The population of the downtown St. Paul neighborhood grew from about 4000 in 2010 2000 to over 10,000 today. There are apartment buildings and condos. There are office buildings and factories that have been converted to housing. In fact over all housing has done well downtown.
There is also a lot of vacant retail and office space. With fewer downtown workers the skyways are quiet with pockets of activity. The co-working space I used to use downtown closed during the pandemic. The building is now vacant except for a restaurant on the first floor.
According to the Downtown Alliance, there are 55,000 downtown workers. Yet there are miles of mostly empty skyways. At street level, there are plenty of vacant buildings and empty storefronts.
The most activity downtown can be found near Rice Park and in the Lowertown area with the ball park Farmer’s market and Union Depot.
Over all downtown is looking clean and in good repair. The parks look amazing and thanks to the Downtown Alliance you won’t find any litter on the streets. There isn’t any kind of a police presence at the street level but Saint Paul PD can be found in the skyways.
