City outlines 2050 plan for Cedar Avenue corridor and future growth.
By now, it’s old news that U.S. multifamily developers are holding their fire amid high interest rates and economic uncertainty. The Twin Cities metro is no exception: Cities across the 13-county region approved just six multifamily units in July, down from 154 a year earlier.
The slower pace is more noticeable in the core cities and inner suburbs, where infill multifamily was a key growth engine earlier this decade. Development in the outer suburbs has held up better thanks to a decent pipeline for lower-density housing, private commercial and industrial projects, and a mini-boom in the civic sector.
Lakeville has seen its fair share of all three.
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An ambitious industrial proposal, but no data centers (yet)
With more than 40 proposed, approved or under-construction tracts in the city’s pipeline, much of the residential action is in the single-family space. Denser housing projects are also moving forward, like the roughly 100 combined townhome and twinhome units the Lakeville City Council approved in May.
The city’s highest-profile recent and proposed projects, however, are commercial, industrial and civic. The biggest — and least certain at the moment — is a San Francisco developer’s proposal to bring at least 1.3 million square feet of industrial and possibly office to a 152-acre site on the city’s southern fringe, between Kaparia and Jacquard avenues south of 215th Street.
The developer, Olam Holdings 1 LLC, completed an Alternative Urban Areawide Review for the site in June. Finance & Commerce reported in March that one scenario envisions four buildings between 210,000 and 250,000 square feet on the site’s south side and four buildings between 100,000 and 140,000 square feet on the north side. The other envisions seven buildings between 100,000 and 375,000 square feet.
“Getting the AUAR out of the way gives [Olam] the ability to do the platting,” said Tina Goodroad, Lakeville community development director. The timeline for that is uncertain, however, and likely depends on how quickly the developer can line up potential users for the site.
One thing Goodroad said is probably not coming to the Olam site is a large-scale data center. The city has been in talks with brokers about potential data center sites around town, but short-term power availability for the notoriously energy-intensive facilities has proved to be a sticking point. One candidate site had a five-year wait for power upgrades, Goodroad said.
“We just haven’t had the same level of serious interest in data centers that some of our neighbors have had — not because we’re preventing it, just because it’s not the right site at the right time,” Goodroad said.
Other south metro cities have indeed had better luck attracting data center proposals, if not finished projects.
Meta is building an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot data facility in Rosemount and earlier this year bought more land nearby that could host additional IT capacity. A Denver-based developer’s controversial proposal for a multi-building data campus in Farmington received key city and Metropolitan Council approvals earlier this year before getting bogged down in lawsuits filed by local opponents. The same developer has proposed similarly-sized facilities in Rosemount and Cannon Falls, according to the Star Tribune, while Oppidan hopes to build slightly smaller — but still massive — campuses in Hampton and Apple Valley.
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First responders, utilities and pickleball
Lakeville might not be the Twin Cities’ next IT hotspot, but it’s still pushing plenty of dirt. The city itself is directly involved in at least four significant planned or under-construction projects within its borders.
One is a revamp of its popular Antlers Park to add a new pavilion, shelter buildings and “so many amenities,” Goodroad said. Another is the city’s newest green space, Grand Prairie Park, which is undergoing phased development near the intersection of 185th Street and Cedar Avenue. Ten pickleball courts opened there in August, with the south metro’s first proper cricket pitch to follow soon.
Lakeville is also building tens of thousands of square feet of indoor civic space.
Its fire department modernization project will combine two older stations into one larger, state-of-the-art facility on a 12-acre site across from the city’s central maintenance plant and a new water treatment facility at 7570 179th St. W. The city expects construction to begin next year and continue in parallel with two other fire station modernization projects.
Lakeville will also host the FiRST Center, 40,000 square-foot regional public safety training hub at 7777 214th Street West. With an armory, firing range, tactical training grounds and specialized facilities for fire and EMS training, the city says the FiRST Center will fill a critical public safety gap in the south metro.
Not far from the future FiRST Center is one of the larger private, non-industrial projects currently planned for Lakeville: the new headquarters for Dakota Electric Association, the cooperative electricity provider for much of Dakota County. The 176,700-square-foot building will have office, warehouse and storage space commensurate with a growing utility serving a growing part of the metro, Jon Beyer, Dakota Electric’s vice president for energy and member services, said in April.
The Dakota Electric project begins heavy work just as national cold storage developer RL Cold wraps construction on its 292,000-square-foot campus in the Airlake Industrial Park. As the FiRST Center will do for public safety, the RL Cold project fills a need in what the company said last year is an “underserved” regional market for climate-controlled food warehousing. Goodroad said the company is now in the process of cooling the facility — a lengthy endeavor for a building with 50-foot clear heights and enough space to fit 34,000 pallets.
Rounding out Lakeville’s slate of major commercial construction projects is the Lakeville 35 Logistics Center, a 190,000-square-foot spec building at 21300 Juniper Way. The project already has one confirmed user: a 42,000-square-foot pickleball gym that the city granted a conditional use permit in July.
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“Still room to grow”
Looking ahead, Goodroad said Lakeville’s 2050 comprehensive planning process is a chance for the city to take stock of its place in the south metro.
Of particular interest is Cedar Avenue between 185th and 200th Streets, which the 2040 comprehensive plan designated for “higher-intensity development — a corridor type of land use that allows mixed-use commercial [and] higher-density residential,” Goodroad said.
City planners based that designation on what seemed like a safe assumption at the time: a future extension of the Red Line bus rapid transit corridor into Lakeville’s southern reaches. The Metropolitan Council shelved that concept during the COVID-19 pandemic and seems unlikely to revisit it anytime soon. The city has hired an outside firm to develop a small area plan and market analysis in the coming months, Goodroad said.
“We are doing 2050 [planning] assuming [the Red Line extension] is not going to happen at all,” she said. “It’s an important study in order to help landowners understand how the city wants to guide development so they and developers are on the right path.”
It remains to be seen exactly how things shake out in that part of town, which — along with the adjacent northwestern corner of Farmington — retains an agricultural character that looks increasingly out of step with the housing and commercial subdivisions encroaching on all sides.
But Goodroad isn’t overly concerned. She estimated Lakeville has more than 3,500 combined acres of residential- and industrial-guided land to develop between now and 2050.
“There’s still room to grow here,” she said.
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