The Myth of the Instant Main Street

With allowances for different scales and particulars, that is a generally fair description of projects built, proposed, planned, or underway in Maple Grove, Woodbury, Wayzata, Apple Valley, St. Anthony, Lino Lakes, Ramsey, and elsewhere in the Twin Cities area.

Developers say they do not fault cities for pursuing the model. "It's perfectly understandable that communities want to create their highest and best vision," Foster says. "The objectives are good and even noble."

However, argues Doran, "what fourth- or fifth-ring suburbs forget is that it took [several decades] for 50th and France to happen. At one point, 50th and France was a grocery store with a parking lot in front of it. There is an evolution of real estate that needs to occur. Outlying communities want to create it all right now."

When the dream becomes a hallucination, developers say, it becomes difficult to move ahead with more modest projects that stand a better chance of success. But in the long run, they warn, communities may suffer deeper pain from ill-advised projects that do get built.

Grand Ambitions

It isn't that new urbanism doesn't work, developers say. Sometimes it works relatively well. St. Louis Park's four-year-old, $150 million Excelsior and Grand project is regarded as successful, though retailers and residents have complained about limited parking space. The still-expanding Shoppes at Arbor Lakes lifestyle center in Maple Grove opened in 2003 and incorporates a Main Street retail theme with a surrounding high-density residential area. It also appears to be thriving.

The Maple Grove project has spawned another lifestyle center in Woodbury, created by the same developers, Opus Northwest of Minnetonka and RED Development of Kansas City. The initial phase of Woodbury Lakes, comprising a 398,000-square-foot open-air shopping center, opened in 2005.

The problem with mixed-use projects and lifestyle centers, developers say, is that a lot of conditions have to exist in order for them to succeed. Those conditions do not apply in every community that wants one.

The most notorious cautionary tale in this regard involves the Ramsey Town Center, a $1.1-billion mixed-use development on 370 acres in the northwestern exurb of Ramsey. Award-winning plans for the downtown "village" launched in 2003 called for 775,000 square feet of retail and more than 2,800 residential units, in addition to office space, parks, restaurants, a school, and a new city hall.

Shortly before he died of cancer in November 2006, Bruce Nedegaard, Ramsey Town Center's master developer, was forced into bankruptcy by creditors who last summer were still trying to salvage what they could of the partially completed development.

"Ramsey is easy to pick on," says Scott Tankenoff, managing partner of Hillcrest Development, LLLP, a Minneapolis firm specializing in commercial renovation. He allows that Nedegaard's personal tragedy complicates the tale and muddies the water, making it harder to draw clear lessons about the dangers of new urbanism gone wrong. Still, Tankenoff says, "this was an example of a municipality knowing what it wanted, and a developer who thought it made sense, when the circumstances obviously weren't right."