Recognized by Minnesota's Metropolitan Council for Significantly Contributing to Smart Growth

Excerpt from the Metro Council Smart Growth Program

Just off Elm Creek Boulevard in Maple Grove a new kind of neighborhood containing retail stores, townhouses and small offices opened this year on land formerly used as a gravel mining pit.

The retail area, dubbed "Main Street," has a particularly rich and eye-catching architectural style. It looks more like a miniature version of Edina’s 50th and France neighborhood than the typical suburban-style development. Each storefront has brightly colored awnings and a variety of facades ranging from brick to stucco. The sidewalk boasts wide, beautiful brick patterns and benches for resting, chatting or pondering life.

A New Type of Development

It offers a new concept for suburban development. Rather than building another strip center, Maple Grove, Tiller Corporation and Opus Northwest LLC created what may offer a blueprint for a new form of development by offering the kind of charm, amenities and sense of community lacking in some areas.

The merchants on Main Street range from local to national chains. Panera Bread, the popular restaurant and coffeehouse with a stylish interior, takes up a corner. LeAnn Chin holds down a spot across the street. Schuler Shoes takes up nearly entire block with huge store with entrances at two corners. Several other stores – Funco Land, Ritz Camera, Aerial Communications, Aphrodite’s Day Salon – line the two-block "downtown" with offices for small businesses on the second floor and on the alley sides.

Downtown in the Suburbs

So how did this pleasant little retail area become part of Maple Grove?

Bob Waibel, Maple Grove’s city planner, would tell you his city’s Main Street offers precisely what most of the newer suburbs want and need. Stillwater and Edina both have vibrant downtown areas but many of the suburbs built after 1950 lack a physical place people can point to the center of town. As one of the fastest growing cities in the state, Maple Grove built plenty of housing and commercial office space throughout the 1990s. But the city lacked anything remotely like a downtown.

As Maple Grove began to study how to reuse a 2,000-acre gravel pit expected to cease operation within a decade, the idea of a downtown became a priority. Tiller Corporation signed Opus Northwest LLC on as a master developer of the first 75-acre phrase of a project called "Arbor Lakes." The developer submitted than 30 plans before the Maple Grove city council approved the final "main street" concept, according to Dan Queenan, a leasing agent with Opus.

For the main street to work, Opus put a bit of a twist on the design: the retail street would be surrounded, literally, by big box merchants. Across busy Elm Creek Boulevard stands a complex with Best Buy, Northwest Books, Office Depot, Timber Lodge Steakhouse, a huge multiplex theater complex and several other large format stores. Next to it is a Byerly’s and Babies R Us. You can walk to them from Main Street.

It’s a strange mixture of big stores funneling into small shops but is somehow works. "The big box development helps to make it affordable and it helps to make it economically feasible to have a main street," says Queenan. "The Best Buy, the Office Depot and the restaurant corridor on the south side move through to feed (customers) to Main Street."

The entire first phase cost $280 million. The bill for Main Street, says Queenan, was higher per square foot than the big box element of the development. Yet together they attract patrons and pay their fair share of the development costs.

Townhouses and City Offices

Helping move customers to the Main Street also will be two nearby townhouse developments, totaling 120 units, now being built by developer Hans Hagen. And the city’s own Government Center, hosting city offices, the police department and library, took a spot just up the street from downtown. City residents in downtown townhouses could live within walking distance of nearly everything they need in life, ranging from food to entertainment, education to clothing.

Arbor Lakes represents only the beginning of a massive expansion of Maple Grove. As Tiller Corporation's operations wind down, the land will become available for what amounts to a the creation of a new community. The next phase, 524 acres, will bring to Arbor Lakes 5,000 units of housing, says Waibel. Main Street will soon have neighbors.

And the suburbs will have a new example of a new downtown for a new era, with many of them planning something just like Maple Grove’s Main Street.

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