Transforming the downtown core from one dominated by 9-to-5 office work into a vibrant, mixed-use landscape is a huge task. Buildings and infrastructure last for generations in a city like Minneapolis. Large-scale change downtown will be neither easy nor quick.
Still, you have to try something. Short-term planning in an overwhelming situation is often a question of finding low-hanging fruit and taking the smallest steps first while waiting for larger changes to arrive. One simple thing cities can do is to loosen stricter standards that no longer seem necessary in an era of downtown desperation.
That’s the case for Minneapolis signage regulations, currently undergoing an overhaul at City Hall. The set of new ordinances lowering restrictions on signs — the culmination of work from the mayor’s office and council members Katie Cashman and Jamal Osman —passed a key City Council committee this month. The changes relax sign restrictions on buildings and raise the question of why these rules existed in the first place.
In general, the new signage ordinance would make it easier to have more larger and more creative signs on shops and buildings around Minneapolis. How you feel about this is largely an aesthetic question, but the general idea is to make downtown more interesting to look at and help better connect businesses to customers.
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For example, the new ordinance might increase the potential height of building signs beyond the existing 48-foot limit. It could allow more types of building walls to be used, not just the street-facing ones, while also permitting “dynamic” signage in more locations — i.e., signs that scroll or change continually. Square footage for iconic rooftop signs would no longer come at the expense of signage on the rest of the building.
Projection signage — digital light thrown onto the outside of a building that’s trendy around the world — would be legalized. Murals would be largely deregulated, as would the small-scale “tenant directory” signs that tell you whose office is located where. Temporary signs would be allowed to stay in place longer than the existing 14-day maximum, perhaps as long as three months. Finally, sign fees would be tweaked to be more predictable and less onerous.
“Our policymakers asked us a year ago to start looking at how signs could be used as one tool to increase vibrancy and safety,” said Sara Roman, a senior city planner for Minneapolis. “They could be used as a tool for skyway businesses to have better visibility on the street.”
Pondering downtown’s future signage
In her presentation to the City Council, Roman included a photo of old Block E — an historic block on Hennepin Avenue. The block of shops, famously bulldozed by the City Council in the 1980s, was once the most “vital” spot in Minneapolis for better and for worse. (See, for example, this 1980s art film.) One thing it had in spades were signs, and it begs the question whether Minneapolis leaders over-corrected in their disdain for historic garish iconography.
The proposed ordinance changes sponsored by Cashman and Osman are part of the larger conversation about the future of downtown, intended to boost vitality and visual interest of the city. This might seem like an obscure or marginal change to most people, but you’d be surprised at how strict rules around signs can alter entrepreneurialism.
I remember St. Paul’s Creative Kidstuff sign fiasco of 2012, when a children’s toy store on Grand Avenue wanted to install large felines around its doorway. The proposal flew in the face of the existing city signage ordinance and overlay rules, and the store was forced to back off its demands for a visually appealing entranceway. That store is long gone. Since then, the aesthetically refined Grand Avenue, like many Twin Cities commercial streets, has loosened restrictions in the face of problematic retail vacancy.
Part of the proposed Minneapolis change would alter the fee structure to make some signs easier to build while others (temporary or dynamic installations) would pay fees. But state rules around municipal administrative charges place limits on how much the city can do.
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“There’s requirement under state law to have fees relate to services by the city, for example, a permit fee has to be directly related to how much it costs to administer the code,” Roman explained. “Looking at cities like Denver or Baltimore or cities that have these types of districts, they either do revenue sharing, or permit fees come back as revenue for the city. That model does not exist here.”
On the other side of the ledger lurks the vulgarity of cityscapes like Las Vegas and New York City’s Times Square. Both are garish and loathed by locals, and that kind of spectacle makes one consider the limits of attention seeking. There are diminishing returns of wattage and seizure-inducing flashing, but the relatively dull scenes of downtown Minneapolis are a far cry from Shinjuku, Tokyo. I imagine most people look back fondly on the era of midcentury neon — locally represented by the facades of Hennepin Avenue’s historic theaters. If anything, the city has veered too far from the light of libertarian illumination.
Two other details of the new ordinance would tweak skyways and billboards, both of which are detractors of the city’s downtown experience. The ordinance would allow temporary event signage to appear in overhead skyways, many of which are too empty these days. Previously, skyway signs haven’t been allowed due to the potential for driver distraction.
Finally, the change that garnered the most negative public comments, mostly from outdoor advertising interests, would Minneapolis’ existing billboard policy. Termed “off-premises signs,” the city has long tried to reduce the number of billboards, particularly those connected to vacant lots or underused buildings. St. Paul has gone though decades of similar backtracking, incentivizing billboard removal in exchange for the rights to more lucrative and eye-grabbing digital signage along busy roads.
But that policy hasn’t been working well lately; few billboards have been removed over the last decade.
“The system had stagnated,” Roman said. “We weren’t seeing billboards being removed. Along with opportunities on re-thinking how downtown could be improved by signs, we looked at what to do differently with the billboard replacement program.”
Signs are part of a bigger Minneapolis challenge
Minneapolis doesn’t have a firm plan in place yet, but will ponder its options. The larger conversation around signage seems like a good place to start.
It’s worth remembering that signs themselves do not cultivate street life, any more than Muzak can materialize crowds of shoppers. I’m reminded of declining small-town main streets that paste murals or historic photos on the outsides of vacant buildings depicting eras when the street was thriving.
These gestures are nice, but don’t change the fundamentals. If there are few shops and people, or if skyways segregate the pedestrian population into isolated groups, downtown will struggle to cultivate investment no matter how many signs appear on the walls. At most, signage can amplify already existing foot traffic, nudge people to linger or entice them to wander more than they otherwise might. At a certain point, you get attention overload with diminishing returns and waning visual interest.
Minneapolis is hardly at that level these days. Loosening the rules so that the old visual vitality of Hennepin Avenue was legal again can’t hurt. I can imagine a city with dozens of businesses on each block vying for the attention of shoppers, the kind of visual excitement of Tokyo’s “zakkyo buildings,” where each floor is a different business. Minneapolis used to be a little bit like that, and you needed ample signage just to help people navigate the chaos.
You find ways to improve the city where you can. Loosening signage rules is an easy first step, and unless you’re an aesthetic stickler, there’s little downside. Downtown Minneapolis is hardly a beautiful place as-is; most buildings offer blank walls to wide streets with little to offer other than speeding cars. Relaxing the rules to bring back at least the semblance of a more dynamic city can’t hurt. Perhaps with some interesting new signs to look at, people and businesses will follow in their wake.
The post Loosening signage rules would be a quick win for an evolving downtown Minneapolis appeared first on MinnPost.
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