urbanMSP

The irritating thing about Olson's article is that he talks about the direcion and trajectory of Saint Paul. His article might have been true - 5-7 years ago. It's true that downtown Saint paul will likely never be a commercial and office center that rivals Minneapolis, but with the growth in Lowertown, the Central Corridor, etc.. The outlook for downtown St. Paul is certainly postive relative to the trajectory it was on several years ago. Once it became clear the condo boom was over, I would have predicted that downtown Saint Paul would be even deader with even bleaker prospects in 2013 than it had in 2008. That is certainly not the case.

Agreed. My point was (and I think Nick's point was) St. Paul should not compete with Minneapolis to be Minneapolis, the center of our regional economy. It fails when it does this. It succeeds when it differentiates itself. It is a great residential/cultural center with a sense of purpose and history, and I think it could do a lot to push small storefronts/offices instead of trying to land mid to large HQs. CoCo and some other spaces in Lowertown are thriving, and St. Paul could position itself to have low entry costs for startups. I don't think this would require much investment, but instead just a return to a framework that supports natural placemaking and incremental investment.

St. Paul is threatened by fragility in a way Minneapolis is not, since there's a larger base of big business in the CBD. Right now, St. Paul is fragile if Ecolab or Travelers packed up, etc. St. Paul needs to become antifragile.

They should just focus on becoming a stronger secondary commercial center. To me it's like Minneapolis vs. Chicago (or even Chicago vs. NYC on a even larger scale) in a way, the latter is going to be always be leading over the former city overall but that does not mean that the smaller city isn't any less desirable if it isn't number one in everything and it can still keep improving while maintaining it's original character. Being second is still better than being nothing.

I think it could do a lot to push small storefronts/offices instead of trying to land mid to large HQs. CoCo and some other spaces in Lowertown are thriving, and St. Paul could position itself to have low entry costs for startups.

The best use for the Macy's site I've seen so far is to tear it down and build more condos/apartments-- but this comment is more what I was thinking.

In something analogous to the Midtown Global Market, what if you made a floor of this a retail incubator space (Hey, get off of etsy and get a cheap and simple storefront with us!) another floor some food incubator space (St. Paul does food trucks better than MPLS does in my opinion, bring them in over the winter)? Let real estate build in as a bigger market emerges.

These are good ideas! Better than the poll the Strib offered, which I think was something like:

-turn it into office space
-lure Target to this space
-lure another dept. store to this space
-we have no good ideas, let's not kid ourselves!