Minneapolis city officials are not renewing an entrepreneur's rights to build a grocery store at a crucial corner of the North Side, dashing hopes of bringing a promising development to a low-income area where fresh food is scarce.
A top city leader says the demise of Praxis Marketplace at Penn and Plymouth Avenues is emblematic of the failure of broader efforts to revitalize the North Side. The grocery store's fate also highlights the enormous obstacles that still face developers looking to invest in north Minneapolis.
"Too many individual examples like that exist where we can't even as a community … rally to get a friggin' grocery store built in north Minneapolis," Council Member Lisa Goodman said earlier in November.
The company is pleading for more time to wrap up a complicated financing package, but the city says it has waited long enough after granting an extension and offering significant taxpayer subsidies.
Praxis' founder, Glenn Ford, and a neighborhood group say the city is giving up just as the grocery project is gaining momentum. The Northside Residents Redevelopment Council, the neighborhood group, passed a resolution this week urging the city to grant a six-month extension to the Dec. 31 expiration of the development rights.
"Why is it cemented that it's not going to happen if you have a developer" who is committed to the project? asked the group's chair, Ishmael Israel. "I don't care if it's the 11th hour."
This barren corner stands as a scruffy reminder of the city's fledgling attempts at a North Side revival.
The city inherited the land in 1991 from a shuttered McDonald's, and leaders quickly dreamed of expanding an adjoining strip mall known as Plymouth Plaza.