Elliot Park

Like Fields, Kanan fell in love with the neighborhood. “The fact that they had all these activities, and a master plan, and also neighborhood money was just amazing to me,” Kanan says. “The neighborhood is so active, and we have such access to city hall; it’s incredible to me that I can just talk to [Minneapolis City Council members] Lisa Goodman or Robert Lilligren. They made it really easy to do a lot of exciting things.”

Kanan says she and others are also proud of and energized by the mix of people living and working in Elliot Park, from college students to hospital workers to new Somali immigrants. “You can’t get a more mixed neighborhood than ours,” she says. “My coffee shop is like the United Nations.”

Housing Boom
Fields says that like the rest of downtown, Elliot Park’s recent housing boom will continue to provide the density and diversity of residents needed to attract more retail, entertainment, and cultural development. What developments are either up and coming, or on the drawing board?

- The Skyscape, a twenty-seven–story luxury condominium tower at 10th and Portland, will open this summer.

-The Sexton Lofts, a former warehouse at 521 7th St. S., has been converted into an eight-story, 123-unit condominium development and residents have started moving in. The Grand Sexton, a thirty-five–story addition scheduled to break ground last month, will add 252 units.

-CCHT is adding sixty units of affordable housing to the Alliance Apartments, a treatment recovery residence.

-The Fifth Avenue Gateway project at 505 E. Grant St. appears to be stalled. The developers, still seeking financing for the twenty-story building, asked for a one-time, one-year extension for the project until August.

-A proposed forty-story condo development at 1010 Park Avenue hasn’t yet made it out of the proposal stage.

With the condo market cooling off along with the rest of the housing market, not all of those projects will necessarily materialize. But if they do come online in the next four to five years, Fields says that adds 1,400 units of housing to the neighborhood since 1998, increasing Elliot Park’s population by more than a third. “That will bring more residents and wallets into the neighborhood,” Fields says, “and a natural demand for more resources.” 

Pointing to overall downtown growth, and the fact that neighborhoods along the river and in Loring Park are pretty well built up, he remains bullish. The next boom, Fields reasons, has to happen in Downtown East and Elliot Park. “This is the next downtown neighborhood, because essentially there’s nowhere else for downtown to go.”