Minneapolis' central business district has a new representative on the City Council for the first time in more than two decades.
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Minneapolis' central business district has a new representative on the City Council for the first time in more than two decades following Lisa Goodman's departure last year.
Katie Cashman was elected last November to lead Ward 7, which in addition to downtown includes Bryn Mawr, Cedar Isles, East Isles, Kenwood, Linden Hills, Loring Park, Lowry Hill, Steven's Square and West Maka Ska neighborhoods.
A pillar of her campaign messaging was revitalizing downtown — where about 15,000 of her constituents live — and enhancing its livability.
She is taking over at a critical time for the state's largest business hub. Some of the area's office towers are struggling with lower property values and diminished occupancy, and the neighborhood's biggest employer, Target Corp., is still largely operating in hybrid mode.
But there's good news, too: Research by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, which tracked cellphone activity across 62 downtown metropolitan areas in the U.S., found that Minneapolis had the highest level of activity increase among all cities between March 2023 and February 2024. Of particular note was when the activity improvement happened: After work hours and on weekends. Minneapolis still ranks near the bottom for working hours activity.
Cashman recently sat down with the Business Journal to talk about the challenges facing downtown and what she thinks the city can do to help. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing downtown? I hear from downtown residents every day about safety challenges, so I would say that's our biggest challenge. But also for visitors and tourists to our city there are perceived safety challenges and that includes light rail ridership, drug dealing, vandalism, all kinds of criminal behavior that makes people think downtown is scary. So we have to hold two things to be true at the same time, one that those challenges are very real, and people who live in Loring Park and in the Warehouse District are dealing with severe livability challenges, but also, that this is a dense urban area and that it actually, according to statistics, is safe.
How can the city help battle that perception issue? The events that are going to be hosted downtown this summer bring a lot of people here. When people start to see that they have a really good time downtown, it does attract a lot of people. And so the more people we can attract to be here for an event then that gets them excited about Minneapolis.
Do you think the safety challenges are more real or perceived? I think it's both real and perceived safety challenges. The real challenges, I think, are for people who live here, and perceived challenges is probably for our reputation within the suburbs and broader regional area. But there are actually really positive crime statistics for 2024 so far in downtown, and I think this really has to do with partnership of safety models.
The success of the central business district has historically relied on private businesses. What role do you think the city can play in helping getting people back to the office? The best way to get people to come back downtown is to make downtown the place they want to be. I heard from a commercial real estate broker the other day that the new thing that office tenants are looking for is green space, so that's really exciting to me as an environmentalist. As we're reimagining Nicollet Mall right now, how can we have more greenery downtown and attract more people to be in offices with that allure? I think that's a big benefit of downtown and attracts people to come back to the office.
For me personally, as a policymaker, I think a lot about removing barriers to downtown activity. How we can make things a little easier for street food workers, for example? Another sort of barrier I'd like to remove is about signage — helping buildings get permission to do more signage, so when people come downtown, they have a good experience, they know where they're going. Especially in the skyway level, it is just full of small businesses, but we don't advertise for them on the outside of buildings, so I'm working to remove some of those restrictions around signage and help individual building owners actually navigate the legal systems around these types of things.
Property values at some of Minneapolis' most notable skyscrapers are falling. What do you think can be done to help reverse that? I'm working on office to residential conversion and supporting developers to do that. My role in that as a policymaker is making it easier through our zoning code for them to get the permissions.