What's Up With Uptown?

In the Ackerberg Group’s contemporary offices near Lake Calhoun, Stuart Ackerberg pulls out a paper map—it looks more like a place mat your kids get at a restaurant—of Uptown between 28th and 32nd Streets, from Lyndale Avenue west to Lake Calhoun’s shore. Many of the bigger parcels are marked in red; they’re labeled “potential projects.” Just across the Greenway from MoZaic is the “Acme Tag” site; developer Arnie Gregory says he will “definitely build housing of some sort” and is trying to encourage efforts to build a streetcar to connect with new housing going up near Lyndale. Another developer with similar intentions purchased the three blocks to the east, where Bennett Lumber was located. One block west of Calhoun Square is the Sons of Norway Building and another block west is Wells Fargo Home Mortgage; Ackerberg and others have tried to buy both.

Call it a realistic dreamscape: Stuff won’t sprout there overnight, but the influx of developer cash means things won’t sit still. But owning a plot doesn’t guarantee success, even for a second-generation developer such as Ackerberg, whom Remington calls the “king of Uptown.” More than half of MoZaic’s seventy condos are sold—an accomplishment postbust—but Ackerberg says that amounts to 42 percent of the “sellout value,” which is below the 50 percent his financiers need to approve groundbreaking for the building. Some details are in flux, but Ackerberg gestures at the map and insists MoZaic will begin to rise this year.

Uptown may be at the epicenter of creamy demographics, but it’s also at the crossroads of Minneapolis’s most active neighborhood groups, who see the same map Ackerberg does. The natives are restless and pushing the city to more effectively plan the area’s growth even as private capital floods in.

In response, city hall has initiated a “small area planning process” for Uptown and Hennepin Avenue north to Franklin Avenue. Small in area, but not in process. The exercise involves dozens of “stakeholders” and months of deliberations: Land use, traffic management, parking, transit planning, and streetscapes are all on the agenda.

Residents can be forgiven their skepticism because when it comes to developers, city hall has often rolled over like a pliant basset hound. One example: The zoning code requires city approval for anything over four stories; the city council rejected neighborhood opposition and approved seven for Calhoun Square. Ackerberg’s building will rise ten stories (although three floors were forcibly lopped off the original proposal).

Then there’s the area’s biggest growth industry: club-restaurants aimed at a younger, hard-drinking crowd. Nearly every liquor license was approved. Neighbors were long used to shoppers parking on their streets, but as retail struggled and alcohol replaced it, the crowd spilled out later and drunker. Ralph Remington, who lives near Calhoun Square, says, “It’s two at night, and you have twentysomethings stumbling back to their cars, talking loud. And then they get behind the wheel and drive away!”

Although CARAG’s Rubenstein says the height controversy prompted the small-area plan, consultants have floated early “case studies” with taller buildings throughout the area, though with more rhyme and reason. For example, allowable buildings would “step back” in height, appearing smaller from the street. Buildings on corners would be “primarily three to six stories,” with “taller mid-block buildings.” Around Hennepin and Lake would be a mix of retail, hotel, residential, and small-office uses; west toward the lake, “neighborhood scale” housing, retail, and galleries; east toward Lyndale, taller multi-unit housing with retail and offices. The carrot: More density leads to better transit, which means fewer cars in the neighborhood. Reality check: Metro Transit is cash-strapped and a new southwest light-rail line or a Greenway trolley is years, if not decades, away. Plans for Calhoun Square and MoZaic take no chances: Both include hundreds of new parking spaces. No one has a good way for decongesting traffic around major intersections. But point to any city’s most vibrant nondowntown commercial node—congestion inextricably comes with urban vibrance.

Rubenstein says neighborhood skeptics believe that the cash-strapped city’s priority is inevitably maximizing property taxes, but he’s not quite as cynical. “Some of us are saying we don’t want to fight projects on a project-by-project basis; it’s tiring and not helpful to the business community. I really think most people in the neighborhood understand Uptown needs to change and grow in order to succeed. BlackRock paid $40 million for Calhoun Square, so we’re not going to see parcels remain the same; it’s just not economically feasible. We hope to have a more collaborative approach.” He says the consultants might be wearing down residents’ antagonism toward height. And, of course, building taller might just be a good idea.

The process has churned up at least one nugget likely to stun anyone who’s driven around in circles looking for a place to park on weekends and summer evenings. “We found in our parking study that there’s more than enough parking in the lots, but they all have Cedar Towing signs on them,” Remington says, meaning they are restricted to certain tenants and uses and often empty. He’s not the first council member to advocate a shared system where the lots’ disparate owners pool their spaces. He also has a nightmare to wield in such a proposal’s defense: Michael Zebuhr had to park down a shadowy residential block instead of a well-lit lot where customer traffic was high.

Unlike a mall, Uptown is controlled by countless independent and sometimes eccentric business people who aren’t exactly team players. The Uptown Association, the business group that puts on signature events such as the sprawling Uptown Art Fair, has seen the departure of senior executives such as Ackerberg, Roberts, and Lunds' CEO Tres Lund. New executive director Maude Lovelle says, “Obviously, contributions from business are not what they used to be.”

Bay Street Shoes’ Besikof, with twenty-three years on the corner and some bile about former landlords, insists the storm will pass. “In retailing, you need to give people an experience—and let’s face it, Calhoun Square stopped giving people an experience a long time ago. It’s been a long time since we’ve had directed, committed ownership, and we’ve only done poorly because of that.”

He’s putting his money where his mouth is, and is talking to BlackRock about a Calhoun Square space that’s 50 percent bigger. “Principal grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory,” he notes. “It bought a building it needed to improve and did the opposite. From everything BlackRock has told me, you’ll see action fairly quickly [after the sale closes in July]. When it announces its first six tenants, businesses are going to stampede here. The neighborhood is still so great.” 

David Brauer, who lives about a mile from Calhoun Square, formerly edited Southwest Journal, the area's community paper. He writes regularly for Mpls.St.Paul and is the media analyst for Minnesota Public Radio.