If there’s one place in St. Paul that’s an evergreen showcase for the city’s potential, it’s the Ford Site. For over a century, the 130 acres that hosted the former Ford truck plant have had a history of changing the tone in Minnesota’s “second city.”
Built in 1925, it represented a massive “scoop” for St. Paul against its larger, wealthier western rival. St. Paul had lured Henry Ford, the country’s talismanic industrial baron, to invest in a riverfront property along the Mississippi River. The factory simultaneously ushered control over the controversial “high dam” power supply that had been a political football for nearly a decade, while bringing modern industrial investment into the city.
Fast forward a century, and the situation is oddly similar. After the Ford factory plant closed, Ford made the unprecedented decision to not sell the property but to clean up the site and prime it for development. St. Paul staff then spent years conducting expensive planning, even sending a delegation of City Council members, business leaders, and city staff to Scandinavia to study sustainable urban development. Then and now, city leaders wanted this parcel to be a visionary showpiece.
This is why it’s no exaggeration to call the former Ford factory the most heavily scrutinized piece of land in St. Paul history. In a wealthy, centrally-located neighborhood along the river, the resulting master plan was a hard-won compromise involving countless community meetings and toxic town halls. Approved in 2017, the resulting zoning laid out a promising mix of densities, everything from single-family homes along the river to clusters of mixed-use apartment buildings including affordable housing. Meanwhile, the city spent over $50 million in tax-increment financed infrastructure as a foundation for the development.
From vision to reality
Fast forward to 2024 and the triumphant tone has changed. Apart from the single-family homes, residential development has been stalled for years due to the challenging post-pandemic economy and St. Paul’s still-onerous rent control provisions.
The site’s developer, Ryan Companies, finally released proposals earlier this month to develop a key block along Ford Parkway, and from an urban planning perspective, it’s a mixed-bag at best. For a key Ford Site parcel next to the intersection of Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue, Ryan proposed five buildings; only one of them fits the master plan criteria, and the other four reflect hefty decreases from the city’s density ambitions.
The situation on Ford Parkway represents an inversion of the usual dynamics, where developers typically press cities for permission to build higher and larger. In this case, the Ryan proposal involves one four-story apartment building and four one-story commercial buildings surrounded by surface parking lots, much less density than required.
That’s why Ryan Companies needs 17 variances to the zoning code, a large number by normal standards of the Board of Zoning Appeals, which heard the case earlier this month. Many of the variances are small details about things like window coverage, but the key exceptions involve building height and floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of general density. In both cases, the application was not close to acceptable minimums: .3 to 1.0 FAR instead of the required 2.0, and 12-18 feet of height instead of the required 40 feet.
The situation puts the zoning board in a bind because variances are held to strict “quasi-legal” standards, not technically subjective decisions. They require “circumstances unique to the property that create practical difficulties in complying with the provision with the code,” and one often-repeated point is that financial concerns alone are eligible to be one of these circumstances.
In this case, while Sean Ryan of Ryan Companies took pains to describe how the slope changes along Ford Parkway created the unique circumstances, both the application itself and the testimony pointed out the determinant role played by access to financing.
“We’re not proposing additional housing because we don’t believe that is able to be developed here,” said a Ryan spokesperson when pressed by one of the zoning board members. “We want a project that meets the master plan that actually has success in being financed and being developed, and we don’t think that is something that has the ability to be financed … and its importance for this development to have vibrance at this corner and support the other things that are happening in this neighborhood.”
In other words, there’s an economic undercurrent where the kind of housing envisioned by the zoning code seems unlikely. After years of impasse, Ryan Companies has still not been able to line up financing for the kinds of projects in the original vision. This itself is a story centering on both the changing economy and the city’s strict rent control policy, approved by voters in 2021.
For their part, city staff recommended approval of the zoning variances.
“In hindsight, maybe things could have been made a bit looser,” said St. Paul Zoning Administrator Yaya Diatta. “When they did the master plan, they thought this is the way to go, but they created some hard situations and this is where we are today.”
Planning downgrade
There’s no question that the proposal represents a planning downgrade. Instead of the four-or-five-story buildings shown in every early Ford Site rendering, Ryan has proposed the kind of single-story commercial buildings you’d find along a suburban frontage road. It’s basically an elaborate strip mall, and for a key city-subsidized parcel in 2024, that’s a big letdown.
In the big picture, city planners have for decades tried to shift land use around the city’s aging strip malls, to boost walkability and density especially near transit investments. Examples abound: the Midway area along University Avenue, full of unwalkable asphalt “superblocks” boasting semi-abandoned strip malls, the East Side’s Sun Ray mall, where a half-billion Gold Line BRT is being built next to a surface parking lot, or the Paster Enterprises strip mall on West 7th Street, once slated to be a key Riverview streetcar location.
To build new car-centric strip retail on a key parcel of Ford Site land, after years of planning and tens of millions of city investment, is a dim sign for St. Paul’s most visionary property. It begs the question of what’s going to happen to the rest of the planned development, especially the called-for blocks of dense residential housing to the east. It also reflects the need to change, once again, the city’s rent control policy. Earlier this year Mayor Melvin Carter announced plans to add a permanent exception for new construction, but the City Council has not yet taken up the proposal.
The zoning case will be voted on again on Jan. 6, when the Board of Zoning Appeals meets again. During its December meeting, it was clear there wasn’t much appetite to approve the 17 variances, so it seems most likely that the board will deny the development proposal. Either way they decide, however, the question is likely to be appealed to the City Council. At that point, they’ll have to look closely at the options on the table and decide, once again, what the vision for St. Paul should look like.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
