ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - The Twin Cities is growing in a new direction: inward, not outward.
In a shift in development patterns, sprawl has been stalled and replaced by infill development on blighted, forgotten and ugly plots of land, the Pioneer Press reported .
“Am I happy about this? Yes, absolutely,” said Jonathan Sage-Martinson, development director of St. Paul, where developers have rushed to build thousands of new apartments.
Cities are weeding out dead businesses, unwanted golf courses and stagnant strip malls. Sprouting in their place are projects that are more densely developed, efficient and environmentally helpful.
The Metropolitan Council reports that while the entire area is growing, more people are being put on less land. From 2010 to 2016, for every 1,000 new residents added, 91 additional acres were developed. That’s only one-third as much land as for every 1,000 new residents from 2005 to 2010.
Homebuilders have jumped on the anti-sprawl bandwagon. Last year they built 8,202 apartments and townhomes, which is 50 percent more than the 5,445 single-family homes they built.
“The pace of our growth footprint has definitely slowed down,” said Libby Starling, the Met Council’s manager of local planning assistance.
The push for more infill development, she said, helps the environment by reducing driving distances. It makes mass transit more cost-effective. It makes government more efficient - saving money spent for police, roads, fire departments, water connections and sewers. It means less farmland is being gobbled up.
But sprawled-out development has one big advantage over infill: less cost.
Sprawl occurs on so-called “virgin land,” such as a farm or natural area. For developers, the land is a blank slate, allowing them to arrange homes, streets, parks and utilities in a harmonious blend.
Not so with infill. It’s expensive to tear out old streets and buildings to fit modern needs.
The need for parking, for example, wasn’t even imagined when the streets of St. Paul were built in the 1800s. Today parking is one factor that makes infill projects more expensive, when old buildings must be demolished to provide it.
Infill also is more complicated because neighbors often fight it.
That lesson was learned in Shoreview, when Community Development Director Tom Simonson unveiled a plan for a 148-unit mixed-use project at Interstate 694 and Rice Street.
Surely, he thought, neighbors would love to have a gleaming new building replace a dying strip mall on the site.
He was wrong. They said they would rather live next to the empty mall. “They said they like the quietness of things,” Simonson said.
Sprawl projects are cheaper because they can be built more quickly. An infill project in Woodbury called CityPlace has taken 11 years - so far - to develop on the site of a former State Farm insurance building.
Ironically, environmental laws can make sprawled-out development less expensive. Environmental rules require that polluted soil must be cleaned or removed - and infill projects are often plagued with it.
For example, about $30 million has been spent by Ramsey County to clean up the former Twin Cities Army Ammunition Depot in Arden Hills - an expense that would not be needed on virgin land. That site has been unused for more than 40 years.
Overall, infill costs are daunting. “There are extraordinary costs of redevelopment,” said Shoreview City Manager Terry Schwerm.
Nevertheless, development is tilting toward recycling urban land.
Cities have found that infill projects are chic, according to Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor and an expert in local development.
He said that aging baby boomers and younger millennials prefer urban amenities such as mass transit, walkable neighborhoods and bars and coffee shops woven into the neighborhood.
Cities also are turning to infill projects to correct errors of the past.
For example, as late as the 1990s officials assumed that golf would always be popular - so they built dozens of courses. But the popularity of golf has been dropping like a 2-foot putt, and 16 courses in the metro area have closed since 2000, according to the website ForeGoneGolf.com.
What can be done when the last swing has been swung?
Eagan successfully transformed the Carriage Hills course into a 115-acre site with a fire station, senior center and 363 housing units. St. Paul’s Hillcrest Golf Course is slated to become a new neighborhood of homes and businesses.
Infill is also being used to eliminate retail vacancies.
In the 1990s, few imagined a world in which people shopped online, retailers faded away, and the demand for parking plummeted.
But that future has arrived, and cities are using infill to adapt. In several places in the metro area, sites of once-mighty retailers like Shoppers City and Kmart have been recycled into churches and community centers.
Roseville was able to transform a former truck terminal into a new home for the Calyxt company, which uses gene-splicing to create more nutritious foods.
Usually, a 10-acre site near a major freeway could be developed only by sprawling into the exurbs. But Roseville provided the site near Interstate 35W and helped the company apply for state grants.
“When we see development opportunities, we pounce,” said Community Development Director Kari Collins.
Cities are boosting infill with low-tax zones called tax increment financing (TIF) districts. These districts slash the taxes paid by developers, in anticipation of the development’s increased property taxes to be paid in the future.
“It’s one of the few tools we have,” said Shoreview’s Simonson.
Another tactic: Bending the rules to give developers a break on certain regulations, such as the number of parking spaces.
St. Paul rezoned land along the Green Line light rail to cut the number of required spaces - which saves space and money.
“That changes the dynamic,” said the city’s Sage-Martinson. “If you want someone to do a new thing with the old rules, it does not work.”
Cities also can offer denser development. Height restrictions in suburbs, for example, typically limit buildings to three or four stories. But cities are more likely to permit taller buildings, which are a more efficient way to use land.
Professor Orfield said denser projects are actually banned by law in many suburbs, but not in the core cities. “A lot of suburbs will not allow it,” he said, “but the market wants multi-family development.”
In other locations, mass transit is the springboard for infill projects.
The Green Line, for example, has spurred more than $4 billion in developments and 15,000 residential units in St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Coming soon is the former Weyerhaeuser site one block from the Green Line at St. Paul’s western edge. That site and two others will open up 20 acres, said Sage-Martinson.
“The plan is to build 600 housing units,” he said - another infill project, another blow against sprawl.
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Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press, https://www.twincities.com
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