We were driving by an intersection nearby and my husband said, “I can’t see why they’re tearing down the Prudential building. It’s in such good shape.” True. The building that was the corporate headquarters for Prudential in Minnesota was only forty years old and still looked like an attractive structure. But the destruction has begun.
Although the building is still viable, it sits on 43.75 acres of land within the Hwy 494 loop around the Twin Cities. Perhaps a large corporation would still invest in a private campus of this size, but the likelyhood of a current buyer, with the money, and (perhaps most importantly) the compatibility with the structure, is improbable. Technology changes alone make a forty-year old commercial building sorely lacking.
But it’s really about the land.
In 1980, much of the surrounding land was undeveloped. There were scatterings of buildings and a few housing developments, but this was truly the outskirts of the metro area. Bass Lake Townhomes, for instances were built in 1990. The commercial strip mall across Bass Lake Road to the north was built in 2001.
Once the present use of the Prudential site changed, and the company no longer had value in it, then value became what an outside party could do with the parcel. And this is what is proposed.
There are plans for two large apartment buildings. There is a retail and a grocery. There is space for restaurants and other commercial. The pressure to release this resource from a one-site parcel to a multi-use asset is tremendous. Thus the value of the large, seemingly viable, structure diminishes to nothing.
What’s interesting to note is that Prudential did nothing to make this happen. It occured because of neighbors.
Home Economics 