Blaine looking to seize opportunities for ambitious redevelopment

The area around Blaine’s National Sports Center complex could soon be much livelier and less focused on youth and amateur sports.

A development team led by Elevage and Bader is expected to break ground in July on the first phase of a 40-acre mixed-use development planned for parcels east of the sports complex and west of the intersection of 105th Avenue and Radisson Road, Blaine community development director Erik Thorvig said in an interview. The three-phase project, which will feature a pedestrian-friendly core with restaurants, hotels, and entertainment uses, could be complete by 2030, Thorvig said.

Meanwhile, phase one of PinPoint Development’s nearby National Sports Village is expected to open later this year. That project is an early test of the Metropolitan Airports Commission’s efforts to stimulate development on parcels adjacent to Twin Cities airports , including the Anoka County-Blaine general aviation hub.

The National Sports Center happenings come at a busy time for real estate development in Blaine. With robust transportation infrastructure, easy access to the Twin Cities’ core, and favorable demographic trends, the north metro city is particularly appealing to commercial and industrial developers like Capital Partners , which recently built out two industrial sites in Blaine and plans at least two more. The city’s northeast quadrant remains only partially built out, drawing residential builders and keeping local starter-home prices in check. And, on the other side of town, the underutilized Northtown Mall complex offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for transit-oriented infill development.

A mixed-use economic engine

With 4 million annual visitors and an estimated economic impact of $83 million , the 600-acre National Sports Center complex, or NSC, is already an important economic engine for Blaine.

But it can do even more for the city. The Mall of America, another major Twin Cities tourism destination that has had to reinvent itself to stay relevant, offers lessons for NSC and Blaine city leaders, Maxfield Research President Mary Bujold said in an interview. Both were conceived as largely single-purpose destinations, “which isn’t sustainable in the long run,” she said.

One issue for the National Sports Center is that many families and fan groups stay elsewhere, in Maple Grove, Roseville, even Bloomington, said Thorvig. Those cities lure NSC visitors with plentiful, affordable hotels and an array of dining and entertainment options, the end result being that they spend much of their time and money outside Blaine’s borders. The NSC touts more than 20 restaurants within three miles, but the entire city of Blaine has just three hotels, Thorvig said.

Adding a mixed-use district immediately adjacent to the NSC’s athletic facilities solves the problem of “what to do when your kid has their first game at 10 a.m. and their next at 5 p.m.,” Thorvig said.

Project sketches show a compact, walkable core with restaurants and family-friendly recreation an indoor batting cage is a possibility, Thorvig said flanked by district parking and green space. Phase one will include a hotel. A second hotel, in phase two, could include an indoor water park. Plans also call for hundreds of new apartments and a Class A office building that could feature a sports medicine facility, Thorvig said.

“We’re expecting this project to have an extremely positive economic impact locally,” he said.

Another mixed-use opportunity, eventually

Blaine’s other big mixed-use infill development opportunity, the area around the faded Northtown Mall, could eventually do even more than the NSC project for the city’s economy and tax base. But the payoff is farther in the future and, as of now, mired in uncertainty.

The city is in the very early stages of implementing a master plan sketched out by a team including Damon Farber Associates, which drew up similar plans for Ridgedale Mall in Minnetonka and Burnsville Center in Burnsville. Elements include a destination “lifestyle center” to replace the Northtown Mall building, a modern office park on the current Northtown Village site, and a mixed-use core featuring hundreds of hotel rooms and multifamily units, all knit together by pedestrian-friendly roads, trails, and parkland. Metro Transit’s planned F Line BRT route will serve a refreshed Northtown Transit Center , adding capacity and frequency to the current Route 10 bus connecting southwest Blaine with downtown Minneapolis.

The 30-year vision imagines “a wholesale change” to the 200-acre, largely commercial area bounded by Highway 10, Highway 47, and Sanburnol Drive NE, said Thorvig. The master plan proposes 4.69 million square feet of medium- and high-density multifamily on the site, up from 111,000 square feet currently. The retail footprint would shrink from 1.77 million square feet to 1.07 million square feet. Much of the district’s surface parking would disappear.

Blaine city planners are “asking the right question,” Bujold said. “‘How do we focus on redeveloping our core areas where we already have a lot of traffic and activity?’”

With most of Blaine’s remaining undeveloped land guided for low-density residential, the Northtown district offers a rare chance to replace an obsolete regional mall while adding density in an area with robust transportation and utility infrastructure. But early efforts to add housing in the area have run into trouble: A proposal to add 220 apartments on the site of a vacant Rainbow Foods store included in the Northtown master plan appears to have been tabled in favor of a pickleball club alongside traditional strip retail.

Overall, Blaine’s approach at Northtown is more hands-off than at the National Sports Center, where it directly owns some of the land slated for development and leases a 16-acre parcel from the Minnesota Amateur Sports Commission, Thorvig said.

This year, city planners are updating Blaine’s comprehensive plan and zoning regulations to enable higher-density residential development at Northtown, and the city council might consider financial incentives for developments on a case-by-case basis, but “we don’t anticipate the city being active in property acquisition here,” Thorvig said.

A sweet spot for Twin Cities industrial (and residential)

It’s not just regional retail centers and sports facilities drawing real estate developers to Blaine. The city’s excellent road and highway network, proximity to the Twin Cities’ core, and low vacancies alongside ample industrial zoning make it one of the best places to site new industrial in an otherwise mediocre Twin Cities market , said Dick Friedrichs, senior director of land acquisitions at Edina-based Capital Partners.

Capital Partners’ Naples I and Naples II projects increased Blaine’s industrial inventory by 315,000 square feet. As Naples II leases up, the firm is moving ahead with the 27-acre, 378,000-square-foot 35W Logistics Center at the southwest corner of Sunset Avenue and 109th Avenue Northeast, and has a 30-acre parcel under contract for the third phase of its Naples development, Friedrich said.

The Twin Cities North Central industrial submarket, which includes Blaine, had a direct vacancy rate of just 1.8%, second only to the supply-constrained Minneapolis-proper submarket, according to a CBRE Market Insights report . With new industrial product slow to come online amid macroeconomic challenges, north metro industrial property owners can increase rents by a comfortable 4% or 5% when tenants renew, Friedrich said.

And Blaine is well-placed to benefit as the sector recovers . Beyond its location and transportation infrastructure, the city has a host of tailwinds, including a relatively young labor force with an average age of 39, a diversified housing market featuring starter homes priced under $400,000 and newer build-to-rent communities like Foxtail Hollow and the Enclave at Lexington Waters , and a city government that’s “pro-development and easy to work with,” Friedrich said.

Absent wholesale turnover in city leadership, Blaine’s pro-development posture isn’t likely to change soon. Blaine will have about 87,000 residents in 2040, up from about 70,000 in 2020, according to the Metropolitan Council’s long-range population projections .

“So we have plenty of opportunities for residential growth,” Thorvig said.

Copyright © 2024 BridgeTower Media. All Rights Reserved.