Lakeville wants more brick facades and less precast concrete.

Belle Plaine wants to keep from turning into a forest of blinking highway signs.

Farmington wants to find a real role for its historic downtown, even as suburbia envelops it.

At a time when there isn't a whole lot being built, cities all across the south metro area are taking advantage of the lull to try and make sure that what does go up when the crash ends is better, and more community-enhancing, than what got built before.

But they are also encountering pushback from business owners.

"I think I have the right to make decisions for myself and not have others dictating what I can and cannot do when I am not harming anyone in this community," Barb Johnson, owner of several historic buildings in downtown Jordan, told planning commissioners during a heated meeting last week over new standards for downtown buildings.

To arm themselves against complaints that fancy new requirements will bleed businesses of their profits, cities are going so far as to price out the differences between brick and stone and their artificial substitutes. Lakeville, for instance, discovered that a massive Cub Foods store can be built of brick at a surprisingly reasonable rate.

Developers say it isn't fair to cast them as the bad guys.

"It goes both ways," said industry spokesman Pat Mascia, senior vice president of Minneapolis operations for the national commercial real estate firm Duke Realty Corp. "You don't want to own a building that is the ugliest building on the block. You want to try to fit within existing surroundings and create value with your investment. And aesthetics can add to value."

At the same time, though, he added, cities aren't always realistic about what they can demand. He laughed out loud when told that one semi-rural community in the south metro area is brandishing images of downtown Wayzata as a guide to what it wants to see by way of landscaping of parking lots.

"If you're requiring the gold standard when it should be the bronze standard," he said, "it doesn't usually happen that way. We wouldn't do The West End" -- an upscale lifestyle center now rising at the intersection of Hwys. 100 and 394 in St. Louis Park -- "in Otsego."

But cities closer in have the same disputes. Burnsville recently bumped up against the worries of the developers of a vacant parcel in its newly created downtown area, Heart of the City, over design standards calling for 60 percent of surface areas to be brick, stone or glass, with no horizontal siding. That, the developer said, was not likely to pencil out.

Savage, which installed new standards for its historic downtown area along Hwy. 13 in 2001, is helping bridge the gap by dishing out grants to building owners. The old main drag, says Mayor Janet Williams, is beginning to look "mighty nice for not a huge investment in dollars." Visiting last Sunday for the weekly farmer's market, she saw "workers putting the stucco on the latest rehab grant project across from the public square."

Putting some new in the old

Farther out, on the suburban fringe, Farmington is trying to work out what the future can be for a downtown that's still very much intact but is always threatened by surrounding suburbia.

The city's new comprehensive plan outlines a vision of boutiques, craft and antique stores and professional offices in a "pleasant, attractive and aesthetically pleasing" downtown. The development lull is helping by giving officials time to reflect and to install new rules, said city planner Lee Smick.

"We're finally catching up," Smick said. "When a new building comes in, we want to make certain that it still portrays our historic heritage."

Draft standards being looked at by the city's planning commission require at least 70 percent of a visible exterior to be finished with clay, brick, stucco, natural stone or ornamental concrete. And they specify that "blank, windowless walls shall be avoided wherever possible."

"Big box" buildings would not be allowed, and any large buildings would need to be broken into smaller facades to simulate a line of smaller storefronts.

A new ingredient in the mix in recent years has been the more aggressive involvement of anti-sprawl activists and foundations in financing small cities' attempts to impose their will. Belle Plaine hired the University of Minnesota's Center for Rural Design two years ago to help devise new rules. Jordan today is benefitting from a grant from the McKnight Foundation in carrying out a similar process.

One new reality that is helping soothe these conflicts, developer Mascia said, is that there's no longer just a choice between ultra-costly but nice, and cheap but cheap-looking.

Thanks to new technologies, he said, "you can hardly tell the difference between precast brick and real brick. But the cost difference is substantial. Precast today can be spectacular looking. The aesthetics are almost identical."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023

Katie Humphrey • 952-882-9056