Downtown Reports

Beginning in early 2023 the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance lead the effort, in partnership with public and private stakeholders, to create a Downtown Investment Strategy that furthers density, vitality, and desirability in downtown Saint Paul. This comprehensive report outlines three key priority areas for the public and private sectors to work on together to dramatically increase density, vitality and desirability downtown: 1) converting office space into housing; 2) investing in pedestrian-oriented streetscape improvements; and 3) advancing downtown Saint Paul’s most strategic redevelopment opportunities.

Downtown Saint Paul worked with the International Downtown Association to compare our downtown stacks up against 44 other downtowns and city centers as part of their Downtown Vitality Index.

From IDA:

Despite a relatively small share of a city’s overall geography, downtowns deliver significant economic and community impacts across both city and region. Beyond being great places, what key characteristics make a downtown vital, strong and active? Downtowns and commercial districts should have dynamic economies that create opportunity; make it available to everyone; and draw people for work, play, and living.

The IDA Vitality Index, powered by Stantec, functions as an interactive, online tool for benchmarking the vitality of downtowns across the United States. The Vitality Index builds on IDA’s pioneering research in The Value of U.S. Downtowns and City Centers, and measures vitality through three principles that study identified: Economy, Inclusion and Vibrancy.

Through these three principles, each comprising five core indicators, the Vitality Index aims to capture the pulse of the downtown and enable urban place managers to quantify and benchmark a district’s performance against peer cities. The Index uses a benchmarking system to understand how each of the three principles contributes to an overall combined score calculated by comparing each metric to the national average. Most valuable, it establishes a baseline and provides a data-driven method for a community to measure its improvement over time.

Downtown Saint Paul was compared to the peer cities of Austin, Birmingham, Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, Minneapolis, Norfolk, Richmond, and Tampa, which were most similar to Saint Paul in terms of population, jobs and density. Despite its larger size, Minneapolis was included due to its proximity to and regional significance for Saint Paul.

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