Is a big box in hand worth two dozen urban blocks in the bush? That’s the question Saint Paul answered, mostly without saying so out loud, on August 28.
The St. Paul Planning Commission approved a modified conditional use permit letting LuLuLand Adventure Park take over 76,292 square feet of the former Herberger’s at Midway Marketplace, the trampoline park, ninja course and arcade concept that’s been advertised on a banner outside the building since July. The permit required a waiver of a specific zoning standard, Section 65.652 of the city’s zoning code, which caps indoor recreation uses in traditional neighborhood (“T”) districts at 40,000 square feet. LuLuLand’s proposed footprint is nearly double that.
Did I mention this former big box store has been largely vacant since 2018?
This piece isn’t an argument against LuLuLand. It’s an argument that Midway chose development now over the rules and plans the city set out for itself. Nobody, staff or Commission, ever explained the basis for the rule in question, much less why it should be flexed for this case in particular, with the area plans set aside just this once.
The Cap Isn’t Arbitrary. It’s a Pattern
Start with the rule itself, because nobody from the city at the hearing did.
Section 65.652’s 40,000 square foot limit on indoor recreation in T districts doesn’t stand alone. It sits alongside a whole family of similar size caps written into the same chapter for the same kind of district: general retail is capped at 20,000 square feet for new construction, restaurants at 15,000 square feet in T2 to T3, bars at 5,000 square feet. These aren’t independent numbers. They’re a consistent policy choice, repeated across use categories, that traditional neighborhood districts should accommodate a mix of moderately scaled uses rather than any single use claiming outsized floor area. If you’re going to ask why the recreation number is 40,000 and not 76,292, the retail and restaurant and bar numbers at least rule out one explanation: this isn’t some one-off number nobody thought about. It’s part of a recurring pattern across use categories in these districts. The structure of the code, at minimum, suggests a deliberate design rather than an accident.
That’s the basis the city never explained. It’s sitting in plain text, one chapter over from the number everyone was debating.
At the August 28 Planning Commission hearing, Commissioner Martinson asked the obvious question: the zoning code sometimes turns up mysteries like this one, and why would the city cap indoor recreation at 40,000 square feet when ordinary commercial buildings routinely get built far larger? Was there a public safety issue? Did staff know the history? Staff’s answer was candid: she hadn’t been with the city when the standard was set and couldn’t speak to its origin, though she guessed it was meant to limit the use’s impact on surrounding property, mainly traffic and crowds gathering at once. She recommended the modification anyway, and the actual history question was never resolved.
That guess doesn’t hold up well against the pattern above. General retail, a use that draws plenty of its own vehicle and foot traffic, is capped even tighter in these districts, at 20,000 square feet. If crowding and traffic were the whole explanation, retail should get more room to operate, not less. It’s the kind of exchange that’s easy to have in a packed hearing and easy to leave unanswered. But the room didn’t need to guess. The answer was one chapter away.
Why T4 Exists
If the cap’s basis was available and unexamined, so was the reason it sits inside T4 specifically, and that reason is just as concrete.
The T4 district itself, the zoning classification covering this parcel, wasn’t some pre-existing category the site happened to land in. Saint Paul created T4 specifically for the University Avenue corridor, timed to the arrival of the Green Line Light Rail. The Planning Commission’s own 2011 memo on the rezoning is direct about why: “the City’s toolbox of existing zoning districts and requirements would not facilitate the type of development envisioned for University Avenue, where the goal is to have higher density development, a reduced demand for parking and more of a pedestrian- and transit-oriented environment.” The zoning code’s general intent for the whole family of traditional neighborhood districts, T1 through T4, is to “foster compact, pedestrian-oriented development in neighborhood nodes, along transit corridors, and at large redevelopment sites.” T4, the most intensive of the four, sharpens that into something more specific: “high-intensity, transit-supportive, pedestrian-friendly mixed-use development… particularly intended for use near existing and planned transit corridors where more frequent transit service and reliance on transit make high-intensity mixed-use development possible and desirable.” The code goes further and defines T4, categorically, as an area of “high pedestrian activity.”
So the floor area cap on indoor recreation isn’t just abstractly “a rule that exists.” It sits inside T4, the district the city built for exactly this kind of transit corridor, with a stated purpose built around high-intensity, mixed, pedestrian-oriented use. A single large-format, car-oriented tenant taking over most of the corridor’s largest redevelopment-ready parcel is hard to square with that purpose.
If we can’t push for high-density, high-value development here, on the site built for it, then where can we?
The Rules Weren’t Frozen. The City Just Finished Updating Them
A lot has changed since 2011. The Green Line opened in 2014, and 2020 brought civil unrest that hit University Avenue and the broader Midway corridor hard: Axios reported roughly 280 St. Paul businesses were damaged, concentrated along University Avenue. The Midway Shopping Center, a half-mile west of this site (a separate property from Midway Marketplace, near Snelling and I-94), was hit hard enough that roughly 10 percent of the strip mall suffered real damage, according to a lawsuit four displaced tenants later filed against the property’s owner and manager, alleging the unrest was used as cover to empty the mall ahead of a planned redevelopment. The center was demolished in fall 2021. Notably, the Herberger’s building itself closed in 2018, before the unrest, as part of a nationwide bankruptcy, so 2020 isn’t why this particular building sat empty. Still, 2020 plainly darkened the investment climate for the corridor as a whole in the years since.
That’s a genuine reason someone could argue the old assumptions deserve a second look. Here’s the thing: the city already took that look, recently, and on purpose.
Saint Paul ran a multi-year Traditional Neighborhood District Zoning Study, starting with a Planning Commission resolution in March 2022, aimed explicitly at finding and loosening outdated intensity limits in T districts. It concluded with an ordinance (25-59) passed by the City Council on November 12, 2025, nine months before this hearing. That ordinance rewrote T4’s intent language from “high-density” to “high-intensity,” raised the general retail floor-area cap in these districts from 15,000 to 20,000 square feet, and touched several other size and design standards. The indoor recreation cap doesn’t appear anywhere in the study’s staff memo or its list of proposed amendments; it simply wasn’t part of the review. The same day the ordinance passed, the Council initiated a follow-up study to expand T-district use even further along transit corridors.
So the city has, in fact, recently and repeatedly revisited whether its T-district rules still fit current conditions. Whether the indoor recreation cap deserves the same kind of reconsideration is a fair question. I just don’t think this particular hearing answered it, because nobody thought to ask about it, and the city’s own recent homework was never brought into the room.
The City’s Own Plan for This Site Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
In 2011, in direct anticipation of light rail, Saint Paul also adopted the Hamline Station Area Plan, a station specific planning document covering this exact parcel. It’s blunt about the problem: the Midway shopping district, as it was then built, was “dominated by auto-oriented forms of development,” which “limits the area’s potential as a strong mixed-use center” and “creates large areas of underutilized land.” (And I’d add from personal experience, land that persistently accumulates heaps of trash.)
The plan measures this literally, using a metric called grid density, the number of street intersections per acre, a rough proxy for walkability. The Midway shopping district clocks in at 0.1 intersections per acre. The plan’s target, drawn from comparisons to places like Grand Avenue in Saint Paul and Cherry Creek North in Denver, is at least 0.25. The plan’s prescription for this specific site is to subdivide the superblocks, extend the street grid, put parking in structures instead of surface lots and let large format uses persist only as part of that transition, not as justification for freezing the status quo. You only have to look to the next block over to see the regridding and better urbanism showing real promise in the United Village adjacent to Allianz Field.
This is where the “just this once” starts to show. Before granting any conditional use permit, Section 61.501 of the zoning code requires the Planning Commission to find that the use is in “substantial compliance with the Saint Paul Comprehensive Plan and any applicable subarea plans which were approved by the city council.” The Hamline Station Area Plan is exactly that kind of subarea plan. That’s not a footnote. That’s the whole ballgame, the entire legal box the Commission needs to check rests on that one borrowed sentence.
The PED staff report on the application, dated August 20, 2026 and recommending approval, quotes the station area plan to support that finding: “the plan notes that large format retail uses will continue to exist and thrive in the area.”
Left out, however, is the rest of that same sentence: “the parking for these uses will be contained below or above ground in larger shared parking structures designed to support active uses at street level.”
The Commission’s own resolution approving the permit echoes the same partial quotation, verbatim. That condition, structured parking replacing surface lots, is attached directly to the sentence being cited as support, and both documents stop short of it. Read in full, the plan the city adopted for this precise site describes a different, denser, more walkable version of continued large-format use, one built around structured rather than surface parking. This project doesn’t attempt that. All 356 existing surface parking spaces stay as-is; per the resolution, the redevelopment occurs entirely within the existing building footprint, with facade changes (storefront glazing, awnings, new entrances) but no expansion, no new construction, and no change to the parking lot itself.
That’s not a rule getting flexed. That’s a rule getting half-quoted.
It Was Never About LuLuLand
To be clear about what all of this isn’t: it isn’t a case against the tenant.
Filling a building that’s sat empty since 2018, across from Allianz Field, in a shopping center that’s lost a Walmart, a T.J. Maxx, and a Cub Foods in recent years, is not an unreasonable thing for a property owner to want, or for a city to welcome. I, myself, welcome LuLuLand. As a parent of elementary-school-aged kids, I’ll happily be one of its first customers.
But let’s be honest about the typical trip. For many families, “going to LuLuLand” will mean traversing I-94 and parking in one of 356 surface stalls, same as driving to Slick City in Woodbury or the Fun Lab in Blaine, just with a shorter commute. That’s a suburban trampoline park with a Saint Paul zip code, not the “high-intensity, transit-supportive, pedestrian-friendly” development T4 was written to produce here. A banner, some new glazing and a coat of paint don’t change that math. (A secure, cargo-bike-friendly bike corral would help. They’ve got the room.)
The question was never “tenant or no tenant.” It was whether granting a near doubling of an explicit, deliberately chosen zoning standard, on the corridor’s largest and most reconfigurable redevelopment parcel, right as the neighboring superblock shows real signs of turning over, is the right tool for getting there, or whether it forecloses, for a while, the kind of redevelopment the site’s zoning was built to allow.
For how long? I don’t know the lease term Nguyen’s company signed with LuLuLand; that isn’t public. But the approval itself answers a more useful question than the lease would: not “how long is LuLuLand here,” but “how long is this scale of use locked in on this parcel.” The conditional use permit and its floor area modification are written to the use, indoor recreation up to 76,292 square feet, not to LuLuLand by name. If LuLuLand’s lease ends and a different large-format indoor recreation operator takes the space instead, that use and scale would likely already be entitled, no fresh floor-area fight required. The one backstop: a conditional use permit lapses if the approved use is discontinued for a continuous 365 days, at which point the 40,000-square-foot cap would presumably apply again. Short of a full year of vacancy, this isn’t a bet on one tenant’s lease. It’s a standing entitlement for this scale of use, on this parcel, that outlasts whoever’s currently running it.
Some of this is understandable. A corridor that’s lost a Walmart, a T.J. Maxx, and a Cub Foods in a few years, watching its biggest building sit dark for eight of them, starts to treat any tenant as a win worth protecting. That anxiety isn’t irrational. But it’s also exactly the condition under which a city most needs its rules to hold, not least, because an anxious “yes” and a reasoned one look identical from the outside unless someone actually checks the reasoning. Nothing in the record from this hearing shows that check happening.
The Findings That Were Supposed to Stop This, If Warranted
Fine, maybe that’s a tradeoff worth making. But not like this. Not without anyone laying out the rule’s history, its citywide pattern or the plan written for this exact parcel. That’s the moment the process was supposed to catch it, and didn’t.
Section 61.501 also asks the Commission to find that a use “will not impede the normal and orderly development and improvement of the surrounding property” which is basically the question this whole piece is asking, just in city-code language. The Commission checked that box. The entire reasoning behind checking it: the applicant thinks their project will draw investment to the area. Of course he does, he’s the one asking for the waiver. Letting the fox grade the henhouse-safety essay isn’t really a safeguard.
Then there’s Section 61.502, which asks something a little stricter, that a modification not ‘impair the intent and purpose’ of the rule it’s bending. Not a suggestion. Set that against everything T4 and the station plan actually say they want here, and there’s a real gap between what the rule promises and what just happened.
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether that tension resolves. What isn’t in question is that the tension was never named out loud, by anyone whose job it was to name it.
Nobody Had to Guess. They Just Did.
None of this is hidden. It’s in the zoning code, the 2011 station area plan, the Green Line rezoning records and a T District study the city wrapped up nine months ago. I found all of it without leaving my desk. Somebody on staff could have too. If a specific floor area standard is genuinely obsolete, the Commission and the Council have a process for saying so, on the record, citywide, and that process isn’t hypothetical here. It just ran, and it never touched this cap.
Waiving it case-by-case instead, for whoever tells the best story that week, isn’t that process. It’s a shortcut dressed up as due diligence, and this hearing’s own record shows it.
It wasn’t for lack of anyone noticing. When the item came up for a vote, Commissioner Taghioff commented that a vague, intent-based condition is easy to interpret and modify with confidence, because the Commission can reasonably infer what the city meant. A specific number is different. Taghioff said the Commission was, in his words, “struggling with” why the figure was 40,000 in the first place, and drew a line between a minor adjustment, a thousand square feet, immaterial, and what was actually on the table: nearly double the standard. He called his own guess at the rule’s purpose “a huge mental leap” from a bare number to an assumption about legislative intent, and asked that in future cases involving a specific numeric standard, staff supply some explanation of its original purpose up front, so the Commission isn’t left inferring it in real time. He then voted to approve, but said plainly that under slightly different circumstances, he could see himself voting the other way.
Two people in that room, staff and a sitting Commissioner, admitted out loud they didn’t know the basis for the rule they were about to waive. To his credit, Taghioff said so plainly and asked for more explanation next time.
This case, though, still went through on a guess.
Pausing to ask why a rule exists doesn’t cost a tenant its building. It costs a city nothing but a little time, and the appearance of moving fast.
A bird in hand beats two in the bush, or so it goes. Maybe it’s time to take the bird. But taking the bird and pretending the bush was never really there are two different things. United Village is turning over next door. The city just spent three years refining exactly the rules that were waived here, not shelving them. Whatever Midway becomes next, it deserves better than a shrug at the rules and plans built, on purpose, for one of the city’s more promising corridors.