Star Tribune
Duluth City Council approves tax breaks for housing development on Central High School site
DULUTH — The stage is set for what could be the city’s largest private housing development, with more than a thousand apartments and condos planned for a prime hilltop site with a sweeping view of Duluth and Lake Superior.
The project, with a potential investment of $500 million, cleared a major hurdle Monday with City Council approval of tax subsidies totaling $26 million for the first phase of the 1,200-1,300-unit development.
“The city of Duluth has been waiting for 13 years for something to happen here,” Councilor Arik Forsman said. “This is the right project.”
The developer is New York-based Luzy Ostreicher of Chester Creek View LLC and Incline Plaza Development LLC. He bought 53 acres of the former Central High School hillside property for $8 million last March from the Duluth school district. The 50-year-old school was demolished in 2022 after sitting empty since 2011. Developers have said the site is difficult with its rocky, marshy landscape, and two major development deals for the site fell through.
Incline Village is expected to include market-rate housing to be built in three phases over seven to 10 years. It would also house 80,000 square feet of retail space and several public spaces, including a trailhead pavilion and potentially an amphitheater.
The first round of subsidies are intended to pay Ostreicher back for infrastructure such as utility connections. Subsequent TIF districts still need to be approved. Tax subsidies are expected to account for about one-third, or up to $50 million, of the developer’s financing gap. That gap is projected to be up to $130 million, according to the city.
One of Ostreicher’s previous projects includes 700 condos in Spring Valley, New York. He also owns Duluth’s Endi and Kenwood Village apartment and retail complexes, although he didn’t develop the properties. Those investments and others total $85 million spent in the city, evidence of Ostreicher’s financial credibility, said David Montgomery, Duluth’s Chief Administrative Officer.
Some had questioned the developer’s financial capabilities, he wrote in a letter to councilors Monday.
The majority of councilors were enthusiastic about the project, but some wanted to delay their decision in hopes an affordability requirement could become part of the agreement. The city is using redevelopment tax increment financing, which doesn’t require any of the units to fit affordability guidelines.
“The challenging nature of the site and the consequent costs to construct on such a site makes low income/affordable housing economically difficult,” Montgomery wrote, noting at the meeting that the developer would entertain that type of housing in future phases.
The multi-building project is undergoing an Alternative Urban Areawide Review to study how different development scenarios will affect the environment. The project is contingent on approval of that review.
The planned public amenities are required by the agreement, but details, including financing and design, aren’t finalized. The trailhead will connect to the Duluth Traverse and other trails.
Construction on the first set of apartments and condos encompassing 340 units and 30,000 square feet of retail is set to begin this summer. Demand will indicate how soon the remaining phases are built. The school district recently developed a back portion of the property for an administrative building, so will share space with the development.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
