Minneapolis property runs on two levels

The downtown core is stitched together by a skyway system of roughly nine and a half miles of enclosed second level bridges linking about eighty blocks. That is the fact that shapes every property in the central business district. A tower on Nicollet or Marquette does not have one entrance and one perimeter. It has a street lobby, a skyway level that is effectively a shared interior street, and a set of hours on each that do not match. The building is public at eleven in the morning and private at eight at night, and the boundary between the two moves.

West and north of the core, the North Loop is a warehouse district that was converted rather than replaced. Century old brick and timber buildings now hold lofts, creative office, and ground floor retail, which means loading docks, freight elevators, and rear alley entrances that were designed for pallets are now doing the job of controlled doors. The Mill District along the river carries the same mix in a different form, historic mill conversions sitting beside newer glass towers, with residential floors above commercial ones in the same address.

East Town and the blocks around US Bank Stadium, Target Center, and Target Field give the city a property class with no equivalent in the suburbs: buildings whose exposure is set by an events calendar rather than by a lease. Add the hospital campuses, with Hennepin Healthcare now the largest employer in downtown and Abbott Northwestern anchoring the Phillips neighborhood, and the city holds nearly every commercial property type in the metro inside a few square miles.