When Dr. Bill McGuire proposed installing a “Welcome to the Midway” sign along St. Anthony Avenue, he recalled city officials telling him “we don’t like signs.” That’s one fight he won’t bother with as he digs in his planning heels elsewhere around the neighborhood.

“If somebody wants to take on that crusade, speak to me,” said McGuire, addressing a few dozen neighborhood residents and elected officials at the Allianz Field brew hall on Thursday evening.

The owner of the Minnesota United soccer team is no longer pulling punches as he talks up plans — again — for the land surrounding St. Paul’s Major League Soccer stadium.

Expressing open frustration with Metro Transit, the media, rent control and what he described as the city of St. Paul’s lengthy permitting process, McGuire told the crowd he’s signed a contract with a soon-to-be-disclosed hotel operator for the on-again, off-again United Village development, and he’s found enough tenants to fill at least half of a four-level office building, including a ground-level bakery and café.

McGuire, who began announcing the possibility of major real estate development years before the soccer stadium’s opening in 2019, did not identify particular vendors or commercial tenants, other than to say one of two single-story restaurant pavilions will be dubbed Pico and run by an independent, local operator offering Chianti wines in take-home wicker baskets and other elevated fare.

Dr. Bill McGuire. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)

“There is a hotel flag,” McGuire said. “We’ll announce it later. The contract has been signed with them. You’ll like what it is. The only barriers are the city: Can we get the permits signed? … We lost funding for one building that I didn’t mention earlier because things just couldn’t get done.”

A community hall, new music venue

The two-hour community presentation was co-organized by Ward 1 Council Member Anika Bowie and co-sponsored by the Hamline-Midway Coalition, the Union Park District Council, the Summit University Planning Council and the Midway Chamber of Commerce.

On overhead screens, McGuire, who has become United Village’s public face and lead developer, offered up fresh renderings for possible new commercial real estate and public-facing amenities near the corner of Snelling and University avenues. He said he’s soon to move forward with an office building with a ground-level eatery, two restaurant pavilions, a hotel, a parking ramp and an acre-sized, garden-lined park that would sit between the hotel and the massive loon statue recently installed over the intersection. The hotel would include a 4,000-square-foot community meeting hall for public use, he said.

His conceptual renderings depicted — in a subsequent development phase — a possible music and performing arts venue of 3,000 to 4,000 seats that McGuire said would complement, rather than compete with, existing performance spaces.

“We all look forward to seeing some cranes in the air and some buildings going up pretty soon,” said McGuire, toward the close of a two-hour community presentation. “This area is a tremendous opportunity.”

Challenges

The overhead screen presentation also listed a litany of challenges.

Master plans that came together around 2017 once envisioned 1 million square feet of office space at United Village, which was drawn up on paper before the pandemic, the riots of 2020, and the era of high interest rates, a tight lending market and remote work.

It’s not just the degree of office space that is unrealistic, he said. A movie theatre company that once considered moving to United Village closed during the pandemic, and that industry never fully recovered.

While neighborhood residents have objected to surface parking lots, McGuire said building underground parking will add millions of dollars to development costs, which would have to be absorbed by higher rents.

In addition to the music hall, McGuire said he had not ruled out the possibility of adding housing to United Village in a later phase, and he pondered taking his cue from European communities that have built plus-sized apartments spanning 1,200 square feet for seniors and middle-aged residents seeking a break from homeownership.

“Housing could work but we have to get a few things done,” he said, calling the city’s repeatedly-amended rent control policy “a major barrier” to attracting developers and investors turned off by the uncertainty around further amendments.

Their concern is the “in-and-out nature,” he said. “Is it going to change next year? Is it going to change the year after?”

He also noted that requiring ground-level retail within mixed-use, multi-family buildings no longer made sense in the era of remote work and online shopping.

No bathrooms?

McGuire said the city’s slow permitting process and negative press coverage highlighting the area’s challenges with crime and vagrancy had scuttled more than one development deal in recent months.

Investors get cold feet when “they wake up to yet another crap story about how bad the neighborhood is,” said McGuire, shortly before explaining to inquiring audience members that street drug use and insurance liabilities made him reluctant to maintain publicly-accessible bathrooms by P.K.’s Place, the new all-abilities playground he installed last year next to Allianz Field.

“It’s a phenomenal little park for kids,” said Allen Saunders, a former stadium worker and member of the Union Park District Council, in an interview after the presentation. “But it doesn’t have bathrooms.”

The Rev. Kirsten Fryer of Bethlehem Lutheran Church implored McGuire to reconsider, noting she and her congregation had removed human feces from outside the church more than once. “We clean it up a lot,” she said.

McGuire said there was movement afoot to fill surrounding blocks that have suffered long-term commercial vacancies. In the Midway Marketplace strip mall at 1400 University Ave. W., contracts are coming together for new tenants in the vacant T.J. Maxx and at least part of the vacant Herberger’s Department Store, he said.

The fate of CVS

McGuire said he had made some inroads on finding residential and commercial redevelopment partners for the long-vacant CVS Pharmacy building at the northwest corner of Snelling and University, which prior to the installation of recent fencing had drawn as many as 40 loiterers at a time, heavy litter and open-air drug sales.

Members of the Hamline-Midway Coalition and others involved in the “Stabilize Snelling and University” campaign have advocated for a combination of affordable housing and ground-level retail at the CVS site. They’ve said they found a successful model at the northwest corner of Dale and University avenues, where the Neighborhood Development Center’s Frogtown Crossroads complex spans 40 apartments above ground-level commercial tenants like Flava Cafe and Slice Pizza.

Likewise, said Hamline-Midway Coalition President Cole Hanson, CVS “should be a community asset that is filled by members of our community — a place for neighbors to buy coffee, buy groceries and get a slice of pizza.”

McGuire, however, said the city was already top-heavy with nonprofits and social benefit endeavors. He said the property owner maintains a ghost-lease with CVS, meaning the pharmacy chain continues to pay some $550,000 annually to rent a shuttered space it no longer occupies, and convincing the owner to give that up would be a tall order.

“I’m not going to do something in a community or an area where the city thinks it’s going to tell me what to do,” said McGuire. “I’m not going to soften it. … I think there are some options. We’ll see over the next two months. … It’s a complicated deal.”

On social media, some noted the irony that Allianz Field — the only real estate addition to United Village to date — pays no property taxes, and McGuire himself had led efforts to remove upwards of 30 private storefronts from the “SuperBlock,” from a bowling alley and multiple Chinese restaurants to most recently a longstanding McDonald’s.

Hanson said McGuire’s negative response toward publicly accessible bathrooms and a community-driven vision for the CVS site had left him cold.

“I’m angry,” he said, because rather than incorporating area residents, United Village “feels like it’s just going to be its own neighborhood.”

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By GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO

HOPKINS, Minn. (AP) — Every Sunday, Johann Teran goes to worship at a Lutheran service in suburban Minneapolis, trying to find some hope that the future he was building isn’t all slipping away.

Like hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans hit by political and economic crises, Teran, his wife and her mother applied for different kinds of humanitarian protections in the United States that the Trump administration has curtailed or is expected to end soon.

“I’m feeling like they’re telling me, ‘Go, just go back, we don’t want you.’ Even when they gave me the opportunity to be here,” Teran said. “We are just hopeless, and trying to find hope, and that’s why I’m going more to the church, to look for or get this hope that I need.”

The 27-year-old attorney came to Minnesota eight months ago on a humanitarian parole program the Biden administration created in 2022. It granted two-year visas to 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela – all countries deemed by the United States to have unstable or repressive governments – if they had a U.S. financial sponsor and passed background checks.

Teran’s wife, Karelia, 29, hadn’t received approval yet when the new administration ended the program, leaving her in Venezuela without a legal path to the U.S. Her mother, Marlenia Padron, was granted temporary protected status – TPS, another mechanism for people who fled countries in disarray – in 2023, but the government has ordered it to end in early April for several hundred thousand Venezuelans like her. Hundreds of thousands more Venezuelans and Haitians will lose TPS later this year. Lawsuits were filed Thursday to reverse the decision about Venezuelans.

Before cooking dinner in her small apartment decorated with photos of far-away relatives and statuettes of the Virgin Mary, Padron said she understands that President Donald Trump “was fed up” with Venezuelans who have committed crimes in the United States and wants to deport them.

“But he eliminates the TPS and there we all fall,” Padron said in Spanish. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, what will happen with a lot of people who are here hurting nobody. … I’m working, I file my taxes. I wanted to buy a house. Those are the plans we had, but now I can’t have those plans.”

Padron, 53, said threats against her began just as Venezuela’s economic crisis escalated. Working as an attorney for a local government office in Puerto La Cruz, she said she was kidnapped for ransom, detained on trumped-up political accusations and surveilled – all the while watching her income disappear in the currency crisis, water and electricity rationed, and medicine for her elderly mother grow scarce.

“That time of the kidnapping was the trigger,” she said, describing how she was taken from a shopping center and held for three days, with beatings and accusations of being a “traitor of the homeland” for raising questions about corruption.

“Nobody can say Venezuela is a place that has stability and respect for human rights. So people are going to continue to flee,” said Karen Musalo, an attorney and professor who leads the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at University of California College of Law, San Francisco. “The U.S., I would say under the Biden administration, with both humanitarian parole and temporary protected status, was recognizing that and responding to that.”

Musalo said most of roughly 8 million Venezuelans who fled in recent years went to other Latin American countries, triggering a regional crisis.

Padron went to Colombia first, crossing by canoe a river where gangs and guerrillas roamed. Worried she still might be targeted, she decided to travel on to Mexico, cross into the United States and turn herself into U.S. immigration authorities, asking for asylum – a process that can take many years.

When the special TPS program started, she applied, got a work permit and a job at a printing press, and finally felt safe in her new home in Minnesota – not always looking over her shoulders for threats or navigating shortages of necessities.

“I get home, make my meal for the next day, if I want to eat out, I go out – because there’s quality of life, I earn what one earns to live peacefully,” she said. “I don’t have to go to a gas station to get gas and spend two days in line.”

Padron had never seen trees without leaves when she arrived in fall 2021, so adjusting to the frigid winters has been jarring. But she finds peacefulness in the snow.

“Sometimes when there’s a lot of snow, I leave the shoes outside, and then I open the door and I think, ‘My shoes, I left them outside!’ And there they are. In Venezuela that wouldn’t happen, they’d steal your shoes,” Padron said.

Now her daughter has no way to rejoin the family, and Padron is unsure of her own next steps. Even her father back in Venezuela has been asking “When will they deport you?” But she says she can’t go back in fear of her life.

Raised Catholic, she hopes that if she can stay in the United States, she will get a bigger home with an altar covered in flowers for the two statuettes – one honors her native city’s Virgin Del Valle and the other an icon especially venerated by Cubans, La Virgen de la Caridad.

Meanwhile, she started attending Tapestry Church, a Lutheran congregation where old-timers as well as Latin American migrants worship in Spanish and English.

In 2023, the church had applied to sponsor humanitarian parole for 38 Venezuelans, but those cases were never processed. Now, it tries to reassure its congregants despite widespread fears.

“We have the conviction that we’re stronger in community,” said the Rev. Melissa Melnick Gonzalez, Tapestry’s pastor.

Teran, who works as a paralegal, has been volunteering with the congregation, helping fellow immigrants with paperwork.

“Everybody is worried and kind of anxious. People doesn’t want to go out anymore,” he said. “The Venezuelan community is just at home. We’re all waiting, like we were criminals.”

He’s trying to get a work visa that would prevent him from returning to Venezuela while allowing his wife, an orthodontist, to leave a country where young professionals like them can’t make ends meet – and any protest risks violent repression.

He said he studied democracy in law school and would like to practice law in the United States, where “there’s no impunity.”

“So that dream is also being kind of canceled by Trump,” Teran said.

On a recent evening, as Padron fried arepas, Teran video-called his wife, and reached out to the phone screen when she turned it on their two snoozing Schnauzer dogs, Hoddy and Honey. Expecting Karelia’s humanitarian parole would be approved any time, he had moved into a pet-friendly apartment before the program was terminated.

“I don’t see any future right now for having her, in fact there’s nothing that I can do right now for having her,” Teran said. “I don’t understand that, why you allow me to get in legally and now you’re treating me like an illegal.”

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