The malling of downtown Minneapolis

by Paul Morel

“The politicians are even worse than the corporations” my uncle tells me over the phone. My uncle is a physicist, a researcher in the field of fusion power. Fusion has held out the promise of clean, reliable energy for more than four decades now, but as a technology it lies right on the frontier of human knowledge. The problem is, no one wants to put money into the research because the results would come too far down the road. “Corporate investors want to see results within ten years, but the politicians need four to eight. If it takes more than eight years, well, they’re not interested.”

One of the quirky things about participatory democracies like ours is that we take it as the mark of a good politician that they’re always doing something. Politicians who like to plan beyond their first term in office are guilty of wishful thinking. All elected governments are contingencies; all politicians who don’t look like they’re accomplishing something are on their way out the door. The extreme accountability of our system has obvious and well-known advantages, of course—low rates of corruption, less influence from powerful groups like the military. But it also promotes a hastier sort of government when that isn’t always in our best interests.

Case in point: the redevelopment of downtown areas, which have been in decline across the United States since the end of World War II. Most everyone agrees that downtowns are valuable, places where (in the broadest sense) things happen. You go downtown to work, to shop, to see sporting events, concerts, and artistic displays. Downtowns serve as the focus of civic life. There’s nothing that says they have to exist, but they’re a nice feature of any city: if you don’t know what to do with yourself, go downtown and you’ll find something.

The conception of downtown as the focus of urban life is largely the result of Renaissance- and Enlightenment-era urban development in London and Paris. The great fire of London of 1666 left the oldest parts of the city gutted, clearing away centuries of tangled streets and piecemeal development. A number of architects—most notably Christopher Wren—offered novel and highly rational plans for reconstructing London in ways that would promote commerce and make living in the city more comfortable. (This at a time when building height bore no relation to street width, and sunlight rarely made it to ground level.) Later, in the 18th century, attempts by the French monarchy to reassert their preeminence resulted in lavish building projects that transformed Paris into the picturesque city we know today: a place where the grand promenades and parkways became the set for the dramas of courtly rituals. It was the place to see and be seen.

Of course, downtowns existed before and after for the simple reason that they were convenient. Businesses need to be where people can get to them, so it’s only natural that they should be located where people live. The density of downtown has always been its greatest asset: forced into close proximity with so many other people, life just seems to happen more quickly. That’s the emotional attraction of downtowns. However, since the rise of the automobile cheap, reliable transportation has diluted the rich brew of the urban environment. People don’t need to live close to businesses and services when cars and freeways can get them across town in half an hour. As a result, what once was built up at great cost now sprawls out more cheaply.

Still, the emotional appeal of downtown—as a place where things happen, where life has more passion and drama—lingers in the subconscious of all Americans, whether or not they’re willing to pay the costs of actually living there. Hence, when many downtowns went to seed in the ’60s and ’70s, a popular outcry arose for elected officials to do something about it. But what to do? City governments either couldn’t or didn’t think of ways to make moving to lower-density environs a more costly proposition, (although, in one of the more enlightened urban planning decisions of the modern era, Portland, Ore. is doing just that.) Rather, most urban planners and politicians seized on a “giant attractor” theory of urban renewal. Build a huge new development, and businesses will follow.

The theory went something like this: Rents were high in part because of a lack of capacity. There was plentiful new office space in the ‘burbs, so companies that moved there didn’t have to pay as much. Furthermore, with development increasing at the periphery of downtown areas, less and less new building was occurring in the oldest and densest parts. Existing properties were showing their age at the same time as less funding was available for rebuilding and beautification. Thus, the trick to reviving downtown was to build a massive and high -profile project that would both lower rents by expanding capacity, and also make the area glamorous again.

Examples of this kind of project exist in just about every city in America. In Detroit, where I’m from originally, it took the form of the Renaissance Center. Housed in a cluster of striking glass cylinders right by the Detroit River, the Ren Cen was both iconic and luxurious. It stood out in a city fraught with decaying urban spaces since the great white flight of the late ‘60s. Unfortunately, the Ren Cen was a bit too great of an attractor: With all of the backing it received from the city government, businesses realized that the Ren Cen had indeed defined the new center for development in Detroit. They flocked to it from all corners of the city, thereby displacing whatever core businesses were left in an already decaying downtown. The giant attractor had become the black hole.

Without a doubt the grandest example of a giant attractor project was the World Trade Center in New York: it was conceived by David Rockefeller and city planner Robert Moses as a way of reviving the real estate market of lower Manhattan, the old hub of business in the city, after many corporations had moved to the more fashionable midtown area. The World Trade Center actually started off as a much smaller complex (a mere fraction of the 10 million square feet it would eventually encompass), but faced a great deal of opposition because of all the land the city intended to annex for the project. In a crass bit of politicking, Moses realized that the only way he would win popular support for the project was by proposing to make it the largest office complex in the world, and, ironically, annexing much more property. Needless to say, people bought it.

Minneapolis has its giant attractors, too. The City Center, on 7th Street, is the sort of sweeping retail/commercial indoor mall concept that was prominent in the mid ’80s. Unlike most such projects, it has the odd distinction of being practically invisible, its blah mini tower facade blending in with its surroundings. The Target Center is another one, an urban arena that also supplies oodles of convenient parking for commuters. The recently completed Block E complex is the missing link between those two: yet another indoor mall, this time with a strong entertainment element, the city has high hopes that it will keep people spending their entertainment dollars downtown. All of these projects were undertaken at great cost to the city, and each represents a conscious effort on the part of city planners to promote and direct the development of downtown.

The giant attractor approach to urban renewal has a number of properties that politicians like. Such buildings are a lot of work, but they can be completed in a few years of planning and a few more of construction. They’re high profile, and when the thing is built, politicians have something they can point at (literally). This is the best part of all: Urban renewal is an abstract concept—who’s to say if the city’s getting better or worse?—but the giant attractor project can stand as a mammoth and real-as-life emblem of that ephemeral civic ideal. That certainly was the case in Detroit, where the image of the Ren Cen graced the logos of nightly newscasts, Grand Prix posters, and anything else that could be used to brand civic pride. That Detroit’s fortunes were still stagnating through much of the ’80s made no difference: the Ren Cen was a shimmering reminder of how things were bound to get better.

The Mall of Minneapolis

I’m betting I’m not the only one who was surprised to hear, a few years back, just what the city had in mind for the Block E development. The City Center, her conceptual cousin, had been in a state of decline for a while already. In general, the idea of building another downtown mall seemed wildly anachronistic. I thought it was clearly an idea without much currency. After all, why would anyone choose to shop in a mall downtown when there are more convenient options out in the ‘burbs, (and more parking to boot)? An enclosed downtown mall doesn’t exploit the inherent value of the locale, which is to say it doesn’t make you feel like you’re shopping downtown. Within its confines you could be anywhere on earth. In our current era of “experience” based retailing, it makes no use of the sights and sounds of the city, exploits no emotional connection to the place. And anyways, it had been tried before, and it had failed.

Indeed, as a number of people have complained, Block E is rather shockingly generic. When finding tenants for the development, the city repeatedly selected large national chains when local businesses were an option. Block E needed a coffee shop—why not put in a Dunn Bros.? Maybe a Caribou? Who knows, but the city went with Starbucks. The only major restaurant in the complex will be an Applebee’s, without a doubt the bottom of the barrel for chain dining. The Borders is only one of half a dozen in the metro area. Ditto for the movie theater.

What’s more, in building Block E, the city displaced many stalwart local businesses. . The city had already vanquished so much local color—wasn’t its choice of tenants an obvious and regrettable mistake? Maybe so, but it also made me wonder if something else wasn’t going on. One thing that’s certainly true of the chosen tenants is that their parent companies have deep pockets. They’re all safe bets, sure to be around for years to come. So whereas a Caribou may be just as good as Starbucks and has the advantage of being a local business, the latter clearly has the edge in a competitive national market. In ten years, if you had to bet which company would be more likely to still be around, who would you chose? The question of what coffee shop should be in Block E thus is not one of local interests, but of national and international businesses concerns.

The need for rock-solid tenants is clear: Block E, like the Target and City Centers before it, was built at great expense, and predicated on the belief that its businesses would produce strong and steady sources of income for the city through increased tax revenues. Walk through the City Center today and you’ll see plenty of blank storefronts vacated by former tenants. Politicians can learn from their mistakes too, and it’s likely that those involved went into the Block E project determined to find proven businesses who were guaranteed to attract a modicum of clientele—and to keep them around for a while. (It probably also wasn’t far from their minds that, being national chains, all of those businesses would benefit from large corporate advertising budgets.)

The crux of the matter is this, then: Block E is an old-fashioned giant attractor-style urban renewal project, designed to reinvigorate downtown and its businesses. But in an effort to guarantee a return on its investment, the city wound up more or less eliminating those businesses. This would seem to be the opposite of urban renewal, since it pretty much involves displacing the urban environment. In fact, allow me to suggest a new term for what Minneapolis has undertaken in the past two decades: “urban replacement.”

Imagine yourself standing at the heart of the beast on the corner of 7th Street and First Avenue. Look around and try to figure out what’s actually local, what can truly be called part of downtown. If you’re hungry, you’ve got a few options: There’s the Hard Rock on the corner, and O’Dononvan’s opposite. Down the street are Copeland’s and TGI Friday’s. (Applebee’s and Red Lobster will soon be just around the corner.) You could walk to the Rock Bottom Brewery, too. All are national chains; all were built within the last ten years. For entertainment there’s the Target Center and the Quest (both managed by a national entertainment promoter), Crown Theater Cinema, and Gameworks, also national.

First Avenue, the club, is one of the very few old time locals remaining—“old timers” in this case meaning “pre-1990.” But herein lies the problem for whatever local businesses do manage to hang on in today’s mall-ified downtown: with neither a rich parent company to support it, nor the backing of the city to underwrite its lease (like the Target Center), First Avenue is the rare business that has to actually compete. It’s not a flagship store for anybody but music fans, and that’s put the squeeze on one of the few places that is emphatically local, authentic, famous, urban, civic, historical and—dare I say—original.

If all that isn’t enough to convince you that developers are trying to turn Minneapolis into one big outdoor mall, look at the way car travel figures into the equation. The entire western edge of downtown is encrusted in a vast series of parking ramps arrayed around the Target Center. These ramps are used during the day by commuters who work downtown, and at nights and on weekends by suburbanites coming in for entertainment. Just like the vast lots that service the Mall of America, these have vast feeder roads that connect directly to 394 and the west suburbs. The message to anyone “reading” this layout is clear: You’re not supposed to live downtown—you’re just supposed to work and play here. It’s easy to get downtown and it’s just as easy to leave a few hours later. As long as there’s an opportunity to snag a few tax dollars while you’re here, everyone’s happy.

Is this what we want from our downtown?

The Perils of the Generic

The management of the Target Center is a great example of the kind of trouble that a lack of economic biodiversity can create. A few years ago, the City gave all of the booking and management chores for the arena over to Clearchannel Entertainment, a national media conglomerate that owns radio stations, billboard advertising, and concert promotion businesses. The evils of soul-crushing corporate music-mongering notwithstanding, it seemed like a great idea. Clearchannel would have an obvious stake in keeping the Target Center full, and would have access to a vast roster of touring acts to do so. If anyone else wanted to have a tour come to the Twin Cities, they had to come to Clearchannel to make it happen. It’s good to be king.

But then something happened that the city hadn’t anticipated: St. Paul went and build Xcel Energy Center and gave its booking over to Jam Productions, another national promoter. Suddenly, the business that was going great guns when Target Center was the only arena venue in town had fallen by half as tour after tour opted for the newer, more concert-friendly St. Paul venue. Clearchannel still has its own bands to route through the Center; but Jam, as a competitor, has no incentive to throw Minneapolis any extra business. And the Target Center is hurting in a big way because of it.

There are two lessons to be learned here. One is that putting all your eggs in one basket is never a sound business strategy in the long run. The other is that any venture without integrity is vulnerable to copy cats. The city clearly invested a great deal in the idea that Target Center would be a hub of sports and entertainment for the whole region, pulling countless fans downtown. But unlike standup operations like First Avenue or the Walker Arts Center, the Target Center is just a box filled with seats. Any city with enough money can build an arena. The spike in revenues that comes from being the only player in town is guaranteed to be short-lived as other folks catch on to your good thing.

Admittedly, the arena example is a special case, but the same is true of all the other off-the-shelf entertainment available downtown these days. In fact, downtown Minneapolis runs the risk of putting itself in open competition with the Mall of America—another titan of civic protectionism. If you take it for granted that The Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood are more-or-less interchangeable, there’s hardly a store or restaurant in and around Block E that isn’t duplicated at the Mall of America.

A Few Suggestions

Fear not, for all hope is not lost. I don’t claim to be anything more than a concerned citizen, but it seems to me that a great deal of the problem with the way downtown is currently being developed is that, as a model it is predicated on two ideas: first, that the people who use downtown don’t actually live there; second, that they will use their cars to come and go. There is a direct connection between the lack of an urban populous and the popularity of chain stores. Why? Well, the answer has to do with what marketing folks call “mindshare” and the ability of businesses to compete.

If a large number of people were to live downtown, or at least experienced it on foot rather than through a car window, they would know their neighborhood personally. This is nothing more than an observation drawn from my personal experiences, but I think that if more people got around downtown by walking, there would be more opportunities for unknown local businesses to flourish. Pedestrian friendly areas like St. Paul’s Grand Avenue and Minneapolis’ Uptown area are both hives of local entrepreneurship.

As it stands, however, most commuters race through downtown like salmon pining for open water. As a result of their isolated and insulated commute, the only businesses that they will know and recognize are familiar ones—those whose advertising budgets penetrate deep into the heart of Minnetonka. Imagine a woman in a car waiting at a traffic light. She sees two restaurants on the corner, one of which she’s never hear of before, the other a major chain whose food, atmosphere, prices, etc. she knows very well from other outlets and from advertising. The latter is the one she will go to if she’s hungry and has a free moment in her busy commute. That’s because the chain restaurant has more mindshare: she knows the business before she ever sets foot in the door, and she has commercials on the nightly news reminding her of its existence.

It’s a sad state of affairs with downtown these days. I get depressed—have a real physical reaction—to the low-rent Vegas-style glitz of the Block E development. What worries me most of all about the way mall culture has been seeping into downtown is the fact that many shopping malls have been losing obligatory businesses like Banana Republic and J Crew. After all, the cat’s been out of the bag for a good decade now: malls are generic, boring and, well, altogether déclassé. Those monuments to capitalism that sprang up from the fertile soil of suburbia in the Reagan years have lost their luster. Suffering from overcapacity and a clientele increasingly wary of the cheap and vapid teen culture that they harbor, many of those malls have begun to look downright seedy. But don’t think that corporate America hasn’t been paying attention. Retailers’ stakes in shopping malls begin and end with the bottom line, and if they’re no longer attracting the right customers, companies won’t stay there for long.

But you can bet they’re going to set up shop somewhere.