| | Lexington Park: Beginning a Vision for an Urban Village... | View and Critique the Drawings
Community Meeting Set!! (see below)
Taking its name from the old St. Paul Saint’s ballpark that used to thrill the baseball- loving citizens of St. Paul, Lexington Park is a mixed-income, mixed-use urban development designed to reconnect neighborhoods torn by the interstate highway.
Lexington Park will help create a new residential St. Paul micro-neighborhood, anchoring the important intersection of Lexington Avenue and University Avenue. Lexington Park will be the initial significant catalyst for the successful development of an almost forty-acre area between Lexington Avenue on the east, Syndicate Avenue on the west, University Avenue on the north, and the I-94 interstate highway to the south.
Lexington Park will include a variety of housing types, building styles and heights, and pricing. It will include neighborhood scale commercial enterprise. It will include a new richly landscaped “Lexington Park”, surrounded by homeownership opportunity. It will include modestly and moderately priced rental units. What is now a wasteland of parking lots, abandoned strip-malls, and ugliness will be transformed into human-scale, pedestrian-friendly, and transit-friendly tree-lined streets. It will be a great place to live and work.
Lexington Park will gracefully integrate over 300 units of new housing and 6 to 8 neighborhood-scale commercial businesses with the existing single-family homes to the south, and with existing medical facilities and businesses to the west. It will re-create the historical street-grid pattern abandoned in this area, by continuing Aurora Avenue through and west of Lexington Avenue.
Lexington Park adheres to all of the city and neighborhood plans designed for the area over the past thirty years. It complements the neighborhoods to the south, neighborhoods to the north, and extends the vision of Lexington Avenue as a key St. Paul residential boulevard.
This urban village design will begin to transform the vacant lots and buildings into a positive force for the neighborhood, University Avenue, and the City of St. Paul.
Lexington Park will:
Ø Create 300-325 units of housing
Ø Include 60-75 units of homeownership town homes and condos
Ø Include 220-250 units of rental housing
Ø Include 12,000-16,000 square feet of neighborhood-scale businesses
Ø Create a new park, “Lexington Park”, that will be surrounded by the homeownership units
Ø Hide most vehicle parking internally in the blocks, or under the buildings
Funding for Lexington Park is expected to include:
Ø Private and public mortgage financing
Ø Private investment
Ø Tax Increment Financing
Ø A wide variety of other federal, state, and local funding
Partners in the conceptual design for Lexington Park include:
Ø University United
Ø Central Community Housing Trust
Ø Peter Musty
The developer of Lexington Park is the Central Community Housing Trust, a nonprofit developer of quality, neighborhood-based and affordable housing. The Trust has developed over 1,100 units of housing. CCHT’s latest project is East Village in Minneapolis’ Elliot Park neighborhood, an award-winning mixed-income, mixed-use housing development that includes 180 units of housing, three commercial businesses, 350 spaces of underground parking, a heavily-landscaped greenway that connects a public high-rise housing to Elliot Park, and transit-oriented design.
The Lexington Park plan is a substantial vision and able to be implemented. It is NOT, however, a completed vision. To make it even better requires the thinking and efforts of a broad range of neighborhood residents and visionaries, in addition to the experience and commitment of the design partners, neighborhood organizations, and the developer.
To view pieces of the Lexington Park vision, or to provide input or comment, or to ask questions, call Gina at 612-341-3148, ext. 204.
Central Community Housing Trust
505 East Grant Street
Minneapolis, MN 55404
Phone: 612-341-3148 Fax: 612-341-4208
Web Site: www.ccht.org
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