Have you heard about Warehouse District Live?
If you’re one of the “losers” still working from home instead of returning to your downtown Minneapolis office, you might not be in the loop.
But if you inhabit similar corners of Twin Cities social media as I do (and if you’ve found this blog post, the chances are good), you probably know all about the menagerie of games and food trucks that closes down a block of N 1st Avenue every Friday and Saturday night. In recent weeks, it’s been easy fodder for the snark brigade sharing photos and videos documenting painfully low attendance and the kind of eerie vibe often associated with a haunted amusement park. It doesn’t exactly help that the event’s most enthusiastic booster, Ward 3 Councilmember Michael Rainville, is not necessarily the first individual that any young person would ask to show them a good time.
The sharper edge to the criticism is that an entire season of 44 scheduled nights will cost the City of Minneapolis roughly $750,000 and possibly up to $1 million in the future. Seen alongside the lapse in city sponsorship of the broadly successful Open Streets events due to a disputed $800,000 price tag and a greatly diminished 2024 schedule of those events, it hasn’t been hard for the already-inclined to draw a line between the two and accuse the City of prioritizing one event and hamstringing the other for political reasons.
Spurred by these observations and my own cursory investigation, I shared some of my own thoughts on Warehouse District Live in a tweet last month. I thought I was being cautious and fair, acknowledging the attendance woes of the event and pouring cold water on somewhat fantastical attributions of crime reduction while at the same time praising the idea behind the event and emphasizing that it shouldn’t be seen as a competitor to Open Streets. With some tweaks, I figured, there might be the germ of a decent concept in there.
But after sharing my reflections, I started to learn a bit more and I’ve come to the conclusion that my initial take was wrong. Warehouse District Live is a more complete idea that I gave it credit for and it deserves to be evaluated through clearer eyes. Having first contributed to the pile-on, I feel like it’s my responsibility to write again to share my second opinion.
Warehouse District Live? It’s good, actually.
Warehouse District Live Is The Kind Of SAfety Strategy We Say We want
I think the key to understanding Warehouse District Live is to realize that, if you’re visiting when it opens to take some photos, or if you’re thinking about the cost to the city budget vis-à-vis alternatives, or if you’re reading this blog, it’s probably not for you.
That’s not to say that you aren’t welcome to use the portable bathrooms or grab something from a food truck or shoot some hoops. But you’re not the primary audience. First and foremost, Warehouse District Live is for the benefit of drunk people. Its peak hours are immediately before and after bar close.
Put on a pair of beer goggles and imagine yourself swaying unsteadily in the 2 AM air at N 5th Street. Maybe you’re unhappy to be facing the prospect of going home in your own company. Maybe you’re nursing an alcohol-fueled grudge against someone and you’ve just seen them again. At minimum, you’re tipsy, tired, hungry, and bloated. Warehouse District Live is there for you. It has silly games to play, places to sit, food to eat, and bathrooms for relief. It may be an embarrassingly square scene, but it’s also extremely functional. This is a crumple zone for the inebriated. Something intended to serve the overserved is simply never going to look as appealing to sober eyes.
And there’s a really good reason why the City might want to sponsor and invest in an event that serves this purpose. Something I did not fully appreciate before looking deeper into Warehouse District Live is how concentrated safety problems are in this area and at this time.
Graphs of four years of shooting reports in Precinct 1 and Downtown West, graphed by hour. Source: City of Minneapolis Crime Dashboard
According to the City’s excellent crime dashboard, in the years 2019-2022 (before Warehouse District Live started as a fully-funded program in 2023), there were 1,680 incidents of gunfire in MPD Precinct 1, which covers the area bounded by I-94 and the Mississippi River. Shootings in the city core take place mostly at night, but relatively evenly within the after-dark hours with one exception; the 2 a.m. hour.
Take a closer look just at Downtown West. From 2019-2022, there were 403 incidents of gunfire logged by the crime dashboard, just under a quarter of the total in the precinct. But in the 1 a.m. hour over a third of shots fired downtown are in Downtown West. In the 2 a.m. hour, fully 45% of shots fired downtown were in Downtown West.
Illustrating the point, just this past weekend, two young men were critically wounded in a shootout on Hennepin Avenue almost exactly around the 2 a.m. bar close. It doesn’t take a degree in criminology to see the contours of the problem; crowds of young men, summer nights, alcohol, and our society’s easy access to guns all factors at a single place and time.
Warehouse District Live is the kind of creative public safety strategy that many people have been asking for. It’s targeted at a specific problem. It’s proactive instead of reactive. And it doesn’t rely on the presence of law enforcement to operate. This is probably the reason why Ward 2 Councilmember Robin Wonsley, who is not often in agreement with her Ward 3 colleague on public safety issues, has called for a very similar effort for Dinkytown.
In this context, I’m less skeptical than I was before about the City’s claims about Warehouse District Live’s public safety benefits. That’s not to say that more research wouldn’t be welcome and, as last weekend’s events demonstrate, the event is not a panacea. But as the crime statistics from past years demonstrate, neither were the City’s prior strategies. Bar close on Hennepin Avenue is not a moment associated with sober weighing of actions and consequence, which makes a safety approach premised on plying the public with corny distraction plausibly more effective than one premised on the imposition of state authority. I also think Warehouse District Live is, in a petri dish, a potential great tool to train or trial teams of violence interrupters and other alternative safety approaches.
For people like myself and others who have been especially focused on issues like downtown revitalization and advocacy for pedestrianization and street closures, it has been too easy to see Warehouse District Live through our favorite lenses as a kind of lame parody of better parties. But that’s not what it’s primarily trying to be and that’s not how it its success should be ultimately evaluated.
Warehouse District Live Is not A Super Successful Downtown Activation Strategy
Okay, but that doesn’t mean that Warehouse District Live couldn’t also be more engaging for sober people in the evening. If the block is active from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. that doesn’t preclude it being active in a different way from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Those photos and videos of a nearly-empty street are still a failure, maybe not a fatal one, but an ancillary one.
One of my initial criticisms of Warehouse District Live was that I didn’t get a real sense that it was trying new stuff. It seemed to be just rolled out there, weekend after weekend, with a similar suite of ideas. But not being out there every week, I didn’t really know this for sure, and it wasn’t true. Warehouse District Live has been trying stuff, sometimes more successfully (karaoke) than other times (pickleball, natch). I certainly don’t have the magic formula here, but I wonder if the recent success of the Timberwolves playoff block party (a big screen with something to watch) might offer another idea worth trying. There may not be one perfect mix, but rather a rotation of activities that can draw different groups every month.
In a larger sense, this is an area where to some degree the public derision about Warehouse District Live might hurt the project, because the Downtown Improvement District and the City could use some constructive feedback. I also think that the event’s focus on the late-night public safety crowd might lead to missing an opportunity to do some real public engagement. Sure, it makes perfect sense not to bother passing around a survey to the early morning’s most coherent stragglers, but there’s no reason why ideas couldn’t be solicited from the evening crowds.
It’s also important to note, as I’ve tried to do, that downtown needs a recovery strategy that doesn’t revolve around one-off events, but is more broadly focused on making the area a great place to live, work, and linger. Warehouse District Live, with its regular and seasonal schedule, should be viewed more like a farmers market. Since it’s being held and funded anyway, it should be an exciting challenge to figure out how it might also become a hangout spot for locals and make downtown living more attractive overall.
The More Open Streets, The Better
There’s no question that the similarities between the Warehouse District Live budget and the amount that was requested by Our Streets (née Minneapolis) to fund the Open Streets series of events has led to some raised eyebrows. But it’s a mistake to see them in conflict. They have different reasons for being and their funding comes from different conceptual buckets.
I see it as more productive to champion both, because besides a similar cost, what they both share is an underlying two-part concept. First, that our street right-of-way is a frequently underutilized space in the city and that it can be a place to gather instead of just pass through. Second, that when we gather to eat and play games and relax, it makes our communities healthier, safer, and more economically vibrant.
Certainly I want to live in a city whose impersonal governmental or quasi-governmental institutions believe in these things and are willing to spend money and act on them. Certainly I want to live in a city where events like these are seen as a cost-effective way to achieve important goals and not as frivolities to be cut in the face of a budget crunch. Certainly I want to live in a city where the institutional capacity to organize these events, even if a little cringe, is preserved.
I’ve come to see Warehouse District Live not as a competitor to Open Streets, but as a welcome imitator—proof that the model has gone mainstream and is being adapted to meet new needs. That’s something to encourage. I think we can do better, and I think the way to do that is by leaning in enthusiastically, rather than maintaining a kind of ironic remove.