Business and housing development – Part 1: The center of town - Eden Prairie Local News (2024)

What’s happening with that building? What’s going in there? What businesses are coming and going in EP? Those are the types of questions the Eden Prairie Chamber of Commerce seeks to answer with its Economic Development Bus Tour. The fifth annual iteration of the event was held this June, with David Lindahl, economic development manager for the City of Eden Prairie, acting as the tour emcee.Ride along on the tour in this three-part series to learn more. This is Part 1.

Current and former restaurants

This year’s Eden Prairie Chamber of Commerce Economic Development Bus Tour began and ended at Fat Pants Brewing Company, 8335 Crystal View Road, in a building that City Economic Development Manager David Lindahl recalled had housed at least three previous restaurants (Chevy’s, Panino Brothers, and the one no one on the tour could remember) and cited as “a great example of a reuse of an older building,” noting that Eden Prairie owners Don Anderson and Elizabeth Anderson Schmidt “did most of the sweat equity themselves” in transforming the space into its current iteration.

Nearby, Lindahl noted, another restaurant property – the previous home of the Eden Prairie branch of Green Mill restaurant – now houses an Xfinity store in about half the space at 8266 Commonwealth Drive. “The other half, we have not heard yet what’s happening there,” Lindahl said, noting that the approximately 3,000-square-foot space is large enough that it could host another restaurant.

Since the City of Eden Prairie does not license businesses, Lindahl said, city staff does not always know what’s happening with specific businesses, unless they need to apply for some type of building permit. “Otherwise, I gotta drive around and just check it out myself,” he said.

Along Prairie Center Drive

The bus tour’s first site was an area to the west of Prairie Center Drive, between Flying Cloud Drive and Columbine Road, along Commonwealth Drive. The roughly 18-acre area had housed Broadmoor Apartments and Castle Ridge Care Center since the 1980s. Presbyterian Homes & Services purchased the area and, Lindahl said, originally proposed to the city, in 2007, the construction of two 13-story residential towers. “And then they came back a number of years later and said ‘You know what? Our eyes were bigger than our stomach.’”

In the updated development plan, Presbyterian Homes constructed the Flagstone senior living complex along Commonwealth Drive. Timberland Partners purchased the section next door and built Paravel Apartments, which has 246 units. At the time of the tour, Lindahl said, Paravel was “probably about 65% leased.” Developers had initially anticipated, he said, some large homeowners in Eden Prairie wanting to switch to apartment living, such as the Paravel penthouses currently listed at $4,000 to $6,000 per month rent. With high interest rates, however, “The people that wanted to sell their big homes are having a harder time getting the price they want.”

Presbyterian Homes sold the remainder of the area to Oppidan, which built a Bank of America branch and a Chick-fil-A along Castlemoor Drive, at the southwest corner of the intersection of Prairie Center Drive and Flying Cloud Drive. They also built a building that still sits empty, which “we thought was going to be an Amazon Fresh,” Lindahl said, prior to the online retailer shutting down plans for such grocery stores. Amazon maintains a long-term lease with Oppidan, he said, and is trying to sublease the building. “We’ve heard rumors; Goodwill was looking at taking maybe half the space, so they were kicking tires, but it’s been very quiet for about three months, so I’m not sure,” Lindahl said. “Hopefully, it’s something that benefits the people that live here as well as others in Eden Prairie.”

As the bus traveled, Lindahl pointed out the site of another redevelopment: a building on Singletree Lane, near Walmart, that had housed various restaurants for approximately 20 years, including Jake’s City Grille and Doolittle’s, now holds Flying Cloud Animal Hospital and a Crisp & Green restaurant. The animal hospital relocated from its previous Flying Cloud Drive and Middleset Road location for additional space.

Town Center LRT Station and Plaza

While approaching Town Center Station, the first of three newly constructed light rail stations in Eden Prairie, Lindahl commented, “One thing Eden Prairie doesn’t have, I think most of you know, is a classic main street downtown like Hopkins or Excelsior. It’s hard to recreate that – those places developed over a long time – but we’re trying to create densities and enough critical mass to give a feel of kind of a downtown.”

One way to do that, he said, is with “vertical integration”: buildings that have commercial uses on the first level and apartments above. “For example, this building where Champps is,” he said. “Eventually, this building will be redeveloped, and it will likely go up quite a ways.”

Nearby, on a new section of the Town Center Place road west of Redstone American Grill, is the Town Center Light Rail Transit (LRT) Station. Lindahl, who has been a city employee since 1986, said, “In my career, I’ve been involved with a lot of development. The light rail was by far the biggest challenge and, in a lot of ways, the most rewarding. It’s just been very anticlimactic because the trains were supposed to be running last year, and they’re not going to be until 2027.”

In anticipation of light rail trains running, Town Center Station, which has only parallel on-street parking, and the new road were built as a drop-off area for people using transit. Options for those disembarking to reach their final destination, Lindahl said, could include electric bicycles, scooters, shuttles, SouthWest Transit’s SouthWest Prime, ride-sharing companies, “and walking, of course.”

Eventually, Lindahl said, the city might consider constructing a bridge to improve the pedestrian crossing from Town Center Place over Flying Cloud Drive toward Leona Road and the area where Best Buy sits. Right now, however, “A lot of work and planning went into this area. You can see that we have very large pedestrian walkways on each side,” he said. Eden Prairie also invested in landscaping, including flowers and planting boxes, along Town Center Place after trees were removed for the construction.

The northwest corner of Flying Cloud Drive and Town Center Place will also be home to a new public plaza. Later this year, Lindahl expects the Flying Red Horse sign, associated with a long-gone Mobil station and cafe, to be erected in that plaza, along with an interpretive sign.

Office Depot, Eden Prairie Center mall, and Lotus Villas housing

East of Flying Cloud Drive, on Leona Road, Lindahl pointed out the now-closed Eden Prairie Office Depot store. While retaining ownership of the site, he said, the company is repurposing the building.

“They’re going to take half of it down,” he said. “They’ve got a new tenant that’s going to take the remaining 18,000 square feet, and they’re going to build a commercial coffee facility on the other corner.”

The project has not yet gone before the city planning commission and both tenants are still undisclosed, Lindahl said. He noted, however, that the existing Caribou Coffee location in the adjacent shopping centerdid not have a clause in its tenant lease prohibiting another coffee retailer within a specific geographic area.

As the bus traveled south on Prairie Center Drive, it passed the east side of the Eden Prairie Center mall, where JCPenney remains closed following an April transformer fire outside the upper level. Eden Prairie Center’s senior general manager, Nancy Litwin, who was on the bus tour, relayed to Lindahl that Penney’s representatives are working with city officials for utility repairs but as yet have no reopening date.

The store likely will reopen, however, as the city’s redevelopment plans for the mall area “will take some time,” Lindahl said. “There’d be quite a while, I think, before they actually started knocking buildings down.”

That comment came in the context of what Lindahl called “the latest and greatest exciting potential project that we’re working on. As many of you know, malls across the country have struggled from the increase in online shopping. So we’ve been talking with the mall owners for years about the potential for redeveloping part of the mall and bringing in other areas that have kind of a synergistic relationship with retail.”

The current concept, he said, would replace existing mall retail spaces, including JCPenney, moving inward to the center court area, with a redevelopment that would include a hotel attached to the mall, residential spaces both near the mall and on the perimeter, about 50,000 square feet of new commercial retail, and potentially a 140,000-square-foot office building.

“Right now, that is the concept we’re looking at,” Lindahl said. “One of the issues is financial. To do all that (demolishing) is very expensive, and it puts holes in the deal.” The city would like to provide financial assistance to the redevelopment through tax-increment financing (TIF), but failed to gain an exemption in the past legislative session from laws that require TIF be applied to physically blighted areas, which Eden Prairie Center “really isn’t,” Lindahl said.

Questioned about a new office property in a soft market, Lindahl said, “What the developers tell us is there’s a flight to quality. Companies are leaving older offices, and they’re going to the offices that are the latest and greatest and have lots of amenities.”

He indicated plans to try again for an exemption on the blight requirement for TIF at the next legislative session and commented, “It’s very much in the city’s interest to have a very successful mall. This is a big investment for the community. It’s a big attraction.”

Those who attended the bus tour received a handout listing additional updates impacting Eden Prairie Center mall. Restaurants Gyu-Mai Japanese BBQ and Ichido Ramen are set to open in the fourth quarter of 2024, while five additional food uses are in various stages of lease negotiation. One is in the former Panera Bread space.

New openings include gluten-free restaurant Where’s The Flour in the food court, Shear Bliss hair salon in the former Master Cuts location, and Best Suits for men and boys in the upper level near Kohl’s. A Cell Expert store near T-Mobile and a Mobile Fix kiosk in the center court plan to open on July 1. Tactical Urban Combat in the mall’s lower level is scheduled to reopen on the same date, with the addition of laser tag.

Not far from the mall, the bus tour turned off Prairie Center Drive onto Prairie Lakes Drive and continued east, past PetSmart, into a residential area, where it visited the future site of the Lotus Villas housing development. Demolition crews were in the process of knocking down a long-vacant office building originally constructed in 1982. The 4.9-acre site, just southeast of the intersection of Prairie Lakes Drive and Kiawah Drive, will become 21 single-family homes.

“Anderson Lakes is just on the other side, so some of these lots and homes will have really nice views,” Lindahl said. “Really, what the city planners try to do is not necessarily just make a decision on what the neighbors would like or not like but just try to blend densities and make things work that way.”

In Part 2, the Economic Development Bus Tour visits the Golden Triangle.

Editor’s Note: David Lindahl is a member of Eden Prairie Local News’ board of directors.