When you think of places in your community that add to your quality of life, what do you picture?
For most of us, our focus would reasonably be on places close to home that we experience on a regular basis. It would be surprising for someone to express a strong affinity for places where they spend little to no time, such as — say — a cardboard recycling plant on the other side of town. As Saint Paul navigates uncertain times, however, appreciating places that are not literally for our own use and enjoyment is urgently important, especially as concerns about rising residential property taxes continue to mount.
The soon-to-close Smurfit WestRock plant and its surrounding neighborhood are prime examples of places we should learn to love, with great potential to benefit us even more in the future.
Yes, that WestRock plant — the big factory that looms over I-94 at Vandalia, the one with large metal beige walls and front-end loaders pushing around cardboard, the source (at times) of interesting smells. I’m willing to bet you have not set foot in this 25-acre site and it might not factor very highly in what Saint Paul residents value for their quality of life compared to local shops, streets, and parks.
And yet! That facility, like other commercial and industrial areas, is an economically productive place for our city. It has quietly paid property taxes that reduce the property tax burden on homeowners in Saint Paul for decades. It has provided union jobs for hundreds of workers in our community and the surrounding area. And it has recycled waste paper (maybe even yours) into new cardboard. As we process the news of its closure, awareness and gratitude for those indirect contributions is warranted.
But why stop there? Is learning to love a factory a pathway to an entire world of gratitude for things that are not specifically for you or me, but underpin a thriving city? I hope so.
A thriving elementary school on the East Side doesn’t serve my kids, but my family benefits from that corner of the city being a stronger community. A market-rate housing project on the West Side stabilizes housing prices and reduces my property tax burden. The affordable housing project across town helps other people’s neighbors be able to afford housing. If a business leases space in a downtown office tower, we all benefit. The bike lane on the North End I’ll never ride on, the constituent service in a ward I don’t live in, the community ed class I don’t want to take, you name it. We rise and fall together through all of these indirect benefits.
And even if I lost you on some of those intangible benefits, the case for a healthy commercial and industrial tax base in Saint Paul should make itself for anyone who pays property taxes.
Saint Paul is famously a city of neighborhoods, and we can live in our own little worlds. All of those little worlds will succeed more if we support the commercial and industrial areas that punch above their weight for our city economically.
The WestRock plant sits in one such place, Saint Paul’s official Creative Enterprise Zone (CEZ), on the western edge of the city between the railway, Fairview Avenue, and I-94. As the organization of the same name, we champion this area as a place for creative work, which it has quietly been for decades. We recently completed a study of how and how much this neighborhood has changed since the Green Line was opened in 2014. Even if the CEZ is not literally your neighborhood, its success over the last decade is good news for you.
While the CEZ is only 3.1% of the city by area, its contributions to the city are consistently higher:
— 16% of the city’s total residential growth over the last decade (1,951 new housing units 2014-2024).
— 16,185 jobs, or 8.8% of the city’s employment overall.
— CEZ properties pay 6.5% of the property taxes overall, which is less than the 8.7% paid by properties downtown but still considerable.
As our city continues to evolve, don’t sleep on places like the Creative Enterprise Zone as drivers of future growth of Saint Paul’s tax base. Our analysis shows that as properties have redeveloped, the property values per acre have increased. Even better, we have underutilized land that could be even more productive for the broader city. Change is good. If you are curious to learn more about this study, we will be sharing the full results at an event on May 30 at NewStudio Gallery, in partnership with Towerside Innovation District and SRF.
Specifically for the WestRock site, while the loss of 189 jobs and the closure of a large recycling facility is disappointing, the redevelopment potential here is immense. The employment and property taxes of the site have been considerably lower on a per-acre basis than other areas of the CEZ. The site is a block away from the Raymond Avenue Station of the Green Line, which has been the driver of our area’s residential growth. The neighborhood is growing as a cultural destination, with new facilities like the Playwrights’ Center and FilmNorth under construction, and the new MidCity Farmers Market that started just last year. It is adjacent to the future route of the Midtown Greenway Extension, and just over a half mile from the Mississippi River.
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As the dust settles from the announcement of the impending WestRock closure, we look forward to advocating for a future at the site that builds on the success the CEZ has enjoyed over the last decade. Few corners of our city are as ripe for renewal as ours, and we want to grow and change to do our part to sustain the city overall — both directly and indirectly.
Ben Shardlow, chairs the board of the Creative Enterprise Zone and lives in St. Paul within smelling distance of WestRock. More details on the May 30th event he refers to above are at www.creativeenterprisezone.org/events/cez-spring-showcase
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