Downtown Minneapolis boosters are on a public relations campaign to get people to come back to the center of the city this summer.
Driving the news: A “Minneapolis Momentum” Public relations campaign, funded by several business groups, launched this week.
- It aims to attract suburban residents by asking people to share their Minneapolis photos and stories, putting some of them on billboards.
State of play: A new normal is taking hold in downtown Minneapolis. People are back, businesses have reopened, and with the increase in crowds there is a greater sense of safety.
- I’ve visited downtown a few times over the past two weeks and found it to be a much livelier vibe than the previous two summers.
Reality check: Downtown is definitely not a “dystopian hellscape“, but he remains a shell of himself, and anything resembling a full rebound appears years from now, if it ever does.
- That’s because downtown has relied on office workers for decades, even as the residential population explodes on the outskirts of downtown.
- A comprehensive airway system of hundreds of restaurants and shops served the downtown working crowd almost exclusively. Many of these windows remain dark.
By the numbers: While the Minneapolis Downtown Council says more than 50% of office workers are back downtown, the organization doesn’t have data on how many days a week those workers come into the office.
- “As we investigate, we find that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the most important days people choose to come back to the office,” said Leah Wong, the council’s vice president of external relations.
Between the lines: A strong indicator is parking revenue from city-owned meters and garages.
- Parking revenue from January to March was still down 40% from the same period in 2019, although it was up 50% from a year ago.
Zoom out: This is not a problem unique to Minneapolis. A recent surveyy of HR managers by a nonprofit business research group The Conference Board found that only 4% of companies require their employees to return to the office full-time and less than half require employees to be in the office five days a week.
- Another one new study found that the Twin Cities actually had one of the highest return-to-work rates in the country.
The other side: None of this is to say that downtown is doomed. Developers like Hines and Sherman Associates, who have been building downtown for decades, are making big bets on the city’s future with new office, residential and commercial developments.
- The Downtown Council says 400 downtown restaurants and retailers are open, including the new Four Seasons restaurants, Mara and Socca Café, by chef Gavin Kaysen.
What to watch: The Downtown Council promotes a range of hundreds of events to guests all summer long, hoping to change perceptions of downtown.
- “When they start coming back with more regularity, they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s not what it was, but it’s definitely better than I expected,'” Wong said.
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