There’s a housing boom going on in the Twin Cities.
Every time I venture into Uptown, I see another new vaguely-industrial loft building. There are also a few going up in St. Paul.
Generic condos outside of downtown St. Paul
Most of the stylized faux-factory developments look the same, and I don’t really understand the architectural style.
These buildings are trendy, but boring. Most of these developments will also look ridiculous in 10 years.
Do you know how we roll our eyes at those 80’s brick skyscrapers? That’s what’s going to happen with the fake factory loft buildings.
The particular “loft” building in the picture is called West Side Flats. It’s on the opposite side of the river from downtown St. Paul, and despite having a few Hour Cars, it must be terribly isolated in the winter.
West Side Flats is a few hundred dollars cheaper per month than the core Lowertown buildings, but it’s far enough away from everything that it doesn’t make sense to live there unless you live at the US Bank or Comcast buildings on that side of the river.
The Rayette is a new condo building going up in St. Paul.
There’s also a new apartment building coming to Lowertown.
The building is called the Rayette Lofts, and it’s in a former parking garage right across the street from the downtown St. Paul Farmer’s Market.
The Rayette’s leasing office is near my building and the leasing company is extremely aggressive (much to the annoyance of my building management.)
The rival building kept putting sandwich boards in front of our building until our management started stealing them.
I went to see the Rayette show unit out of curiosity. The charming sales agent couldn’t make the mock apartment less underwhelming. The unit was smaller than my current apartment and far more expensive. (One bedrooms top $2,000k/month)
The Rayette show unit also didn’t have the same specs as the real building (flooring, windows, ceiling height, cabinets) so only information that I got from the staged unit that the Rayette is another spendy, generic luxury building.
I don’t know whether downtown St. Paul really has the demand to support all of the new apartment units.
The prices for rentals in Lowertown are beginning to rival Uptown and the Warehouse District, and we have a dramatically smaller social/bar scene.
Another problem is that the condos in downtown St. Paul are relatively cheap, so people who have the means to spend $2,000 on rent will either buy (or rent) a condo instead of opting for the spendy building next door.
But who knows, perhaps I’m wrong about people’s tolerance for high rents in fake factories.
