Apartments or park? Battle continues in Minneapolis

As a Minneapolis City Council member, Steve Minn was smart and blunt, sometimes brash. He's carried the same qualities to the development world.

Once again, Minn seeks zoning variances from the city for a housing development, and he's threatening a lawsuit if he doesn't get his way. The proposed project is on a premiere spot he owns just off the east end of the Stone Arch Bridge.

But opponents -- who'd prefer a park where Minn and his quieter development partner, John Wall, want apartments -- have the men stymied, at least temporarily. The opponents petitioned for an environmental assessment of the project, which Minn concedes the law requires, even if he doesn't think it will offer anything new.

Opponents are trying to buy time. They consider the triangle on which Minn wants to build 80 apartments to be a prime spot with historical and natural significance, along the planned connection of East River Parkway and SE Main St. They hope that time will allow public agencies to line up money to buy the parcel.

Minn has long owned apartments in the university area and said he has renovated or built more than 1,500 units. The debate over his current plans is colored in part by his past run-ins with the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood group.

"For 20 years, we've never agreed on anything," Minn said.

That's not literally true, said Ted Tucker, who has mulled Minn's projects as a member of the neighborhood's land-use committee and as a city planning commissioner, at separate times. Tucker said Minn does better when he negotiates with the neighborhood, an approach that produced a compromise for the nearby 1,095-unit Pillsbury A Mill project planned by the Schafer Richardson firm.

Indeed, he's hired former Council President Jackie Cherryhomes, with whom he once clashed frequently when he was one of the only non-DFLers on the council, to lobby for his projects. "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client," he explained.

Minn's latest project comes after the neighborhood adopted a master plan that's incorporated in the city's comprehensive plan, now awaiting Metropolitan Council approval. That plan calls for development to stay on the neighborhood side of SE Main St, the historic street fronting the onetime millpond above St. Anthony Falls. Minn and Wall already have a 221-unit apartment complex on that side of Main, plus two condo projects nearby, one built and another approved but on hold.

The neighborhood plan calls for Minn's oddly-shaped, triangular parcel between Main and the river to be a park. But Minn already owns it, and he said the Park Board historically has shown little interest in buying it, although it long has been designated as a future regional park.

The site is constrained by overhead power lines and its elongated shape. Minn originally proposed 96 apartments, but the city rejected that, and he scaled his request to 80 units.

Minn once tried to arrange a land and cash swap with city park officials under which he would have given them the triangular East Bank parcel and received a larger but polluted West Bank park site on a bluff next to Interstate 35W. But residents of a neighboring high-rise shot that down.

Minn last month offered conditionally to delay his project for a year to give park officials time to pursue funding, but he says that's off the table since southeast residents petitioned for the environmental study.

"Apartments don't create significant environmental effects," Minn said. "What's left to discover here?"

But the presence of his land within boundaries of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area make an environmental assessment mandatory. Opponents drafted their petition within hours of watching a City Hall discussion in which a similar tactic was used to slow down consideration of a proposed expansion of the downtown Minneapolis incinerator.

"We pulled out something from our own legal bag of tricks," said Irene Jones, a river advocate for the nonprofit Friends of the Mississippi River organization.