Politics & Government

Traffic Concerns Surmountable for 34-Unit Woodale Ave Housing Complex

The St. Louis Park city council sounded sympathetic to the possibility of rezoning the Most Holy Trinity plot to residential.

Plans for a 34-unit housing complex at the intersection of Wooddale and Utica avenues seem to have the support of the St. Louis Park city council despite concerns about exacerbating traffic on Excelsior Boulevard.

Council members spoke positively of the potential to rezone residential a plot of land previously occupied by “The Church of the Most Holy Trinity” during a work session on Monday.

A developer is hoping to build two- and three-bedroom townhouses and condos in six buildings on the site. The homes would be owner-occupied and sold at prices between $320,000 and $500,000.

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“I think we looked at as a good mixed residential and transitional use,” said Meg McMonigal, the city’s planning and zoning supervisor.

Council members were happy that the homes would not be rentals but worried that traffic would worsen in the area, specifically at the intersection of Excelsior and Wooddale.

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“That right-out [from Wooddale onto Excelsior] might make more enemies of perfect strangers than any other in the city,” council member Jake Spano said. “I don’t know how many times I’m sitting there like, ‘Come on, come on!’”

Mayor Jeff Jacobs also had a colorful condemnation of the intersection.

“It’s a consistent place where the moon doesn’t shine,” he said. “Getting out of the intersection is just awful.”

City manager Tom Harmening said he thought that traffic would not be made drastically worse by a housing complex.

“That area is a highly complex series of intersections,” Harmening said. “I think the answer is, ‘it’s probably doing the best it can do.’”

Council member Anne Mavity attended two neighborhood meetings on the project and said she believed it was “a new housing option that we don’t have in our community right now.”

“The neighborhood raised a ton of issues, mainly on traffic and density,” she said. “The developer came back, and my reading was a third of the room was like, ‘Great, looks great,’ something less than a third still had some problems and the rest were like, ‘Whatever’—it wasn’t like pitchforks.”

But traffic issues were enough for council member Steve Hallfin, a resident of the neighborhood, to say he opposed rezoning.

“Traffic’s already horrible, and we’re going to be adding up to 71 new cars for this project,” he said. “It’s not easy to get out of our neighborhood in the morning, and it’s not easy to get in in the evening—if there was a way to keep it commercial, that’s my preference because traffic’s opposite.”

The rezoning decision will come before the council on July 15.


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