Hot property: Shops at Village Creek
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March 6, 2009 Where: Southeast corner of Brooklyn Boulevard and Zane Avenue
N. in Brooklyn Park |
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Details: Brooklyn Park officials have approved plans for a key element of the city's ambitious, 133-acre Village Creek mixed-use redevelopment project: a 24,500-squarefoot retail/office building, that it's hoped will be anchored by a Hennepin County Medical Center clinic. The Shops at Village Creek is the first of three planned mixed-use structures meant to provide the commercial element of the redevelopment, but is the only one so far to come close to reality. Plans call for it to hold down the "new urbanist" project's far northwest corner, at the busy Brooklyn Boulevard-Zane Avenue N. intersection. HCMC has provided a letter of intent to put a 12,500-square-foot clinic in the first floor of the building, but a lease has not been signed, according to hospital spokesman Tom Hayes. Because of that, he said, HCMC officials wouldn't comment about the project. Neither would the Beard Group, Village Creek's Hopkins-based master developer. But Brooklyn Park Planning Director Cindy Sherman said the addition of an HCMC clinic would be a big "get" for the Village Creek project, which has already seen the construction of about 100 of the planned 157 townhouses and row houses, as well as the majority of the 137 planned units of the Town Gardens urban-style neighborhood by Ryland Homes. "We're really excited to have HCMC moving in," Sherman said. "The clinic will bring quality jobs and businesses into that area. They're a good anchor tenant for that location, and we think it will be a catalyst for the rest of the Village Creek development." She pointed to the addition of a Smile Clinic dental office along Brooklyn Boulevard last year and an agreement with a developer to build a two-story medical building on the site of a Burger King as indications that Village Creek still has momentum in the face of the economic downturn. Retail is also in the plans for the Shops atVillage Creek. A Beard Group representative last month told city officials that restaurants and other retailers would be approached to take space adjacent to the clinic, and that medical service providers would be a good fit in the second-floor offices above an HCMC clinic. -DON JACOBSON |
