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Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 26th, 2019, 5:30 pm
by eastharrietguy
There is no question that there is more going on in DT Mpls, but DT St. Paul has a lot to offer. Some of my favorite restaurants are in DT St. Paul:Meritage, St. Paul Grill and Pazzaluna. I understand there are some great spots in Lowertown as well. I would also argue that Rice Park is easily the best urban space in the cities... beautiful buildings all around. I would hope more firms would consider DT St. Paul over the suburb if they feel DT Mpls is too expensive.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 26th, 2019, 5:46 pm
by David Greene
I really liked working downtown St. Paul. Wish we were still there.

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Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 26th, 2019, 7:29 pm
by grrdanko
There is no question that there is more going on in DT Mpls, but DT St. Paul has a lot to offer. Some of my favorite restaurants are in DT St. Paul:Meritage, St. Paul Grill and Pazzaluna. I understand there are some great spots in Lowertown as well. I would also argue that Rice Park is easily the best urban space in the cities... beautiful buildings all around. I would hope more firms would consider DT St. Paul over the suburb if they feel DT Mpls is too expensive.

Saint Paul is one of the nicest suburbs of Minneapolis, but many businesses would like to be located in the central city.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 8:12 am
by SurlyLHT
There is no question that there is more going on in DT Mpls, but DT St. Paul has a lot to offer. Some of my favorite restaurants are in DT St. Paul:Meritage, St. Paul Grill and Pazzaluna. I understand there are some great spots in Lowertown as well. I would also argue that Rice Park is easily the best urban space in the cities... beautiful buildings all around. I would hope more firms would consider DT St. Paul over the suburb if they feel DT Mpls is too expensive.
St Paul does have better urban spaces. The parks are dispersed throughout the CBD. I loved going to Rice Park during my breaks when I worked in Downtown St Paul. I walk over to the Commons in Downtown Minneapolis, but by the time I get there I need to turn back. The Government Center's 7th St park is nice though, but no Rice Park.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 8:25 am
by LakeCharles
Downtown St Paul has some great urban spaces, but in between them it's real gross. Walking down 6th St between Rice Park and Mears Park is very depressing.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 8:41 am
by SurlyLHT
Be awesome if Mpls put a linear park on 5th St. connecting US Bank Stadium to Nicollet Mall. (If it went past Hennepin I fee it would mess with traffic too much.) This would make green space accessible to many Downtown workers.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 8:54 am
by phop
St. Paul's interfacing with the river is still very bad in downtown. Granted, it has more of a severe bluff to deal with than Minneapolis, but Minneapolis is working towards a world-class river park on the downtown periphery, while St. Paul is still trying to figure out simply how to get people past the rail and car barriers.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 10:05 am
by xandrex
Not speaking specifically to the downtown, but I think it’s easy for west metro/Minneapolis people to equate St. Paul being smaller with St. Paul being irrelevant, when really St. Paul and the east metro in general have their own smaller but similar ecosystem. Like for me there was a long time when I’d never go to Uptown or much of anywhere in Minneapolis, and instead Grand Avenue served the same purpose.
Downtown St. Paul is definitely not irrelevant. While I worked over there, it was funny to hear east metro folks talk about how they hadn't been over to Minneapolis in months ("Why would I?"). It's truly its own smaller system.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 11:54 am
by alexschief
Not speaking specifically to the downtown, but I think it’s easy for west metro/Minneapolis people to equate St. Paul being smaller with St. Paul being irrelevant, when really St. Paul and the east metro in general have their own smaller but similar ecosystem. Like for me there was a long time when I’d never go to Uptown or much of anywhere in Minneapolis, and instead Grand Avenue served the same purpose.
Downtown St. Paul is definitely not irrelevant. While I worked over there, it was funny to hear east metro folks talk about how they hadn't been over to Minneapolis in months ("Why would I?"). It's truly its own smaller system.
As a non-native, and someone who has only ever lived between the downtowns (Mac Groveland, Como, and Prospect Park), this perspective really frustrates me. If your orbit is confined by the political geography of the two central counties and cities, you're missing out on a lot.

I wish more people treated it as one city that just happens to have two downtowns.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 12:01 pm
by SurlyLHT
Not speaking specifically to the downtown, but I think it’s easy for west metro/Minneapolis people to equate St. Paul being smaller with St. Paul being irrelevant, when really St. Paul and the east metro in general have their own smaller but similar ecosystem. Like for me there was a long time when I’d never go to Uptown or much of anywhere in Minneapolis, and instead Grand Avenue served the same purpose.
Downtown St. Paul is definitely not irrelevant. While I worked over there, it was funny to hear east metro folks talk about how they hadn't been over to Minneapolis in months ("Why would I?"). It's truly its own smaller system.
As a non-native, and someone who has only ever lived between the downtowns (Mac Groveland, Como, and Prospect Park), this perspective really frustrates me. If your orbit is confined by the political geography of the two central counties and cities, you're missing out on a lot.

I wish more people treated it as one city that just happens to have two downtowns.
I don't think they'll ever be treated as one city. It's an age old rivalry which has lessoned. There is a reason Minne and Paul are shaking hands at Target Field. With that said I know many in the St Paul area which don't go to Minneapolis often.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: September 27th, 2019, 1:21 pm
by Didier
I wish more people treated it as one city that just happens to have two downtowns.
Maybe it's because I've lived near the border since 2009, but this is always how I've experienced it. There are things in both, and they're really not all that different. I think a lot of it just comes to where you live.

Like, if you live in Uptown, you probably don't spend a lot of time in St. Paul, but you're probably also not getting dinner at Holy Land or Jax Cafe in Northeast all that often, either. And for a lot of South Minneapolis, the nearest commercial district of note is in Highland Park. So I don't really buy that a lot of people refuse to cross the river due to some sort of rivalry; it's just that people often don't have a super compelling reason to go to random neighborhoods that aren't very close to them.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: February 22nd, 2020, 1:02 pm
by alexschief
I was curious about how new Minneapolis office developments are building parking, so I looked up the submissions for (1) the City of Minneapolis Consolidated Office Building, (2) the Gateway Tower, and (3) North Loop Green. I also compiled the three submissions for the block and a half (4) Thrivent HQ development, including the preliminary proposal that is going before the CoW next week.

Between them, I counted:
+ 1,506,599 office sq. ft.
+ 63,664 commercial sq. ft.
+ 692 housing units
+ 318 hotel rooms
+ 1,955 car parking spaces

All of these projects are being built on either surface or structured parking, so I counted or estimated how many existing spaces would be lost. I counted roughly a loss of 2,056 car parking spaces, which means these four developments are better than parking neutral. Add to this the Dayton's Project renovation, which will restore office space without adding new parking (I didn't look closely for any submissions for this).

Image

While I wish that several of these projects were even more ambitious, especially the Thrivent HQ development, the overall picture is really promising. Cities have widely different parking requirements for office, but a pretty standard measure is 3-4 spaces per 1,000 square feet. If you completely ignore all of the other uses, the parking ratio for these downtown developments is about 30-40% of what other places would require. When you add in those other uses, it's even more impressive.

Job density drives transit ridership even more than housing density, and a lack of free or easy parking drives transit ridership more than anything else. Adding over 1.5 million square feet of office space while reducing the amount of parking in the downtown core is a pretty big success all around, especially as the LRT system extends into the commuter suburbs.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: June 2nd, 2020, 12:11 pm
by CalMcKenney
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/stitch- ... force.html

Some potentially good news. Stitch Fix is planning to lay off 1400 employees to hire 2000 new ones in cheaper cities such as Dallas, Austin, & Minneapolis according to the article.

The optimist in me has been hoping that all the bad press Minneapolis has received as of late, justifiably, may have also brought some national attention to the fact Minneapolis has been a success story compared to the rest of the Midwest by many measures of success. If we can prove that our liberal ideology will change from measures that look great on paper and make us feel good, but don't really do much, to ones that practically and meaningfully increase equality I feel like this could be a positive for the city over the long run. Putting ourselves on the map as a lively, artistic, educated, dense, and hopefully increasingly equal city for national companies to relocate young workers too as San Francisco & New York become prohibitively expensive.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 4th, 2020, 8:30 pm
by eastharrietguy
Does anyone else think the days of office construction are over for awhile? Everything I've read about office workers is that many employees will continue to work from home. Less costly to the employer and the employee saves time and money by working from home. Its not for everyone, I personally prefer to go into my office, but this will be a change for a certain percentage of workers and I believe will stymie new office construction for a long time, unless it's build-to-suit and even then will likely be smaller than whatever previous space the company occupied.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 13th, 2020, 10:42 pm
by TroyGBiv
I think you’re right. I’ve spoken with a lot of company CSuite people I’ve worked with and they are all saying that even in the fall when they start to go back to the office many will work from home indefinitely. They also say that they may release some office space, so I suspect that the vacancy rate will rise for the near term.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 14th, 2020, 4:59 am
by tedlanda2571
We got the official word yesterday: my (mid-size) employer envisions no more than 60% return to office at any given time - permanently. Seems likely there will be a hybrid model of some sort to get us there.

Now, I'm sure they'll need some 'decompression' to accomplish that so it's hard to say exactly how the space requirement will change, but definitely lots less people.

If this is the norm, it would obviously be devastating for downtown Minneapolis. Sigh, I have to admit I've gotten very bearish on the attractiveness of city living in the medium term time frame (say the next 10 years or so).

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 14th, 2020, 7:27 am
by uptownbro
At my office many already worked from home 20% of the time if not more. No word on when we head back in but I know this has shown me that I cant wfh full time. Also it may be less people but the same amount of office space need to accomplish proper distancing.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 14th, 2020, 8:24 am
by SurlyLHT
I forsee businesses trying to save money with permanent hybrid models. Although, part of me feels like workplaces owe their employees an office and shouldn't be forced to use their homes as offices and basically help higher ups save money. Now if you compensated for using space in my home as an office I might be more for it.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 14th, 2020, 9:19 am
by tedlanda2571
I forsee businesses trying to save money with permanent hybrid models. Although, part of me feels like workplaces owe their employees an office and shouldn't be forced to use their homes as offices and basically help higher ups save money. Now if you compensated for using space in my home as an office I might be more for it.
I've had the exact same thought. About a month into WFH I looked around and realized that my 'home' had effectively gotten about 10% smaller due to the need for an office. Meanwhile, my mortgage payment remained exactly the same. This could work out a lot like the 'gig' economy: a big handout to business at the expense of employees. Granted, I'm saving on commuting costs and time, but my costs and time spent commuting were negligible due to my lifestyle choices. Looks like that element of those lifestyle choices may have been for naught.

It seems obvious to me that this also justifies trends towards larger, more remote homes (do families now 'need' 2 rooms to dedicate as offices?). This is just a really crappy direction in which we are heading.

Re: Downtown Minneapolis Office Market

Posted: July 14th, 2020, 9:28 am
by uptownbro
The trend was already pointing towards more work from home but the biggest issue for me is the lack of a work life balance. If I stay late in the office that’s my choice but when it’s at home especially during the worst days of the stay at home orders I found myself working on a Saturday or Sunday night at times just for something to do. If you don’t have a dedicated home office (mine is my kitchen table) it really hurts the work life balance.