This playground for the wealthy is being overtaken by giant storage buildings. Some call it ‘Tin City.’

CROSSLAKE, MINN. — This wealthy lakes community with the hottest housing market in the state is fighting a new, not-so-upscale nickname — “Tin City.”

Giant metal pole buildings, also known as “barndominiums,” are taking over Crosslake. Drive through this tourist town of 2,500 people north of Brainerd, and you’ll see boat marinas and rows of traditional self-storage rental units, like those drab garage bays featured on the reality-TV show “Storage Wars.”

But now the trend is bigger, pricier personal storage buildings. Rather than renting from one of the more than 500 self-storages across town, or paying a business to store expensive toys in the off-season, rich homeowners and vacationers are building their own luxury storage.

“This area is always going to have more storage than most other communities. I mean, 40 percent of our land is water and the majority of our homes here are on the lake. And so there is naturally just going to be a higher demand for storage,” said Paul Satterlund, the city’s new planning and zoning administrator.

The oversized personal storage buildings are essentially like a second home. They contain bars, bathrooms, fireplaces, big-screen TVs and even a bedroom or the occasional stuffed standing bear mount. The buildings range in size from 6,000 to 12,000 square feet, sell for more than a half a million dollars, and are mostly made of metal paneling.

Crosslake saw massive growth following the pandemic, with hundreds of people moving there to work remotely or retire. What accompanied that surge is a lot more tin. Already 60 of these personal storage buildings have been built in recent years and dozens are in the queue.

But the city is trying to restrict, and potentially prohibit, these from further proliferating.

Officials have enacted several moratoriums over the past decade to stall the construction of storage units. The latest ban was lifted in October, but new personal storage can no longer have living quarters and owners must limit how much metal paneling is used.

Developers don’t see the harm, especially since these personal storage buildings grow the tax base by the millions without using any city services like water, sewer or road maintenance because it’s all on private property. Three local developers own land and sell lots to new owners who customize their personal storage building.

“If a person wants to live in their man cave, why does it bother you? What is it? And nobody can ever give me an answer except, ‘Well, we should have a rule that you can’t,’” said Dean Eggena, a business owner and developer in Crosslake for over 50 years.

Eggena said people objected to the buildings because some thought they were ugly. “I don’t know where that goes if we’re going to legislate beauty,” he said.

His partner of 35 years, Cynthia Holden, owns a 20-acre property on the south end of town. The couple developed the site, which sits in an industrial area off the main corridor, into nearly 30 lots of personal storage units with the feel of a neighborhood. That property went from a $30,000 tax value to $3.5 million in four years. Holden set aside an adjacent 60 acres to develop the same way.

But the city may not allow such developments to continue.

Satterlund said the city is allowing the remaining four lots on the 20-acre property to be developed into personal storage. However, in the future he said the city would not allow new developers to replicate this.

Another developer in town built 11 storage buildings on Hwy. 3 and looks to build 30 more, but it’s unclear if the city will allow that development.

As of this year, the city is no longer allowing personal storage buildings in commercial districts.

But a new mayor and council are taking over in 2025, so it’s unclear how the city will decide to navigate future storage buildings, but Satterlund hopes to enforce proper land use at a time when Crosslake is at a crossroads of economic development.

Satterlund doesn’t believe the personal storage units are inherently wrong or bad. “The nickname for this community is ‘Tin City.’ ... More and more storage is going up. And not even just storage, but just kind of cheap, pole-type buildings that keep going up,” he said.

He came on board this year with a new city attorney and city administrator. Fresh eyes saw that Crosslake had been allowing personal storage with little planning or zoning involved. The buildings were going up in commercial districts, even though they were residential and for personal use, and the building materials weren’t preserving the city’s Northwoods aesthetic.

The city is now enforcing ordinances and proper land use. It’s considering further regulations like prohibiting water and septic to keep them from becoming overflow guests quarters, or even rentable vacation homes. Satterlund said he’s not aware of people living in them.

What typically is the case is that an existing lakeshore homeowner who wants more storage is restricted to build on their lake lot, so they build personal storage in a commercial district. Satterlund said this happened for years because the city previously allowed it, and folks had the money to do it.

Crosslake had the hottest housing market in the state this year, and among the top 10 in the nation, according to a new study by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal. The study found that the average home sale price was over $1 million in the third quarter of 2024.

It wasn’t always this way. Crosslake used to be a logging community that dammed up all the smaller lakes to form the Whitefish Chain so logs could travel down the Mississippi to St. Anthony Falls. When that industry faded, the city struggled to find an identity and economic engine until it landed on tourism.

When summer is in full swing the population swells to over 15,000 people.

Patty Norgaard, former mayor and member of the Economic Development Authority, said COVID changed everything.

“All of a sudden we had all these people in the past five years paying beaucoup bucks for property on the lake. We’re a city that has to meet the needs both infrastructurally and economically for these wealthy people,” she said. “Developers saw storage units as a way to do that.”

In 2017 when Norgaard was mayor, they enacted a moratorium on 120 storage units being built near the Crosswoods Golf Course. It was zoned residential and converted to commercial.

The recent moratorium and tipping point came last year when a developer clear-cut a bunch of old Norway pines along Hwy. 3, a main corridor in town, to build large tin buildings for commercial use, with the intent to build 30 personal storage buildings behind the businesses.

Everyone in Crosslake threw a fit, even Eggena.

“He stirred up the bee’s nest, and all of a sudden, everybody’s looking how to solve it now,” he said.

The city created a new zoning district that prohibits the use of commercial storage including but not limited to mini/self storage on main corridors. It’s meant to “protect and enhance the aesthetics ... by encouraging sustainable development that respects the environment and upholds the community’s Northwoods character. Certain land uses are prohibited in this district along with greater regulations on architectural standards to ensure protecting the beauty of Crosslake long term,” the ordinance states.

Eggena said he’s been building traditional storage units and large pole buildings in Crosslake since the 1970s. “In the early days, they were very simple. They were boat storage,” he said.

“That whole industry has just grown and grown and grown for the 50 years I’ve been here. It’s gone from mom-and-pop resorts where people vacation, to privately owned lake homes.”

Eggena said this is the third time the city has stepped in to change the rules. He said it typically happens when new officials join the council or administration.

“And they come up with terms like ‘Tin City,’ you know, and that we’re just going to be nothing but storage buildings. And that is so far from the truth. Just get in a boat and travel the 13 lakes of the Whitefish Chain,” he said. “You’re going to see multimillion-dollar lake homes, and you’re going to see clean water, and you’re going to see nice boats and Jet Skis and pontoons. It’s a place where people come to relax, they come to enjoy themselves.”

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