Why hasn't light rail revitalized the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul | While it has for the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis

WRT the previous blog entry, I'd been meaning to write about the topic for months, having come across a story about the soccer stadium and its failure to contribute ancillary development in the neighborhood.  With the Sun-Times article, I was able to connect multiple examples, which is how I like to write the entries, so that the conclusions are more generalizable.

Just as with the stadium as an augur and in terms of reproduction of space, the Midway neighborhood is an example of how with rail transit development, pre-conditions are required to have seemingly "immediate success" and less well off areas don't have the preconditions.

The story of Midway is similar to many other transit station catchment areas across the US.

Green Line LRT at University and Snelling Avenues in St. Paul. Credit: MinnPost photo by Corey Anderson.

Why hasn't light rail been a great augur for the Midway neighborhood?  A separate question from the Allianz stadium is why is the Midway neighborhood languishing despite the presence of light rail ("A tale of two Green Lines: 10 years after ‘Central Corridor’ light rail transformed University Avenue," and "A better future for the 10-year-old Green Line should include signal priority, business investment,"  MinnPost).

From the first article:

Talking to him today, Thoj feels like the light rail hasn’t transformed his part of St. Paul. Like most people I talked to, he keenly remembers the disruptive construction years, and points to the persistent inequality. Parts of the line near the Minneapolis border have seen significant growth, but in the central swath of St. Paul, there’s been practically nothing. “ 

The promises were never delivered,” Thoj said. “Overall in terms of new businesses there has been none in this stretch of the avenue, from Frogtown and Rondo to the Capitol. I don’t think we’ve seen a whole bunch of net gains. I think that’s because there has not been as much investment between Lexington and Marion.”

In other words, the light rail has not been a silver bullet, alleviating inequality. When something this big goes through an area, it’s easy to see why people get their hopes up for generational change. The vacant lots are still vacant, and there’s no new money streaming in.

Green Line at sunset.  Photo: Bill Lindeke.

I think the answer is: income level and density of the neighborhood, and distance from the core of the city and the core of the light rail system, in terms of both access to transit and "location, location, location," and anchors-stakeholders motivated to invest.

And while the Minneapolis-St. Paul transit project is considered best practice because of the pre-development revitalization plans for the Green Line, as well as a financial commitment from the Metropolitan (Planning) Council and area foundations to support the construction of affordable housing at stations, maybe the plans needed to be even better.  From "Transit Oriented Development in Minneapolis and St. Paul":

In 2010, the Metropolitan Council created the Livable Communities Act - Transit-Oriented Development (LCA-TOD) Grant program. Since its creation, the grant program has allocated tens of millions of dollars toward the development of hundreds of projects containing thousands of housing units in the Twin Cities' myriad of light rail and bus transit corridors.

And like I pointed out wrt the Purple Line suburban light rail project in Greater DC, there needs to be a community development corporation charged and funded to ensure development is much more speedy in the areas that are economically languishing ("Purple Line Part 6 |  Creating a transportation development authority in Montgomery and Prince George's County to effectuate placemaking, retail development, and housing programs in association with the Purple Line").  

Otherwise it takes many years to see improvement at outlying stations, as developers focus on the best areas first, and it can take decades before a rebuilt out core lacks developable parcels, leading firms to take on what were previously less profitable opportunities.  From the second MinnPost article:

[with the Blue Line] it took over a decade for development to happen in the sleepier parts of the corridor, such as 46th Street South. In stagnating parts of town, it takes years for good economic “comps” to sway wary investors to float loans for new housing construction.

From "After years of stagnation along the Blue Line, new housing booms in Longfellow":

... for the most part, the pace of transit-oriented development has seemed glacial. According to Metropolitan Council studies, more than 12,000 new apartments have been built along the Blue Line since its opening. But if you glance at a map, the vast majority of this construction has been downtown, or else subsidized in some way. For most interstitial stops along Hiawatha, south of downtown, there’s been very little new housing construction. Even the rosiest development booster would have to admit it’s been a slow climb.

I've suggested when transit lines and stations are being constructed, that "Public Improvement Districts" should be created, or at least an action plan, for each station ("Public improvement districts ought to be created as part of transit station development process: the east side of NoMA station as an example").  In the planning field, this is called "station area planning."

The model action plan I suggested for New Carrollton, which already has Metrorail, regional commuter, and Amtrak service, but will be getting the Purple Line too, outlines what can be done at a larger scale ("Setting the stage for the Purple Line light rail line to be an overwhelming success: Part 4 | Making over New Carrollton as a transit-centric urban center and Prince George's County's "New Downtown""), the same with the series on Silver Spring.

Purple Line Part 5 | Fenton Street, East-West Highway, and Wayne Avenue, Silver Spring, as building blocks for a Silver Spring "Sustainable Mobility District"
-- Part 1: Setting the stage
-- Part 2: Program items 1- 9
-- Part 3: Program items 10-18
-- Part 4: Conclusion
-- Part 6 |  Creating a transp

The lesson from DC Metrorail is that it took about 30 years for substantive transit oriented redevelopment to occur in the city outside of the core.

Hundreds of new apartments sit in a spot that had a negligible population a decade ago. Credit: MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke.

Note that at least one area along the Green Line but in Minneapolis, the Prospect Park neighborhood, has experienced this kind of growth, because of purposeful planning, strong community organizations, and financial commitments from major partners like the University of Minnesota, which created the Towerside Innovation District there ("Prospect Park eyed for development Green Line," Minnesota Daily, "In Prospect Park near the U, three developers come together in sweeping makeover," Minneapolis Star-Tribune).  From the MST:

The developers praised an overarching vision, first laid out in 2008, for redeveloping the area into a mixed-use urban village featuring high-density housing and green infrastructure. The plan emerged from the Prospect Park neighborhood association and was later spun off into a new organization called Prospect Park 2020. That group has since been joined by a public-private coalition called the Prospect North Partnership.

The latter group, established in 2014 through the efforts of the Urban Land Institute, counts among its public members the University of Minnesota's real estate arm, the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County. Perhaps its most active private-sector member is Prospect Park Properties, a firm led by neighborhood booster and second-generation real estate professional Jeff Barnhart.

Like with how the Prospect Park neighborhood created new branding around the "Innovation District" (Towerside Framework for Planning and Implementation), I wonder if when doing transportation related revitalization planning, if it's possible to come up with "unique selling propositions" for different station areas, as a way to move improvement faster.

In any case, Minneapolis sites are likely to continue to develop more quickly than St. Paul sites because Minneapolis is a higher functioning local economy ("Prospect Park: They have the vision, but what about the will?," MinnPost).

And in short, those areas that do jump ahead in terms of improvement, like Prospect Park, show the value of a transformational projects action planning approach (e.g., "Authors term post-Katrina revitalization of New Orleans a failure | It's a confirmation of my "Transformational Projects Action Planning" concept").

Revitalization success is much more likely when these elements are present.

1. A commitment to the development and production of a broad, comprehensive, visionary, and detailed revitalization plan/s;
2. the creation of innovative and successful implementation organizations, with representatives from the public sector and private firms, to carry out the program. Typically, the organizations have some distance from the local government so that the plan and program aren't subject to the vicissitudes of changing political administrations, parties and representatives;
3. strong accountability mechanisms that ensure that the critical distance provided by semi-independent implementation organizations isn't taken advantage of in terms of deleterious actions (for example Dublin's Temple Bar Cultural Trust was amazingly successful but over time became somewhat disconnected from local government and spent money somewhat injudiciously, even though they generated their own revenues--this came to a head during the economic downturn and the organization was widely criticized; in response the City Council decided to fold the TBCT and incorporate it into the city government structure, which may have negative ramifications for continued program effectiveness as its revenues get siphoned off and political priorities of elected officials shift elsewhere);
4. funding to realize the plan, usually a combination of local, regional, state, and national sources, and in Europe, "structural adjustment" and other programmatic funding from the European Regional Development Fund and related programs is also available (Hamburg, as a city-state, has extra-normal access to funds beyond what may normally be available to the average city);
5. integrated branding and marketing programs to support the realization of the plan;
6. flexibility and a willingness to take advantage of serendipitous events and opportunities and integrate new projects into the overall planning and implementation framework (examples include Bilbao's "acquisition" of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum and the creation of a light rail system to complement its new subway system, Liverpool City Council's agreement with a developer to create the Liverpool One mixed use retail, office, and residential development in parallel to the regeneration plan and the hosting of the Capital of Culture program in 2008, and how multifaceted arts centers were developed in otherwise vacated properties rented out cheaply by their owners in Dublin, Helsinki, and Marseille).
7. commitment and time.  Revitalization is a forever process that takes a long time to begin to see results.  It needs to continue beyond the vicissitudes of changing political administrations.
8. adaptive management. Visionary revitalization requires continuous process improvement.  Other ways to think about it are using the design method or adaptive management instead of remaining static.  Programs can always be improved and should be.