800 Washington Av S (Guthrie ramp liner) - AECOM / City of Lakes Community Land Trust

[Silophant]

Apparently they'll be appearing at the February 11th meeting instead. Here's the packet.
300 units in 15 floors (top floor is amenities), 100 parking spaces in two underground levels accessed via the existing Guthrie ramp.

[John21]

Not a fan of the new look but glad it’s back up to 15 floors. Really miss that original design…

[gopherfan]

It's going to be sad when the great views from the Guthrie's amber box on the 9th floor get blocked looking south by this thing - definitely not going to win any awards for aesthetics, but I guess it's good for progress. Still going to be a bummer though.

[Tyler]

Of course it ends up looking like this.

But beyond aesthetics, 300 units! 100 parking spaces!

I mean talk about a contrarian project, at least for this area. Love that about it, hope its an unqualified success.

[MNdible]

Interesting that they're including 350 sf condos. That size makes sense for apartments, but I find it hard to believe that a lot of people will be interested in spending a couple of hundred thousand for a little studio unit.

[Tyler]

I would guess those all will be affordable units. (I don't know the details of affordable condo units, but I assume they are sold below market rate and aren't simply really small?)

[twincitizen]

Making units super small is probably the only way to make them affordable, since basically every affordability metric out there counts by unit (i.e. studio vs. 1br vs. 2br) and not by square feet, whereas the costs of building a building are more correllated to total square footage than unit count.

I dunno. If I'm buying an expensive market-rate condo in that building, I'd likely want the micro units to be prohibited from becoming rentals, or to have a pretty strict cap on the percentage of the units that can be rentals (this is fairly common in condo bylaws, correct?) The whole point is for affordable ownership, so it would be counter to that goal to allow them to simply turn into rentals.

How do you keep it from turning into another 2930 Blaisdell, which (at least when I was in the building almost a decade ago) is basically a slum that happens to be a condo building. What even is the point of a condo building that, over time, basically turns into an apartment building with dozens (or hundreds) of separate, absentee owners?

How many of these are land trust units (that ought to remain affordable over multiple owners) vs. those that are simply small enough that the market-rate sale price meets some affordability metric (e.g. under 120% AMI or whatever), but there would be no limitations on future sale prices? Not that tiny condo units are likely to appreciate too much in value (see Centre Village or basically any older building with lots of small 1br units).

[BigIdeasGuy]

Those 2 story walk up townhomes along Washington feel like a bad idea with how busy Washington is. Loud, bright, little privacy really just poorly thought out all around. Going with additional retail facing Washington would feel like the much smarter plan I hope the city pushes the developers to rethink that idea.

[Didier]

Is there a reason buildings here don't do the thing where the first floor is raised like a half floor above the sidewalk level? That also creates the possibility for basement units, which in theory would be more affordable. There are so many first-floor units in Minneapolis where you could basically never open your windows.

[BigIdeasGuy]

I've often wondered that as well, those seem like an infinitely better idea than street level entry, especially along Washington. I really hope we see a big jump in the number of townhomes constructed, I think they are a great product that can and do serve a lot of different populations that are need of housing. The biggest challenge I see in that is many locations where townhomes make sense apartments make just as much if not more.

[Mdcastle]

I'm guessing building the initial floor a half story up would preclude either walkout patios or balconies on the first floor, and would create issues of handicap access to the initial first floor before you get to the elevator for the rest of the building.

At some point isn't a developer likely to just drop a project if a city forces them to devote more than a token amount of space to ground floor retail (that there's apparently little demand for even before the pandemic started and before fast casual restaurants and coffee chains started preferring freestanding suburban sites?)

[VacantLuxuries]

before fast casual restaurants and coffee chains started preferring freestanding suburban sites

Citation needed

[Mdcastle]

Panera's new prototype for all new stores includes a double drive-thru, which essentially precludes strip mall, mixed use, or Lifestyle center locations. The Roseville Center (discusses elsewhere on the forum) and Apple Valley store have both relocated from retail strips to freestanding pad sites so they can have a drive-thru
https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.co ... s-redesign


Starbucks closing 600 stores, mostly in urban or mall locations, and opening a similar number of new stores in suburban sites.

it may be harder to find a Starbucks in a city center. The company is aggressively expanding in suburban areas, where locations can support drive-thru windows and attract ex-commuters who are working from home for the foreseeable future

https://www.eatthis.com/starbucks-closi ... locations/
https://www.eatthis.com/news-after-clos ... ing-again/

Chipotle's new freestanding "digital kitchen design" for take-out and pickup only
https://newsroom.chipotle.com/2021-12-1 ... AL-KITCHEN

They expect 70% of new stores to have a "Chipotlane" pickup window. As discussed elsewhere, so they can have their pickup window they want to open in a pad site on the Cub Foods parking lot in Heart of the City rather than lease space in one of the nearby mixed use buildings.
https://www.qsrmagazine.com/fast-casual ... chipotlane

[TroyGBiv]

*snap*

[Hero]

Does the city have a program for affordable retail space? Maybe instead of affordable rental units the first floor could be affordable commercial spaces? Small spaces could house small take out restaurants, barbers, tailors, cobblers, art studio or any other small business someone can think of. This could give an entrepreneur a start and a bunch of little shops would help activate the street.

[uptownbro]

I know the city has been promoting pop up retail along Nicollet mall but im not sure if the city is actually put up money for these. I think it would be worth it from the city. Retail space was already struggling before all that 2020 brought it. If not I think you will see more push back on the amount of required retail space sadly.
Overall im glad this is still in the works and will provide affordable home ownership for people!

[Silophant]

FWIW, there's been a couple precedents in the North Loop for street-facing townhome units getting turned into little boutiques. I'm not sure if the condo structure of this building vs apartments makes that more or less likely here, but it's possible.

[Mdcastle]

The city is clearly creating a market failure by forcing developers to include ground floor retail. If there was actually a demand for it at a price that would make a developer enough money to make it worthwhile, they'd be including it without pushing from the city. But now there's not a price that will both make developers money AND that small businesses can afford, so a lot of them tend to sit vacant.

If the city is going to insist on developers including these, "affordable commercial spaces" sounds like a good idea to me. Yes, you can levy some sort of tax penalty on vacant spaces, but that's just going to in the long run discourage overall projects, including the housing components, from being built. Same reason we set a cap on the number of affordable units required, there's a limited amount of things that the city can do that will cause the developer to lose money before they just say "forget it".

[MNdible]

I feel like there's a solution where these spaces start out as townhome units, but that the city mandates that they are designed to be convertible to commercial spaces in the future. The biggest design consideration here will be to make sure that they are ADA accessible from the adjacent sidewalk grades.

[thespeedmccool]

The city is clearly creating a market failure by forcing developers to include ground floor retail.

One man's failure is another man's correction. One could rightly make the argument that the "failure" today is that the market is not providing the optimal volume of afforfable commercial space. Just like focusing on supply-side with housing, focusing on requiring supply of commercial space will inevitably bring down the price of commercial space.

That said, I agree with the notion that the city could somehow incenticize units to be affordable. I don't think there's an avenue for them to require developers include a certain number of affordable retail spaces since most projects only put in one or two stalls anyway. For obvious reasons, we should be less concerned about the underavailability of cheap retail space vs. housing, so whatever we do, we should be confident that our commercial objectives are not undermining our housing objectives. I don't think there's any evidence of that (e.g., a housing project being cancelled rather than include required retail space) but there probably would be if we required either more space or affordable space.