The double lot where two houses were razed years ago sits empty across Interstate 94 from downtown Minneapolis, stubbornly resisting a city building boom that's adding more than $1 billion this year to the city's tax base.
The stagnation at each end of this high-visibility block of Park Avenue between the freeway and Franklin Avenue illustrates the difficult economics of bringing infill multifamily development to market in the inner city, especially when compounded by perceptions of crime and blight.
Ask developer David Crockett, who with his investors behind him had run up three straight successes in the Minneapolis housing market before the recession hit right as they were poised to build a 36-unit building on the lots with the spectacular views of the skyline across I-94.
They tried marketing the planned condos for six months. But a worsening economy forced them to pull the plug. Lenders shunned financing new condo buyers while they were foreclosing on others. Now Crockett is trying to unload the property.
His bad timing continued a string of goose eggs that have kept this corner of the heavily trafficked block of Park Avenue between I-94 and E. Franklin Avenue vacant for more than 20 years, through boom and bust economies. The two aging houses built in the block's Victorian heyday were razed by the early 1990s, one heavily damaged by fire.
It's one of two empty corners that bookend this heterogenous block in the neighborhood that calls itself Ventura Village, part of the Phillips community. Both resist redevelopment, despite high visibility and convenience to downtown, within walking distance of such major employers as Hennepin County Medical Center.
Some attribute that stagnation to the difficulties of developing multifamily housing in Minneapolis generally, excepting select areas such as Uptown and downtown, where higher rents are the norm. Some say the block's undeveloped lots are too small to generate the economies of scale that make a developer more comfortable with the financial risk.
Still others say it's the block's colorful history dating to the 1990s, when a group of landlords gave "crack tours" to vent their frustration over what felt like official indifference to prolific drug dealing along Franklin. However, others say that unsafe reputation is long out of date, despite a random shooting in June that wounded a mother and her baby across Franklin at Peavey Park.