Downtown Minneapolis received some good news recently. According to the University of Toronto’s Downtown Recovery Team, a research group dedicated to measuring the activity of downtowns throughout North America using cell phone activity, Minneapolis had the highest percent change in visits to its downtown between March 2023 and March 2024.
At 45.3%, it beat out Midwest metropolises like Chicago (35.5%) and Cincinnati (28.3%) and coastal cities like Washington, D.C. (26.3%) and San Jose (28.2%).
There are a handful of reasons for this the likely culprits of concerts, sports, the occasional convention. But there are a lot of people working behind the scenes trying to remove barriers to bringing people into the different districts of Minneapolis’ downtown.
One of those people is Erin Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald is a senior director on the Capital Markets team for JLL with a focus on the office market. Fitzgerald also chairs the Minneapolis Renaissance Coalition, which she describes as a private-public partnership that brings together developers, city leaders and community members “whose mission is to serve as a catalyst to reimagine investment in downtown Minneapolis.”
Fitzgerald sat down with Finance & Commerce to talk through her 9-5 work at JLL and her 5-9 work at the Renaissance Coalition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How do you see your work with the Renaissance Coalition intersecting with what you do at JLL?
A: My job at JLL is to sell office buildings. If there's anybody that knows anything about the office market today is that it's a challenged one. There are a lot of things that have shifted with the office market that I think offer a lot of opportunities. But there's also, like I said, a lot of challenges with it.
So a little over a year ago, I went to [Mayor Jacob Frey] and we had a conversation about what was happening with office buildings downtown and what might continue to happen if office buildings continued to be largely unoccupied due to remote work, and the loss of rental income and higher interest rates, where owners wouldn't be able to afford to refinance.
We put in place a plan to try to figure out what the right answer was and ended up establishing a revitalization program through this private-public partnership. That's how the Minneapolis Renaissance coalition came to be by looking at the office market and how it was shifting and understanding that a new plan needed to be put into place to address some of the issues that we were seeing.
Q: I'd love to hear even just the broad policies that this revitalization program is putting forward. Do you mind talking a little bit about that?
A: I don't have the full list of incentives in front of me, but a couple things first. When the mayor asked, will you help come up with a plan to try to figure out what to do with these buildings that are starting to become less and less occupied, I met with a lot of developers and commercial real estate owners at a meeting at the Downtown Council and asked them what they thought the plan should be.
We had another meeting at the JLL office where we actually flew in folks from Gensler that specialize in this, that specialize in landlord repositionings and in city redevelopment and had a full working session.
We brought in all these developers, architects, commercial real estate owners, and we looked at every area of downtown Minneapolis, section by section, from the North Loop to the Warehouse District, 1010 Curry, Loring Park, CBD, Nicollet Mall, East Town against three criteria.
The first [criteria] being a significant number of buildings that were facing loan maturities. A significant number of buildings that could be converted from office to something else. And three, an area of high crime that could benefit from a revitalization effort. And that group unanimously decided on the Warehouse District as the first place to focus.
Q: You said that the Renaissance Coalition is looking to recommend the removal of bike lanes during a recent MNCAR panel conversation. Could you talk to me a little bit about why the Renaissance Coalition is putting forward this recommendation?
A: Well, that's in one specific area. Looking, again, just at the warehouse district, what we've realized is there are more people who are walking on the sidewalks than there is biking. There's a strong desire to widen the sidewalks along First Avenue from Washington, essentially down to the Target Center and a little bit beyond, to bring in more entertainment destination businesses.
It really is meant to be an entertainment destination, a nightlife district. If we focus on that first and foremost, on bringing in these new entertainment concepts, there needs to be space for people to walk to those concepts. And there's only so much street space.
One thing that we've heard from business owners in the North Loop that makes that such a popular destination for people from all over the Twin Cities, is the ability to park, and so just the fact that there are meters out in front of some of these establishments gives people the mindset of “oh, I'm going to drive down to Freehouse for lunch.”
Now they may drive down and the chances of them get actually getting a parking spot right outside in the front of the building at noon on a Thursday may be slim, but they're at least going to try to drive down and maybe they circle the block and ended up parking in a ramp or something.
But if there were only bike lanes and no meters even if we were able to widen the sidewalks so you can have outdoor street dining and that sort of thing if there were no meters out front, it becomes more difficult in somebody's mind to think I'm not necessarily going to drive there because there's no parking. It just becomes one more hindrance for getting people to the area.
Q: Do you have any first things, like once you get into the office that you do every morning?
A: I would say every day is a little different. But checking in with my team, certainly. And that's really what I love about coming into the office is we're all here.
I come in and immediately, you know, everybody's just in the same area and we just start talking. It's like, what do you know, what's the priority today? What are you working on? And so getting updates on where we left off from things the day before. As far as starting off my workday, it really is so helpful when you're able to look your teammates in the eye and be able to go over their computer and look at the things that you're working on together. It really does add a lot of efficiency to the day.
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