Donjek :: The Cents of Place Blog

Donjek Project: Historic Hudson Manufacturing Building Reuse

I'm currently in the process of concluding work with a historic reuse team focused on next steps for the H.D. Hudson Manufacturing Building in Hastings, Minnesota. The City-owned Hudson Building is of substantial size, and offers open floor plans and high ceilings - a blank, solid canvas. The Hudson was featured as a "hot property" recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

From a finance perspective, the chief hurdle for historic reuse is reconciling long-term lease rates or purchase prices, with a rehabilitation investment that may include remediation, demolition, site costs, and a collection of items that can petrify typical investors: HVAC, roofs, stormwater management, vertical circulation, accessibility improvements. My role on the team, led by Will Stark of Stark Preservation Planning, has been to:

• Evaluate and quantify the long-term financial gap between the value of the building's net income and its required investment
• Identify funding sources and mechanisms that private and public parties could employ to make reuse of the building feasible in a financial sense
• Inform scenarios for the City's next steps with the building, with financial analysis. Cost, speed, and scale of reuse each impact the financial outlook for its future
• Narrate findings related to the downtown marketplace and project finance, to citizens, the City Council, and other stakeholders.

Historic structures offer uncommon attributes for the very reason that their construction occurred in a different marketplace. In the late 1800s when the Hudson Company put up the Hastings facility, materials including stone and lumber were available at lower real cost than today. The proximity of the building to the Mississippi River distinguishes the building regionally, in part because regulations have evolved to protect the river from development impacts. The reuse or demolition of the structure will, either way, continue to influence the health of downtown Hastings.

Related Articles:

• Victory in the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Competition!
• Layers of Stone, Layers of Finance at Historic Fort Snelling
• St. Paul's Rice Park: Part Catalyst, Part Message

Hudson Building image courtesy of Stark Preservation Planning and Peter Musty

The Medium is the Message, or Parks as Performance

Last night I enjoyed seeing good friend, a professional musician, perform with two bandmates. As at times in the past, I was struck by the generative power of a talented, experienced performance artist. At one moment, there are three people on a stage, poised to play. The next moment, they create something that establishes a connection not only among the producers, but among the audience, and between the two groups.

Given that a primary filter of mine is that of placemaking, I wondered what this shared musical experience means for our work in urban design and redevelopment. Current Donjek projects include an initiative on urban open space, focused on building links between residents and workers to a major riverway and to the green space itself. An (implicit) goal is connecting people to each other using open space as the medium, to create a distinct experience. Another current engagement relates to exploring reuse of a historic industrial building; a substantial element of the community’s preservation interest is to use the structure to connect people today to yesterday’s residents and the heritage of the place. In each case, physical design acts as a language that allows us to relate to others.

Music and other performances can trigger a powerful connection among us. Our places can become more vital and durable if we build and preserve them with connection in mind. 

@Strib Forum: New Recommendations for Fort Snelling Reuse

As I mentioned previously, I have participated as one of seventeen writers in a new project created by the Star Tribune. The forum, Your Voices, features commentary by artists, advocates, entrepreneurs. Today, I posted a story describing prospects for reuse of historic structures at Minnesota's 160-acre Fort Snelling complex. A Joint Agency Task Force has been meeting since last year to develop concrete recommendations for how to complement and connect activities at the Historic Fort and the substantial recreational assets widely used there, including athletic fields and the State Park. A long story made short: State policy must be changed to allow private parties with reuse ideas and capital to engage in the reuse of dozens of underutilized buildings on the site. Failure to establish such a process will likely lead to the structural demise of buildings located at a strategic hub of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.

Stay tuned for discussion of task force recommendations.

Donjek Project: Renovation of Little Rock's MacArthur Park

Readers will find continuity in another brief comment on parks:  The Cents of Place blog has touched on the economic value of parks and the multiple layers of significance in a space like Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

Donjek has been retained to assist in the implementation analysis for MacArthur Park in Little Rock, Arkansas.  In our office, implementation means raising the capital and operating funds required to renovate and operate quality open space into the future.  Partners, which have moved the project for the last twelve months, include lead consultants Conway + Schulte, as well as Oslund and Associates, each of Minneapolis, and the University of Arkansas Design Center and McClelland Engineers of Little Rock and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

MacArthur Park represents an urban open space with significant historic elements and a physical location close to commercial and academic assets, but challenged by the close proximity of two interstate highways in Little Rock.  Over the coming weeks, we will be examining public and private funding mechanisms and their application to MacArthur Park and the realization of community objectives for the space.  

Graphic:  Courtesy of Conway + Schulte

Revelations in Milwaukee: Historic Reuse, Natural-Lit Parking and Free Parking

I’ve returned from a recent junket to fair Milwaukee. I hadn’t been to Milwaukee in fifteen years, and parts of the city have changed dramatically since then. Two examples and a policy observation:

• I noticed on my tour of the lakeshore, the vital reuse of the Milwaukee River Flushing Station (pictured). Alterra Coffee (in combination with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and Milwaukee County) rehabilitated the station, which was built in 1888 to flush sewage harbored in the river into Lake Michigan. Does this strike you as an ironic piece of infrastructure to reuse as a coffee shop?

In fact, it works conspicuously well. The building remains owned by the sewerage district (“MMSD”), and the county owns all land from the periphery of the building to the edge of the site. The physical structure is aligned with its new mission: Pervious pavement and water filtration systems are narrated on displays constructed by the county’s parks department. The building’s lakeshore location is not surprisingly home to a brisk business moving excellent food and coffee; Alterra also sponsors a music series with wares ranging from opera to Latin American.

Special thanks to Bill Robison, Principal at Engberg Anderson, an architecture firm with offices in Milwaukee, Madison and Tucson. As the lead architect on this reuse project, Bill partnered with Alterra, MMSD and the county, and generously responded to my recent cold inquiry about its development.

• Milwaukee Art Museum’s renovation and expansion includes dramatic architecture and serves the need for a much-enhanced connection between downtown and Lake Michigan. Of course, as principal of a public finance and transportation consulting firm, I was most drawn to the underground parking garage lit with skylights (also pictured). Facilities Director Charles Loomis explained that sensors evaluate the quality of light admitted through the skylights and adjust the use of lighting to supplement, creating significant (but to date unquantified) energy cost savings to the museum.  And to preempt your question before you read below, museum parking is not free.

• A recent post at Urban Milwaukee cited SBT and Colliers data showing the median metered hourly parking rate in downtown Milwaukee is $0.63, versus a national average of $1.48. Author Jeramey Jannene suggests an oversupply of metered parking downtown has suppressed redevelopment efforts: The zoning code requires structured parking in site plans, which represents a mandate to lose money in an environment with an oversupply of cheap on-street parking.

In St. Paul, a very different discussion is taking place regarding the anticipated loss of roughly 85% of on-street parking on University Avenue as light rail transit is added to the street’s modes. At the same time, the Metropolitan Council has indicated their wish to discourage the building of structured parking just off the avenue in order to avoid the avenue’s use as a park-and-ride. Arguably, the main impact of this move is to drive up land values and favor those who control larger parcels near University. It also highlights the importance of the type of transportation consulting that Donjek’s Dan Walsh can provide, including analysis and negotiation for structured parking, shared parking, and travel demand management (TDM).

The travel log would remain incomplete without noting our visit to Sprecher Brewery, where I sampled their very fine Shakparo beer, fermented according to an African protocol using bananas.  The beer tent in Milwaukee continues to get bigger and bigger!

Photo of Milwaukee River Flushing Station: Retinal Fetish, Flickr. Parking garage photo: J. Commers

St. Paul's Rice Park: Part Catalyst, Part Message

St. Paul boosters have long sought to present the Rice Park area as a symbol of life here, to audiences near and far. A brief historical retelling reveals how the park and the urban activity that envelops it have always been inseparable, and why.

Rice Park as Catalyst

Nearly ten years before Minnesota gained statehood in 1858, Rice Park was donated to the City of St. Paul as a public square by Henry Rice and John Irvine. The park’s first years were modest in many respects – accounts recall its use for cows’ grazing and as a place to hang linen to dry. With James J. Hill’s Great Northern railroad monopoly in place, lumber and grain enterprise thriving and the city booming by the 1880s, developers erected a panoply of prominent buildings throughout downtown including the Ryan Hotel (1885-1962) and the Pioneer Building (1889-). Rice Park increasingly became a center of the city’s economic and civic life.

The Panic of 1893, as I mentioned in a previous post, represented the most severe economic depression in the nation’s history to date, effectively halting construction downtown. Following recovery, development came to resume in downtown St. Paul – with the Rice Park area in particular focus.

Between 1910 and 1920, three signature structures appeared around the park: The St. Paul Hotel, the Minnesota Club, and the St. Paul Public Library / James J. Hill Reference Library. These joined the Federal Courts Building (now the Landmark Center, pictured), finished in 1901. A report commissioned for historic designation in 2001 noted that

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, business leaders worked toward enhancing St. Paul’s attractiveness for business…Business leaders, including James J. Hill, were active in focusing downtown development on the Rice Park area and ensuring that architecturally designed buildings enhanced the vision they promoted. (St. Paul Heritage Preservation Commission, "Rice Park Historic District Study,” 3).

So committed were business boosters to creating noteworthy space around the park, the Business League – forerunner to the chamber of commerce – raised $125,000 to purchase the site for the St. Paul Hotel, a sum equivalent to over $2.7 million in today’s dollars.

Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Rice Park and its surroundings endured a period of neglect, during which both the park and the buildings were threatened and saved. In the 1970s and 1980s, activists saved the Federal Courts Building from demolition, and a major renovation of the hotel moved the main entrance to face the park rather than the core of downtown. Again, capital from the private market and public sector followed a path to the park’s perimeter. The construction of the Ordway Center and a recent renovation of the St. Paul Public Library have reestablished the Rice Park area in the mold envisioned by Hill and others in the early twentieth century.

Rice Park as a Message

Braided into the narrative of Rice Park’s inception and development, its period of decline and restoration, is the notion of the park as a physical message to audiences beyond downtown, beyond city limits, around the country.

One hundred years ago, the grand opening of the St. Paul Hotel was attended by the governors of both Minnesota and North Dakota, the mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis, magnate James J. Hill, Archbishop John Ireland and others. Clearly, the hotel’s parkside construction was viewed as a significant statement to a broader audience.

In September, the park will transmit a message to the nation when 45,000 Republican activists and reporters come to St. Paul for the party’s national convention, to be held in the Xcel Center, located just one block from Rice Park.

Anthony Andler is the proprietor of Heimie’s Haberdashery, a men’s clothing store located in the historic Hamm Building in the Rice Park area. Said Andler this week, “when I started my business, I asked myself, ‘what do I love about this city and how can I help others experience that?’” When I heard these words, I imagined the same sentiments exchanged at Business League meetings one hundred years ago. At that time, boosters answered this question by leveraging a public space and investing heavily in the design and construction of the buildings around it.

“Windows say something: They say, ‘here we are and here’s what we do’,” Andler says about Heimie’s. Rice Park is itself a window, through which residents and visitors view how St. Paul pictures itself – characterized by lasting and traditional architecture, a meeting of public and private sectors. It also suggests that after a hundred years, the people of St. Paul continue to be inspired by the place created by this combination of open space and buildings, by the joining of past and present.

Photos:  Courtesy of Maggie Osterberg and H. Head, Flickr.

Looking Back at Yesterday's Property Tax

It's 1896.  The Presidential campaign involving William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley is heavily colored by the Panic of 1893 – the worst economic depression yet experienced in the U.S. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are championing the right of American women to vote, a campaign separated from success by twenty more years of hard organizing.  In St. Paul, “empire builder” James Hill is at the peak of his influence as a railroad monopolist.  Near the Cathedral in September, future literary master F. Scott Fitzgerald is born.

And finally (lest I neglect the dictum that only two things resist change), the St. Paul City Council in 1896 passed a measure establishing what became known as the “St. Paul method” of assessing property taxes. 

The method streamlined the process of assessing property in the city for tax purposes, by establishing values per foot of frontage on various types of streets.  In other words, with certain exceptions, the core assumption was the wider a lot on a given street, the higher the assessed value of its property.  In the modern discussion around property tax, this comes close to what is now characterized as a land tax.  In theory, builders and property owners of the time would have been encouraged by this tax system to plat narrower lots and build higher, longer structures, rather than lower, wider structures.  Over the last year, my efforts to engage a full GIS analysis of this dynamic have been stymied for lack of records indicating when the St. Paul method was forced out of use by the state, which at some point likely mandated a more uniform statewide assessment system.  View an 1896 article describing the system by clicking here.

Still, I have run some initial analysis.  Below is a graph (click on it for a larger version) showing citywide property data, and plotting the year each parcel was built versus its floor-area ratio (“FAR”).  FAR represents the total square footage of a building divided by the total land area, and serves as a measure of the density of building on the property.  The blue dots represent buildings constructed in a given year, and the red line represents the annual average FAR for the year.  Unfortunately, it’s difficult to draw conclusions around the impact of the St. Paul method without an end date, but the trend of density in the city is certainly of interest. 

1896 is, in fact, a high point, and the years that follow suggest a significant drop in the density of buildings constructed, which lasted until the end of World War I.  However, a range of issues may explain these dynamics beyond the impact of a property tax regime:

• The cost of labor and/or materials related to buildings more than one story;

• Availability of desirable land as the city became more continuously developed;

• Changes in the streetcar and auto transportation system.

Also notably, the current year’s property data have a significant inherent bias, in that many buildings of low and high density have been demolished over time, and so the available data by no means represents a full accounting of when and how construction occurred in St. Paul. But while imperfect, this exercise does suggest how powerful contemporary analysis may be in tracing success and failure in past development and policy.

Donjek Project: Layers of Stone, Layers of Financing at Historic Fort Snelling

How do you envision reuse of two large cavalry barracks at Minnesota's Fort Snelling?

Donjek, Incorporated has been retained by the Minnesota Historical Society as part of a reuse team for four buildings including the Cavalry Barracks (Buildings 17 and 18), to examine the multiple jurisdictions involved at the site and the encumbrances that federal regulations and past state bond financing may place on potential future uses. 

Background

The confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers became the home of Fort Snelling in the 1820s, starting a period of 170 years of uses ranging from infantry induction to cavalry installation and Veterans Administration clinic.

Dozens of buildings remain at Fort Snelling, spread over a site bisected by two major highways.  The historic fort is, along with the four buildings forming the focus of the reuse study, part of a smaller portion isolated from the remainder of the campus by State Highway 55.  Since 1992, shortly after the Veterans Administration closed clinic facilities in the cavalry barracks, these two buildings – together comprising over 50,000 square feet – have been vacant.

The buildings are structurally sound.  The site is located on the Mississippi River bluff and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (“MNRRA”) corridor, and its location is levered by quick access to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, and the I-494 corridor.  The recent addition of a nearby light rail station presents another significant asset.  So whither vacancy and continuing underuse?

First, the Federal

As it turns out, these buildings appear quite encumbered indeed.  Starting in 1967, discussions between the predecessor agency of the National Parks Service and the General Services Administration (the federal government’s landlord) led to an important division of the 160 acres at Fort Snelling. The GSA designated 21 acres (containing the old fort and the cavalry barracks) for historic monument purposes, but declined to do the same for the much larger area across the highway.  Instead, the larger parcel was later designated for parks and recreation purposes, a decision reflected today by the popular athletic fields.  In 1968, a legally binding “program of utilization” was adopted for the smaller parcel, requiring the land to “be forever used and maintained as and for an historic monument,” a provision that unless amended will continue to hamper reuse efforts of the cavalry barracks.

Second, the State

With reason, the state has in place guidelines regarding the sale of property constructed or improved with state bond proceeds.  Starting from limits spelled out in the Constitution (Article XI, Section 5), the Department of Finance has construed the law to prohibit any leases of space in buildings built or improved with state bond proceeds.  This rules out any potential abuse – and effectively precludes the reuse of historic bond-funded buildings that do not house a public agency.  And as resources for public purposes diminish (see the “price of government” trend compiled by the Department of Finance), which agencies will continue to use historic buildings?  Which agencies have the resources to invest capital in renovation and upkeep of historic structures?  If the Department of Finance’s interpretation of the law is leading to the unintended consequence of forcing agencies to vacate or abandon historic property, perhaps the issue merits visitation by the Legislature.

Fort Snelling is admittedly more convoluted in legal terms than many other historic sites.  Additional layers complicate the reuse of the cavalry barracks further.  Still, with their structural integrity and prominence on the river bluff, addressing the financial aspects of the twin buildings’ reuse will enhance the odds of a long-term solution to the unfortunate history of underutilization at the fort.

Photo:  Courtesy of Flickr.

Donjek Project: Reuse of Iconic Jacob Schmidt Brewery

The iconic Jacob Schmidt Brewery sits on fifteen acres along the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The history of brewing on the site can be traced to 1855, three years before statehood. The brewery’s role as a major employer, architectural landmark in the river valley, public source of coveted spring water and – of course – Schmidt beer – has assured its iconic place in the city’s cultural life and historic fabric.

 

The questions of adaptive reuse have for years been daunting, but a new joint ownership between developers Jeff and Craig Cohen and the Fort Road Federation (one of Saint Paul’s district councils) elevates both the profile and the potential for redevelopment in the near term.  Theirs is a mixed-use, multi-phase approach that aims to utilize the bottling house and the leviathan main brewing building, affectionately known as “the Castle.”

Donjek has been retained by the prospective new ownership group (known as “Brewtown”) to assist with project finance, and I am enthused to conduct feasibility analysis for a site of such economic, cultural and historic value to the city and its prospective owners.  While Schmidt and subsequently Minnesota Brewing eventually fell victim to the market pressures facing mid-size brewing operations, the site today has the potential to thrive as a creative, historic mixed-use redevelopment.  I look forward to keeping you posted as the project unfolds!

Photo:  ArmyArch/Flickr.

Parking: More Expensive Than We Thought

A dramatic reuse of an aging church for the new Stepping Stone Theatre required a variance of 104 parking spaces, or 92% of the requirement stipulated under the zoning code in St. Paul, Minnesota, meaning only 8% of the requirement is directly provided by the theatre's property. Do the City’s parking requirements create a structural oversupply of parking in the city? It’s likely. I will revisit parking requirements in coming months, during which city planners and stakeholders will engage the future of local parking policy. The focus of this post is to consider the public cost associated with requiring developers to meet the parking requirements currently in place.

Stepping Stone Theatre is a success story, providing children with training and experience in acting and stagecraft. Shows in the new theatre on Victoria Street
are sure to be well attended, leading the reader to ask:  How will the neighborhood accommodate the parking needs during performances? The theatre has arranged for patrons to park in existing surface lots at William Mitchell College of Law, located across the street, and at the House of Hope Church parking lot at Holly and Avon Streets one block away. A few scattered observations about the area we can use for housing or other uses, due to the shared parking arrangement in place for Stepping Stone:

• Each parking space requires 200-300 square feet of space. If the theatre had been required to purchase and renovate a site allowing them exclusive control and use of 113 spaces, surface parking would represent between 0.52 acres and .78 acres of land committed to a conspicuously low level of land use and productivity. This area is equivalent to between five and nine residential lots for single-family or duplex homes.

• A mixed-use development recently built in St. Paul, with structured parking underneath, is valued at $157/square foot of the lot; at this level, the area equivalent to 113 parking spaces would represent between $3.5 million and $5.3 million of market value. In the theatre’s new location, a site this size might accommodate 20-40 units of housing or mixed use development, leading to enhanced property and perhaps sales tax base.

The car is here to stay, so devising intelligent ways of storing cars during their many hours of non-use is essential for cities serious about their future vitality and financial wherewithal. Ideas worth exploration on this issue abound, but one in particular deserves note: Adoption of a payment-in-lieu-of-parking program. A sample of potential benefits:

• Allow building owners unable to satisfy a parking requirement to make payments to the City, parking authority or business improvement district, in return for parking credits

• Proceeds would be devoted to capital financing for structured and/or shared parking, and pay a parking liaison charged with connecting parties for shared parking arrangements

• The City could be separated into a number of “parkingshed” zones, so that payments would fund parking infrastructure and agreements in relative proximity to property owners paying the fees

• Potentially, a local market for parking credits could be established, further enhancing the efficiency of the program.

Parking policy is a confluence of real estate development, public finance, transportation and land use, and hence advocates in each of these realms get involved in parking discussions. In the theatre’s shared parking arrangements lies one critical tool for cities, the leadership of which must be absolutely focused on concentrating tax base with redevelopment and forward-thinking approaches to land use.

Photo: Courtesy of Stepping Stone Theatre.