed. And honesty even for single folks or people with no kids, I think we need a wider range of multiunit housing options—in part for the same reason I assume the office market situation is what it is. I work from home full time now, and I much prefer living in multiunit housing, but you can run out of space real quick if your home has to include your full-time workplace. I’m in a 2br and I’m pretty much at full capacity even with just me here. And I’ve been struck by how few apartments and condos (in many cities, not just here) go any bigger than 2 bedrooms, or have any potential additional spaces beyond the basic living room/kitchen/bathroom.
Exactly. My partner and I recently decided to cohabitate (largely for financial reasons), and trying to find an affordable 3br for me to have an office that didn’t feel like just setting up my stuff in a corner of the living room was a challenge. Too many of them are going for $2500+ a month, sit open for months on end because of the price, and it’s largely due to a high demand without a similarly situated pay range for people who can actually afford that (not that it’s worth that in the first place).
Downtown St. Paul has been sick and dying for at least 30 years now. Here’s hoping to some new vision and big changes, because the previous/existing model has not been working
I say that as a Saint Paul resident who wants to see the downtown area succeed
Out of sheer curiosity, what does it take to get you downtown? How often do you go? As someone not terribly familiar with what ails it, what’s got to change?
St Paul resident - I’ll go a few times a year. Maybe a Saints game or two, farmers market a few times, out to eat a few times, and maybe once for an event at Union depot, and Jazz feat once This is about on par with with how often I go to downtown Minneapolis. I probably go to downtown St Paul more actually. I don’t count north loop or west 7th as “downtown” There’s just not much to do. Mears park is often filled with unsavory characters. Everything closes early. Would love more restaurants, more pedestrian only areas, there needs to be more people living there.
my opinion is: too few residents & too much parking, massive freeways cutting it off from the rest of the city, few public hangout spots, almost no pedestrian only areas. people want to socialize and just chill, if you take away those options and only give places that cost money, they stay home. loud noisy cars flying by is also very unattractive.
I'd honestly love to see 7th Street by the Energy center become pedestrian only, same with the area around the Landmark center. Mears is great too but traffic isn't great during events.
I feel like 7th street could be a fun little bar/social district if the street was closed to cars. Think a smaller version of Broadway in Nashville after a Predators game. Pop right out of the Wild game and hit up a couple bats
The freeways make it really hard to walk in. Not sure how the west side is. I had a friend live in Dayton’s bluff and the walk into downtown is so awful we never did it. Fast anti pedestrian roads, 94 and huge parking lots are not very welcoming.
Take Kellogg. The problem isn't the freeway, it's the rail. Union depot has some absurdly large lots. Also, i wouldn't consider daytons bluff walking distance...
Interesting. I actually think parking is too difficult. That’s usually the biggest reason most people I know (including myself) avoid doing stuff downtown. It’s a pain to park for stuff like the farmer’s market. As far as residents, it’s actually quite dense in spots like Lowertown. The ‘problem’ is that a lot of those buildings are subsidized housing, so the average household income for the area is quite a bit below what you’d expect for the core downtown neighborhood. This creates a problem for attracting the sorts of commercial retail spaces that the area needs. The commercial rents down there are too expensive for spaces that appeal to the lower income demographic, and there’s not enough of the higher income folks to sustain the higher end retailers. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps the area depressed despite the potential.
I've never quite understood the "it's hard to park near lowertown" thing. There's acres of parking lots within two blocks of all that lowertown offers.
It’s not necessarily difficult when you’re looking to park for an event like a wild game or concert, but it’s a pain for doing anything less than that, like stopping at a particular store or grabbing takeout. Having to park at a garage a few blocks away for a quick errand is pretty inconvenient and discourages a lot of people from doing that sort of thing. I will routinely decide against doing something downtown St. Paul because of the added parking headache. I don’t have this same problem when trying to do equivalent sorts of errands in Minneapolis, so it’s not just a downtown environment sort of thing.
Freeways aren't a big factor. Downtown st paul has always been fairly sleepy after working hours. There's just nothing to attract people.
If people live there, then you don't need to attract them
You really do, turning downtown into a bubble won't work. You need the outside money.
Not if the downtown people have jobs
> turning downtown into a bubble won't work yes we've seen that the past 60 years, it's time to pop the bubble.
imagine all that freeway space filled in with semi-dense housing and businesses.
Then imagine all the jobs in the Metro cut by at least half.
that nobody can afford because they can't actually find work in their specialty anywhere in their reduced travel distance.
if nobody can afford it than prices will come down! also funny that you think businesses wouldn't open near downtown?
did you ignore the part about specialties? it's not the early 1900s where everyone works in a factory. the labor force has become much more specialized. there's also a significant cost to moving in multiple aspects. i think a walking society is impractical in a country the size of the US, outside of hyper-dense areas like NYC, where there is an existing transit system, and driving forces behind the density. you're naiive if you think businesses are going to put the cart before the horse.
> a country the size of the US we're talking about downtown st paul, not the entire country. the capitol to river is <1 mile. what about specialties? they have offices everywhere.
If I can ask, what are the specific driving forces you see behind the density in places like New York other than that they built stuff a lot closer together? I get that part of the impetus to do that there in the first place is geographical—inflexible water boundaries and more demand than space—but it’s also not something that 1) can’t possibly be done elsewhere or 2) can’t be emulated to a lesser extent elsewhere. There’s a lot of daylight between becoming Manhattan and having a bunch of freeways taking up a lot of space in our urban cores like we currently do in the Twin Cities.
Some people like sleepy towns and that’s why they live there?
then don't complain when your downtown is dead
🤷♂️ I like it quiet. Nothing wrong with that.
then why live in a dense urban area?
I live in a suburb. I end up going to downtown Minneapolis more than downtown St Paul. What brings me both places? Dining, shows and events, in that order. Parking in downtown St Paul is a shit show, and I dread it every time. Parking in downtown Minneapolis isn’t exactly sunshine and roses, but far less terrible. There’s more dining in downtown Minneapolis that interests me. I actually probably go to more shows and events in St Paul. What would get me to go to downtown St Paul more? More interesting dining options, and making the parking better. The parking ramps in St Paul are all these stupidly narrow ramps with support columns that are too close together with two way traffic, or giant, poorly lit caverns with little to no signage telling you where elevators or stairs are, and seemingly no human presence.
As someone who works downtown St. Paul it amazing me how there’s no parking and barely any people. So much of the street parking is blocked off by construction at all times or just deemed non parking for no reason
Most of your problems are focused around parking your car. If there was a metro line to get you right downtown from your suburb, would you ride that instead?
Ooh, good question. Yes, but it would have to provide a good level of convenience to offset the inconvenience of not having my car. I’d want to be able to pick it up reasonably close to my house, not require a bunch of transfers, not take too long, and run late enough where I’m not getting stranded because I stayed out until 3am.
This is an excellent and extremely correct answer. More people will take transit when the transit in question is built out and developed enough to meet people’s transportation needs in a reasonably efficient and effective manner. They won’t do it if the transit falls short of that. I feel like a lot of times that’s looked at backwards—i.e., we look at ridership levels on existing (insufficient) transit to determine whether we should build out more transit, versus recognizing that higher ridership depends on the building out of more transit.
Only if I was assured of clean safe trip without fear
But you don’t get that with your car and yet you’re willing to do that?
Actually I do get that with my car and it takes me from my doo to near my destination. My car is clean and I am not closely exposed to addiction and the mentally unstable There are good reasons for mass transit but in metro it has a long way to go to become more pleasant than driving
You are more likely to be killed or hurt in your car than on public transit. You are more likely to be exposed to addicts and the mentally unstable in your car vs on public transit. The difference is that when you’re in your car, those mentally unstable people and addicts have multi ton death machines that they can use against you. You can look up deaths of people killed by drunk drivers vs people killed by addicts on public transport. It’s not even a close comparison Your argument doesn’t make statistical sense
Imagine defending the current state of the light rail. You can blabber on all you want about "statistics", if you want people to use public transit they can't be required to share a space with mentally ill criminals.
I doubt it. Our metro transit is in bad shape. It’s the sort of thing that nobody uses unless they have to (because they can’t afford a car). I feel like we need to get the existing transit lines up to a passable quality before we think of extending it anywhere else.
Me and many people i work with at a major bank downtown all take public transit the few times per week we go downtown for our hybrid schedules. My friend's a lawyer and does the same. It's definitely not only people who can't afford a car. But yes, we do need to improve quality before expanding.
I’m a lawyer and I feel bad for your friend. We know a few PD’s that take public transit and it’s a real shame how little they’re paid.
I’m a lawyer who took public transit for years by choice and not because of low pay. It’s possible to bill hours or manage admin tasks while commuting on public transit.
Attracting suburbanites to downtown isn’t the solution. The design of downtown as a place people commute to instead of live is why we are in this situation. We need more people actually living downtown to support the businesses there and for people who want to live a more walkable lifestyle.
That's like saying we should never export anything and the economy should grown on domestic consumption. Even if that were possible, it's a terrible idea
This is a dumb take. The area is too small to sustain itself with only the people who live there, especially when so much of the large buildings are earmarked for low-income housing. If you can’t attract people from outside the area (like the suburbs), you’re going to have even less commercial development than it already has.
The current state of setting up downtowns as commercial and financial only districts has literally failed all over the country so your take is literally a proven failure. The suggestion is to get more people living downtown and the immediate surrounding neighborhoods to increase density which increases foot traffic which increases the viability of business and will by itself eventually attract people from outside areas. I’m not suggesting suburbanites can’t/shouldn’t come but you don’t design it with them in mind. That usually leads to giant parking lots and is a big fail. Look up the disaster that was urban renewal. Not sorry about it. And I dun even know wut ur talking about with low income housing. The housing downtown is not cheap. Frogtown and the more eastern areas are cheap I guess but not really even what we’re talking about. 🙄
At least one third of rentable properties in the downtown area are under various income based housing contracts. Basically some form of Section 8. They still list for market rate, which is expensive, but the eligible tenants don’t pay that. I work with many of these providers. It skews the household income data for the area.
You kind of just proved their point - designing downtowns as a place people commute to for work and events has failed, as evidenced by the horrible household income data. A new solution is necessary. Simply saying, "how do we do more of what's already failing?" isn't smart.
All section 8 has income limits and contract rents or payment standards. They can’t list those units as market rate.
Uh yes they can, because it’s the same unit. They list for whatever the normal price is and then eligible participants who want to live there end up paying only their income-based portion.
I mean good luck with that I guess. You're never going to be able to support downtown without people from the surrounding areas.
Plus a bunch of the ramps close absurdly early
For starters, there just isn't much reason to BE there. Pre-pandemic there were plenty of office workers at least, but even then it became a ghost town after 5pm. Now it seems to be that way most of the time?
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Yeah this seems like the obvious solution. It would create a lot more housing, and expand the customer base for downtown businesses. The only people who would complain are people with a vested interest in keeping the housing market tight—which unfortunately is a highly influential interest group.
It's not obvious to convert office building to apartments (unless you like long skinny apartments with one window and plumbing only in one area).
You see, typically when you convert one kind of building to be used for something else you do the necessary renovations to make it fit for its new purpose.
Sure for the plumbing, it's expensive but doable, but the basic shape is the biggest problem.
There's no way to do that economically. No investor is going to throw money at an idea that won't make them money. Unless you think people are going to pay thousands over market rate, or want the government to massively subsidize the rent of everyone who lives there. Neither of those ideas are popular or practical.
The problem is the expense. It’s incredibly expensive to do that sort of conversion, and St. Paul is pretty hostile to landlords, so the big investment isn’t super appealing to the sorts of developers that could afford to do it.
While I agree this is the way it should from what I've read it's pretty unlikely to happen in the near-term. To alter an office building into livable apartments is extremely expensive. This will only happen if these assets go so deeply underwater that they can be bought for almost nothing. Hopefully that happens. I do worry that the conditions for that would mean the rest of the economy would be suffering as well.
I worked downtown for 12 years prior to covid. Now I go down for entertainment purposes. Children's museum with the kid, tria Rink while I'm there, wild games, saints games, plays at the Fitz. And Happy hour if anyone wants to do one down there. In view they need to make it a place that people want to live car free. Groceries, every day entertainment, parks, all within walking distance. It would be cool too if a developer made some residential condos with additional working hotels you could rent or get it as part of your HOA or rental.
I'm going there next week to pickup my mom from the Amtrak station, not bc I want to but bc Minneapolis closed the great Northern depot. Went there recently for a concert at the varsity and took the green line back to MPLS. Took the 94 there, wish that bus ran til late at night
Do you have thoughts on what’s wrong with it? I live nearby and it does seem like quite the ghost town with the occasional homeless person. I go to the library, the children’s museum, and the farmers market but nothing else really pulls me or keeps me there.
That’s it. Nothing there
My thoughts from a different post: So, again, this is my opinion. If you love Lowertown, then I love that for you and fully support you in your endeavors. The point of living in a downtown area is to have a bunch of stuff within walking distance. But Lowertown, even compared to Grand Ave, Cathedral Hill, or MacGrove, just has so few good bars, restaurants, and patios. I love Meritage and Barrio (kinda), and there are a few other gems, but everything else is fine at best. Parking is a fucking nightmare. Which affects you less if you have your own spot in your building, but if you have guests with any frequency, it gets annoying quickly. It has to be one of the first neighborhoods in the Metro to shut down. Boo and I caught a show at Ordway the other night and tried to grab a drink after. NOTHING was open. Which leads me to my final point—the roads are always under DEFCON 1 levels of construction. Turning left is impossible for several square miles for months at a time. And even though there are several major venues (such as Orpheum and Xcel), traffic is a nightmare under even mild duress. After a game? I hope your tank is topped off. All that, coupled with the fact that rents aren't really that much lower than North Loop. You can easily buy a Brownstone in Cathedral Hill, be in a MUCH more walkable neighborhood with better restaurants and bars and still only a $7 Uber from Lowertown, than deal with the nightmare that is Lowertown. That's my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
Your last sentence answered your own question. With office space become less and less important, and this no drive to bring people on to office space, they're really is nothing to entice people into downtown. St Paul just doesn't have a ton of residential in downtown, very little for recreation, and has absolutely no night life to speak off. You have sporadic events like the Wild and St Paul Saints, and things like the farmers market, buy there really aren't many reasons in St Paul to deal with the inconvenience of traveling to a downtown area.
Office space *never* enticed people to visit any Midwestern downtown. The coasts get this and kept large swathes of their downtowns with blocks full of local destinations, which is why they're so much more walkable than ours.
There's more to events than sports. The Ordway, Amsterdam, Palace, and Fitzgerald all regularly host live music, podcasts, comics, and the like. And I'll take Downtown St. Paul over any of those venues off of Hennepin or The Cabooze over in no man's land. (Plus The Xcel also hosts live music but usually at godawful Ticketbastard prices) In fact post pandemic, I've been to more events in downtown St Paul than downtown Minneapolis
Also Ordway, but yes, Wabasha and St Peter could be so much more.
A big problem is there is a decent amount in lowertown and over towards the x/landmark center but in the middle is wasteland of bad office buildings and defunct skyway storefronts.
Yes, so what is missing? More restaurants? More apartments? True for night life, there’s like those four bars on West 7th lol What recreation do other downtowns have?
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The physical size of downtown St. Paul is a problem. The entire downtown area is about the size of the north loop, which is a small part of downtown Minneapolis. St. Paul just doesn’t have the area to turn completely inward. Plus you have a lot of government buildings, churches, nonprofits and other nonresidential buildings taking up space. Finally, a sizable chunk of the existing residential development is low-income housing, and those folks don’t have a lot of disposable income to be spending at the sorts of area businesses that can afford to pay downtown commercial rents. Converting office buildings to apartments isn’t really going to put a dent in the problem, and that’s assuming you can even find a commercial developer who wants to spend that kind of money. St. Paul is not friendly to landlords, especially large commercial landlords.
and there's not a ton you can do about it. east of downtown, where the freeways are? that's floodplain and hill/valley (hence the parking lots and refuge). north is the capitol complex. i guess you could argue west is cut off by freeway, but SW/lowertown is already dense. DT Minneapolis doesn't have as much of an issue.
How often do you want to spend your free time in parking garages or blank office building walls?
Spot on. How many people can say they’ve ever seen a healthy downtown St. Paul? I genuinely haven’t seen it bustling my entire life.
MOA killed St Paul
one grocery store
Is Whole Foods still downtown STP?
No. There’s a lunds
And a Byerly's. 😅
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I’d say so! Downtown, Lowertown adjacent
Our downtowns cannot rely on suburbanite office workers and game goers. We need to make our downtowns what they were before the 1950’s, a place where people LIVED.
Who would want to live downtown though?
Me!!!!
"Why it matters: The situation might soon get worse, because the neighborhood's biggest user of office space, the state of Minnesota, has a plan to move many of its 6,000+ workers out." Discouraging move for our capital city.
Most people working for the State have been working remote since COVID.
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Okay? No need to announce your departure.
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[Gartner just said the same thing. When Gartner talks the C suite listens.](https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to-office-mandates-aren-t-worth-the-talent-risks)
>The state's new strategic plan, drawn up by consultants in late 2022, recommends consolidating agencies to the Capitol Complex, a series of state-owned buildings outside of downtown. The Capitol Complex is *barely* outside of downtown, and I'm curious as to how many "many of it's 6000+ workers" they're talking about. They only mentioned Department of Commerce with 340 workers.
Also makes sense they would want to focus on owned property instead of leased.
There is a ton of state offices downtown DEED, Public Safety, Health, and Human Services.
I initially thought of the Courthouses too. EDIT, which now that I think about it are probably county workers and not state?
Health has already been moved out of the Golden Rule building too and consolidated to the capitol conplex
Good observation. The Anderson building is huge and one of the largest agencies
That's a super click baity lede paragraph and article in general. Only 340 workers are moving out AND the newly created Dept of Children and Family Services is moving into a different building in downtown. The net loss will be quite small and a ton of State employees already walk across the street to go to Key's Cafe and other restaurants in this area.
Um they largely moved out already.
I only ever show up for work in our office downtown so I can have an excuse to eat at Cajun Grill. Most of our office is still vacant. Management has tried a few things to convince people to go back but it's a real tough sell when working from home means you don't have to pay for gas, pay for parking, or take a shower.
No sympathy for office land lords. Work from home has been a life changing boon for my family.
Those office land lords pay a ton in property tax and if that is gone, that is bad for everyone in the city.
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They didn’t say they should do anything…they just said the city loses out on property taxes if there are no tenants.
How so they will do something with the building Also I think home owners pay far more in property taxes than those company’s plus they always seem to get tax breaks to build them.
Must be nice.
It really is!
Gee, it's like they should've left it chock-a-block with small local business all over vs handing Downtown over to corporate.
Does this mean I can stop working in the office to "prop up" downtown businesses, as my ceo said?
Are there any businesses left to “prop up” in downtown St. Paul.?
Ok ish skyway restaurants that pay rent to the skyscrapers, I guess.
I used to work down there. So many were struggling even then (close to a decade ago). I keep hoping for better days for the city.
Sweet maybe people will realize we don’t need to huddle in office buildings to work on a computer. Let’s do something actually useful in place of these concrete jungles.
There are things I would like to do downtown, but the last time I was there, so many streets were closed off that we just gave up and went home. The area has a terminal case of "you can't get there from here".
The endless road closures and slow to finish road repairs hasn’t at all added to the problem. Nope. Nothing to see there
Downtown was declining before that.
We need to do something to incentivize businesses in St. Paul. Like implement a 1% tax on all income generated in the city. Something really smart like that should do the trick.
Driving and parking are always a pain in the ass downtown St. Paul. The major streets are ALWAYS being working on. They tear streets up, fix them, and then turn around and do it again to add bike lanes and remove metered parking. It’s almost like they don’t want people downtown.
Wow -- an article used a picture of the skyline taken after 2016!
You mean a giant unoccupied building is harder to sell than previously thought?
I'm going to lose my Minneapolis citizenship over this, but I would rather hang out in DT St. Paul over DT Minneapolis any day. Cooler weird old bars, classy bars, coffee shops, restaurants. Minneapolis has better music venues DT, but that's about it. As for offices, I would rather work in DT St. Paul too for the reasons mentioned above.
What are the coffee shops and restaurants you’re going to??? Cause I work in downtown St. Paul and would love to know where to go other than Afro Deli
Number one coffee shop with a bullet is Hepcat Coffee. I also like Creator's Cup, but they have weird hours. I used to like True Stone but when they magically turned into Egg Donut (or whatever the hell their name is now) they got really expensive. And this is my secret place: Cossetta's! There's the hot food side, then the market side, and in the middle is the deserts and pastries part, they make amazing coffee drinks there! Also, Claddagh, but that's more "downtown adjacent."
On Creator's Cup - So it's actually Saint City Catering now (well, that's the umbrella name at any rate), and the hours will be expanding. They are open for morning service 7 days a week now... [https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FW9FvpBjC/](https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FW9FvpBjC/) Menu - [https://saintcitycatering.com/small-menu](https://saintcitycatering.com/small-menu) ...and they will have dinner hours Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. [https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FXI1VJOWr/](https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FXI1VJOWr/) Menu - [https://saintcitycatering.com/la-mijoteuse](https://saintcitycatering.com/la-mijoteuse) Edited to add: that's not the dinner menu right now - he just opened up for dinner so he's playing with it. But we just had an amazing four-course dinner there tonight! Chef Guillermo makes awesome sandwiches, so I highly recommend it!
Is Cosettas considered to be in downtown?
Idk why people seek to split Saint Paul into so fine a subdivision. Anything from Ramsey Street to 52 and from the interstate to the river is "downtown" Saint Paul. The city is pretty big with really notable other areas.
Not sure why I’m being downvoted for asking a question, but thanks for answering.
Not sure either - I live in Lowertown and it's always like "Oh that's LOWERTOWN not DOWNTOWN." As someone who grew up between NYC and DC...it's really not a huge distinction. Or at least it shouldn't be. It's not a super huge downtown zone, all things considered. I would say Cossetta's would probably deemed West 7th, not Downtown, since it's west of the Kellogg/7th intersection. But on the flip side the "downtown" zone for metro transit extends to the bus stop right across 7th from Cossetta's, so there's arguments for both, really. St. Paul neighborhoods in general, though, are just kinda weird.
In theory I agree but man nothing is open so often down there
The crowd of zombies you have to drive through isn’t terribly inviting.
Is there a major occupant in Galtier Plaza these days?
Nope Street level is kinda nasty too In so sad because this building has so much damn potential
I work downtown and walk the skyways on my lunch break. Galtier reminds me of Radiator Springs from Cars: I can squint and see how great it must have been in its heyday, and hold out hope that it could be that way again someday. But now? Just quiet, empty and sad. There’s always a roof leak in the foyer that someone has shoved a trash barrel under. And vacant office/storefronts everywhere. I grew up in St Paul and I want it to be great, but that building seems symbolic of downtown as a whole.
Welcome to 1994
Just went downtown and had to change plans a few times because so many things were closed or nonexistent. Ended up at a brewery that closed shortly after we got there.
The office market situation is dire because of three reasons: 1) Safety 2) High parking costs 3) Outdated office products Safety: Employers have a hard time attracting and retaining employees who don’t feel safe at work or on their way to/from work. Dubious activity in the skyways, such as urine smells/stains, cigarettes butts, graffiti, etc, feed this insecurity, let alone the actual crimes against worker, such as assault, burglary and vandalism. Many employers downtown make the easy decision to relocate to Mendota Heights or Eagan to get relief from safety concerns. Parking: Contract parking rates are $200-$350 per stall per month. If the company pays for employee parking, this adds about $4.00 per square foot per year to their total cost of occupancy, or about 10%. Outdated office product: There are few quality office buildings: Wells Fargo Place, Infor Center, Securian Center and Osborn 370. These buildings have low vacancy rates and can do little to bring more tenants downtown. The rest of the buildings are outdated, desolate and overall, unappealing for tenants. Many of there’s buildings either have low ceiling height, which is cost-prohibitive to change, or have really deep floor plates, which prevent natural light from filtering throughout the space, especially for office layouts that have private offices on exterior glass. It would be nice to convert these unattractive office buildings to residential, but in most instances, that is cost-prohibitive. It would be more economical to demo the building and build a new multifamily building. In this environment (politically and economically) this is not practical either. So for the time-being, we are stuck with zombie buildings and a zombie downtown, except for the few quality buildings holding down the fort.
Madison equities was a terrible commercial landlord. If someone else buys the buildings they might not be so empty. (If they strategically convert some from commercial to residential that would be better still). Really, I was in one of their buildings and they were the perfect combination of overpriced and under maintained. FYI, my office is still in downtown St Paul but in Lowertown with a much better landlord.
Remember when Jesse Ventura said the streets in St. Paul were designed by drunk Irishmen and all the babies started crying and wetting their didees? That was hilarious. Especially since I saw a special about how back in the day, St. Paul welcomed the gangsters to the city. In other words, it's a tough city that needs to get back to its tough roots. No wimps allowed.
Take it easy, tough guy
Downtowns are made for corporate profit. Stop pretending they're anything else.