Super Bowl’s Minneapolis Stadium Brings a Surge in Development<br />Yet approval of the spending helped persuade Ryan Companies, a design, development<br />and construction firm, to acquire five blocks from the Star Tribune Media Company just west of the stadium to make way for a $588 million development, said Mike Ryan, the market leader for the north region at the firm.<br />“But I would guess that the wave of development we’ve seen would not have happened without that five-block urban campus and park.”<br />According to the organization, the population in East Town grew 30 percent to 8,500 from 2000 through 2014,<br />and housing demand could support more than 3,000 new apartments over the next 12 years.<br />“If you had an aerial picture of this area 10 years ago, probably 15 blocks were surface parking lots,<br />and now there are maybe five,” said George Sherman, principal of Sherman Associates, a developer in East Town.<br />“When we first looked at the opportunity, we thought there was too much land — there was going to be a great new stadium,<br />but there was nothing to prevent the area from being another sea of surface parking,” Mr. Ryan said.<br />“But having a major public green space at its core is the reason developers want to be there.”<br />The Downtown East project, completed in late 2016, provided the development community with a boost<br />of confidence, said Dan Collison, executive director of the East Town Business Partnership.
