LASALLE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT, a global real estate investment manager, is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its business and collaborating with stakeholders to sustainably manage properties. LaSalle’s sustainability team relies on property managers and building staff to support and implement sustainable operations. LaSalle’s Sustainability Management Program engages these teams by conducting property-specific outreach on a quarterly basis and providing all properties with training, tools, and resources, such as its GreenGuide, which highlights 10 best practices, from energy efficiency to staff education strategies.
MoZaic is an office building in Minneapolis adjacent to the bustling Midtown Greenway. To leverage access to the Greenway, MoZaic’s developer worked to include a pedestrian and bicyclist bridge and ramp from the project site to the path, giving walkers and cyclists direct access to the building. The Midtown Greenway allows commuters to reach MoZaic from the Uptown Transit Center by foot or bike, and the growing housing options in the area allow easy access to the building. There is a planned extension to be called MoZaic East that will open in 2017, expanding the development from 77,000 square feet to 200,000 square feet of office and retail space.
The Midtown Greenway is a commuter trail in Minneapolis that was built in stages between 2000 and 2007, with future extensions still to come. The Greenway provides healthy and safe automobile traffic–free connections between key destinations in south Minneapolis and facilitates access to the heart of downtown due to its links with other bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
The Midtown Greenway has come to be known as a “bicycle freeway” because it includes separate one-way paths for each direction of bicycle travel and a parallel two-way pedestrian path. The creation of the Greenway has led to an explosion of residential and commercial development along the surrounding corridor.
Block E is a large-scale, urban mixed-use project that combines retail, entertainment, hospitality, and parking uses. Located in downtown Minneapolis, it derives its name from the city block upon which it is built. The urban entertainment complex has little competition in the downtown and is rapidly becoming a key destination there. It contains a mix of stores, nightclubs, restaurants, and entertainment venues intended to appeal to people of all ages. Restaurants, bars, and stores fill the project’s first and second stories, while a 15-screen, 4,000-seat multiplex cinema is found on the third floor. A 255-room hotel occupies the fourth through 21st floors.
Seeking to create a town center, the city of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, entered into a public/private partnership with TOLD Development Company to develop Excelsior and Grand, a $150 million mixed-use project on 16 acres (6.5 hectares) that contains apartments, condominiums, retail space, and a town green that links to an existing city park. Designed by Elness Swenson Graham Architects, Inc. (ESG), this four-phase project will consist of 86,000 square feet (7,990 square meters) of retail space, 337 apartments, and approximately 330 for-sale units. Already completed, the first two phases comprise all of the aforementioned apartments, 124 condominiums, and over 65,000 square feet (6,093 square meters) of retail space. Furthermore, it provides the city of St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb west of Minneapolis, with a pedestrian-friendly downtown.
Located along the Mississippi River, West River Commons is a mixed-use project consisting of 53 rental apartments, three for-sale townhomes, and four retail tenants. A public/private project developed by the Lander Group and At Home Apartments, West River Commons opened in 2004 as a key redevelopment on a major Minneapolis, Minnesota, commercial corridor. Through its pedestrian-friendly design, the project connects with the surrounding neighborhood, and a public plaza on site serves as a community focal point.
The Rose is a 90-unit mixed-income apartment project, part of a multiphase redevelopment project that includes 47 affordable units and 43 market-rate units in a two building configuration. The Rose is also an example of an ambitious effort to build sustainably, and the developer has set out to meet many of the stringent sustainability standards of the Living Building Challenge within three to five years of opening. Unlike many sustainable buildings, the Rose kept overall construction costs generally in line with comparable affordable housing projects. The Rose succeeds at balancing the aspirational requirements of green building with the need to be cost-efficient and replicable across the affordable housing industry.
