It might be easy to forget, after hearing Target Corp. say last week that it will empty a huge downtown office tower, that Minneapolis before the pandemic was the place to be.
More than 1 million square feet of office tenants moved into downtown Minneapolis over the previous six years, the real estate firm CBRE said in 2019. The North Loop gained another big slug of tenants, too.
Minneapolis co-working spaces were still opening in 2019, too, led by the aggressive expansion of an upstart from New York called WeWork. While cranking out marketing hype seemed to be its core business, WeWork's spaces in downtown Minneapolis and in the North Loop were the most fashionable places to work in town.
The momentum continued all the way through the end of 2019, when lease rates in downtown Minneapolis were inching up, leases were being signed and there were new office buildings under construction.
Accounts about employers moving into the city all seem to mention how they were attracted by transit connections and cool amenities for workers, both inside the buildings and on the surrounding blocks.
Last year, it all abruptly stopped. Yet Minneapolis didn't suddenly become the place to leave. What happened is that a pandemic changed office work.
Minneapolis-based Target, which employs about 8,500 people downtown, largely sent its office workers home a year ago. Now, it appears, a lot of them won't be coming back, at least not every day.
There currently aren't any Target employees working in the building it's going to abandon, 33 South Sixth Street, where the company leases 985,000 square feet.