St. Cloud to ask Legislature for $100 million to jump-start downtown redevelopment

ST. CLOUD — City leaders here plan to ask the Legislature for $100 million in bonding next year to spur redevelopment of the city's historic — but struggling — downtown.

The money would be used to increase walkability on both sides of the Mississippi River and help developers revamp buildings that require extensive work to bring up to code or redevelop.

Bonding dollars would also help drive an estimated $1 billion in private development at the city's core, according to St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis, who said he's seen a significant uptick in interest from private developers since he hosted a downtown summit focused on redevelopment in December.

"In the time that I've been mayor — in those 18 years — it's night and day for the amount of folks that are interested in development," he said.

At the December summit, national downtown strategist Chris Leinberger said the key to bringing foot traffic back downtown is housing — an approach that's been successful in several midsize cities across the country, including Fargo.

"All the downtowns that we've seen that have survived during COVID and are thriving now are ones that have focused on the housing piece," said Kleis, noting his goal is to add 1,000 downtown housing units in the next five years.

As part of his push to reinvent downtown, as Kleis calls it, he created a private-sector task force to help define infrastructure investments and show private developers what's possible. At the helm of the task force is Greg Windfeldt, a developer and president of St. Cloud-based Preferred Credit.

"Before everybody looked at it as a lost cause, but there's a realization now that we can't lose the downtown," Windfeldt said. "The hard thing is overcoming the naysayers."

Windfeldt points to a condominium project in 2017 that scrambled to find tenants at first, which Windfeldt attributes to a lack of residential parking and other downtown amenities such as grocers. The city has a strategy to bring amenities downtown, which it outlined in its 2015 comprehensive plan that proposes redevelopment of several city-owned parking lots and other spaces to add housing, hotels, retail and art spaces.

While many future projects are undefined, Kleis listed a couple that he'd like to see in the next few years. Topping that list: redeveloping the Herberger's building at the heart of downtown, which has been mostly vacant since the department store closed in 2018, as well as redeveloping the Empire Apartments public housing high-rise that's on the river near the convention center.

The Legislature has approved similar requests from other regional cities, including Rochester — which got about $400 million from the state in 2013 for its Destination Medical Center initiative — and Duluth, which got $100 million a few years ago to support urban renewal in the downtown and medical district.

Kleis and Windfeldt are looking to Fargo — which has added 1,600 housing units in the last two decades — as inspiration. Only about a dozen units were added to downtown Fargo in 2001 right after the city launched its redevelopment initiative. But that number has seen a gradual increase each year. Last year alone, about 370 units were added.

"There is a lot of interest. The city is very committed to it. I've never seen the mayor more committed to something," Windfeldt said. "But it's just going to take time. The community is not going to see it overnight."