Inside Rosemount’s housing and industrial building boom

Minnesota’s cleaner, higher-tech future is taking shape in Rosemount, one of the Twin Cities metro’s fastest-growing suburbs.

The Dakota County city approved 850 housing permits in 2023, good enough for third place in the state amid a sharp multifamily slowdown. Much of its residential activity is happening at Amber Fields , a mixed-density, 435-acre site that will host nearly 2,000 units at full buildout.

Those new residents will have plenty of employment opportunities nearby. Meta’s planned $800 million, 715,000-square foot data center grabbed headlines in March when state and company officials confirmed it as the anchor for secrecy-shrouded “Project Bigfoot,” but it’s just one of several recent and planned large-scale commercial and industrial projects across Rosemount, including a major expansion by longtime local employer Spectro Alloys and a 570,000-square foot FedEx distribution hub being developed by Scannell Properties.

Scannell has plans for nearly 2 million square feet of additional industrial space on another Rosemount site. And with thousands of acres of undeveloped land zoned for residential, commercial and industrial uses, more project announcements are almost certainly forthcoming.

A Twin Cities industrial hotspot

Project Bigfoot helped raise Rosemount’s profile as a top destination for large commercial and industrial users considering the Twin Cities market, said Adam Kienberger, Rosemount community development director.

“What we’ve found in our experience is that development often begets more development,” he said. “Meta planting their flag here has attracted a lot of interest.”

But Rosemount wasn’t exactly undiscovered before Meta stepped forward. The city is near the heart of one of the Twin Cities’ tightest industrial submarkets, according to CBRE’s Q4 2023 Minneapolis Industrial report . The South Central submarket saw 1.06 million square feet of net absorption in 2023, ending the year with a 3% vacancy rate comfortably below the Twin Cities region’s 3.8% average.

Large commercial and industrial users find Rosemount especially appealing because it has a surplus of “large aggregate sites not available elsewhere in the metro,” some sprawling across hundreds of acres, Kienberger said.

Meta’s future home covers 280 acres, while Scannell’s FedEx distribution center occupies most of a 160-acre parcel and its planned industrial mega-development includes 12 lots on 235 acres.

Also important are proximity to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport about 20 minutes away, traffic permitting and a burgeoning local labor pool in fast-growing south metro cities like Lakeville, Apple Valley and Rosemount itself.

“These companies often have criteria like ‘x minutes from an international airport’ or certain workforce demographics” within a set commuting radius, Kienberger said.

Rosemount’s oversized transportation and utility infrastructure is another selling point for manufacturers, logistics providers, and others, said Catalina Valencia, director of business development for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. So is the presence of Dakota Community and Technical College, which makes Rosemount “a good place to tap into metro region talent,” she said.

Those assets give Rosemount and surrounding communities a “readiness aspect” that allows them to capitalize on big economic development opportunities, Valencia said.

These advantages were enough for Spectro Alloys to invest nearly $80 million in a 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art aluminum recycling facility that will increase its headcount by roughly one-third, company president Luke Palen said.

The 51-year-old company looked at sites in Wisconsin and Iowa, but “we love Minnesota and [Rosemount and were] hoping to make it work here,” Palen said.

Spectro recently completed a 70,000-square-foot, solar-powered distribution warehouse at its Rosemount headquarters. Its rooftop photovoltaic array offsets roughly half the facility’s energy consumption, “reducing [our] exposure to future energy price increases,” Palen said.

Carving up UMore Park

Rosemount’s population is growing alongside its employment base.

Much of the city’s new residential development is happening at Amber Fields, in the northwestern portion of the 4,772-acre UMore Park study area .

Maplewood Development Inc. bought the 435-acre Amber Fields site from the University of Minnesota for $13.1 million in early 2022 . Since then, Rosemount has permitted most of the 1,959 housing units envisioned in the site’s planned unit development, and construction is humming on multiple single-family, townhome and apartment projects there.

“[Amber Fields] is coming along very, very quickly,” said Mario Cocchiarella, CEO and owner of Maplewood Development. “We are well on our way to having every portion of the site active by the end of the year.”

Four national homebuilders Lennar, Pulte Homes, David Weekley Homes and M/I Homes have subdivisions under construction at Amber Fields, Cocchiarella said. Multifamily projects are sprouting on the site, including REE’s 160-unit Landing at Amber Fields . And in January, Rosemount approved Maplewood Development’s plans for 174 townhomes and 167 single-family homes, greenlighting one of the last pieces of the larger planned unit development.

Amber Fields’ housing product mix is resonating with early homebuyers and renters, Cocchiarella said, noting the variety of small- and large-lot single-family homes, townhomes and “highly amenitized” apartments. Work on an internal park and trail system is expected to wrap in September, he said.

There’s plenty of housing development happening elsewhere in Rosemount, including the 214-unit Wicklowe by Roers Cos. expected to open this fall; Schafer Richardson’s 164-unit, all-affordable Croft at Rosecott ; and Lennar’s master-planned Talamore community , which includes a mix of attached and detached homes.

Rosemount itself “affords some very specific advantages for people who are buying a new home,” including an excellent school system, good transportation connections, long-distance recreational trails and proximity to major regional parks, Cocchiarella said.

More to come in Rosemount

In addition to Kienberger’s “large aggregate lots,” Rosemount has another big selling point for developers: Much of its land area is agricultural, wholly undeveloped or given over to gravel mining.

Dakota Aggregates has worked a broad area south of Amber Fields for about a decade. In the near future, its active operations will move “deeper into UMore,” freeing up more land for residential development, Kienberger said. Remediating former mine lands is relatively straightforward, said Kienberger, though other UMore tracts remain unsuitable for development due to contamination from World War II-era munitions manufacturing.

Farther east, near the intersection of State Highway 52 and County Road 42, Scannell’s FedEx distribution center part of a 160-acre golf course redevelopment “brought infrastructure to an area not expected to see development so soon,” Kienberger said. That has opened up a roughly 300-acre area controlled by Great River Energy that Rosemount’s most recent long-term plan earmarks for residential use.

“That is the next phase of growth for Rosemount,” Kienberger said.

Meanwhile, much of UMore’s northern fringe is guided for commercial and industrial uses. DEED’s Valencia expects Minnesota’s power-sector decarbonization plan to help attract big electricity consumers like large-scale data centers and heavy manufacturers to places with other built-in advantages, including Rosemount. Flint Hills Resources recently commissioned the country’s largest “behind-the-meter” solar installation at the massive Pine Bend Refinery in northeastern Rosemount, offsetting about 30% of the facility’s power consumption, Kienberger noted.

Since Valencia arrived at DEED four years ago, the agency has fielded interest from “a lot of projects looking at Rosemount and the southeast metro,” Valencia said.

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