Dave Higgins is the face of the new St. Paul Downtown Development Corporation

Yahoo

24-02-2025

For the past 20 years, Dave Higgins has dug deep into major real estate projects, especially those involving a partnership of some kind between local government and the private sector to convert buildings to new uses. A real estate attorney by training, he worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the real estate group of the global law firm DLA Piper before spending most of the past 10 years as a vice president of development with the Minnesota companies Roers and McGough.
Still, despite his hefty experience, the next challenge on his plate will be unlike most any he's come across to date. He's the new president and public face — and sole employee to date — of the St. Paul Downtown Development Corporation, a new nonprofit redevelopment effort of the city's Downtown Alliance. In short: it's his job to help fill thousands of square feet of empty downtown real estate, in part through office-to-residential conversions.
'I have great confidence that downtown St. Paul is poised for a significant transformation,' said Higgins, who foresees himself as a future link between investors, the public sector and private developers. 'It's undeniable that the past several years have been hard on downtown St. Paul – not unlike many cities across the country.'
'But the silver lining of this challenge is twofold,' he said. 'First, we have a large-scale opportunity to reimagine downtown into a modern, thriving environment that will benefit our region for decades to come. Second, we can embrace proven tools that have successfully revitalized other downtowns and put them to work in St. Paul.'
Would that include buying buildings outright for repurposing or even demolition?
'It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility,' Higgins said. 'Wherever we can, our goal is to set the table … and provide support and provide guidance and provide leadership for solutions to redevelopment. We'll have ability to do (acquisitions). It's not our first focus. We're not going to compete with either market actors or the public partners that are involved. We're looking to complement.'
Joe Spencer, president of the Downtown Alliance, said the launch of the Downtown Development Corporation flows from a Downtown Investment Strategy the alliance published last March that aims for more vitality, pedestrian connections and office-to-residential building conversions.
That was followed last fall by a Gensler study that evaluated 20 downtown buildings and prioritized 10 by the likelihood they'd be strong candidates for conversion.
'That gives us some focus to some of our efforts,' Spencer said.
Around the same time, Madison Equities — downtown St. Paul's largest private property owner — listed most of its downtown properties on the market en masse, revealing in its sales offering that most of the 10 buildings sat fully vacant or largely unoccupied.
As far as real estate occupancy goes, 'the part of downtown that is west — the Rice Park district, the event district — is actually doing quite well,' Spencer said. 'You're seeing good occupancy. Similarly, in Lowertown, despite a bunch of restaurants that have closed, which is a bummer, there's good occupancy in the apartments. But in the core of downtown, it's a real crisis.'
Higgins, in an interview last week, declined to lay out exactly what kinds of tools he most fancies to turn that around, though he said he's hoping to 'bring a different approach to the way in which projects are financed and processed, to leverage tools that exist in the marketplace,' he said, and he's planning to 'raise capital to bring another source to the table.'
His experience in Boston and New York, where he spent several years in the industry, exposed him to tricks of the trade for large-scale redevelopment projects that may or may not be suited to St. Paul, but plenty of other cities closer in size to the capital city have experimented with their own approaches.
Cities around the country, 'they're all doing a couple different things,' he said. 'One is to look at efficiencies in process, and the other is financial. Are there tools they have to augment what's feasible? There's a significant drop-off nationally in development. It doesn't make for good process or policy to wait for an unknown number of years for things to change.'
'We're not the only downtown to be struggling in the last five or six years,' he added. 'There's a number of cities out there that have some tools and methods to catalyze development that maybe haven't been tried locally.'
He's not just talking about leading studies of what exists and downtown and what could exist, or analyzing permitting processes and the behind-the-scenes work of City Hall, though all of that is likely.
'In thriving times, where everything is going great, there's no reason to evaluate,' he said. 'In challenging times, it makes sense to evaluate if there's anything that can be done to facilitate progress. … In the real estate climate, for physical products, if it's not working, you need to evaluate how business is done, period.'
Just as importantly, converting a historic office building into new residences, for instance, is a costly, complicated affair that might involve convincing hesitant private sector developers there's different layers of funding available, from state and federal historic tax credits to private lending. Fundraising will likely be part of his job.
'It's going to take capital,' Higgins said. 'It's going to take meeting regularly and meaningfully with the capital community. Obviously, the city stakeholders are involved, and it means meeting with them regularly as well.'
'The scale of the problem is the scale of the opportunity,' Higgins added, noting some have described downtown as being in crisis. 'Whether it's a crisis or not, it is equally a massive opportunity.'
Spencer noted that despite serving as a subsidiary of the Downtown Alliance — a partnership between City Hall and downtown building owners and employers like Securian and Ecolab — the new nonprofit will have its own board under the alliance's partial oversight and operate on grant funding, as opposed to the fees charged to downtown property owners for the Downtown Improvement District.
In December, the Downtown Alliance announced Kris Zagyva — who has overseen Block-by-Block street ambassadors in markets from Hollywood to Houston — as the new general manager of the Downtown Improvement District, which recently expanded to span more of downtown St. Paul into Lowertown.
In addition to street ambassadors greeting visitors, picking up litter, removing graffiti, providing safety escorts to walk people to their cars and conducting welfare checks on homeless individuals who may be in distress, the district maintains a Safety Communications Center that connects street ambassadors, downtown street outreach services, private building security teams and the St. Paul Police department.
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