CLOSELowry Avenue Strategic Plan
Plan Background
The Lowry Avenue Strategic Plan: An Update to the Lowry Avenue Corridor Plan is a small area plan that resulted from the initiative of the five neighborhoods that border on Lowry Avenue in north Minneapolis—the Cleveland, Folwell, Hawthorne, Jordan and McKinley neighborhoods. The plan was funded by neighborhood NRP monies and a City of Minneapolis Great Streets grant. It was created under the project management of City of Minneapolis staff, with consultant services provided by Cuningham Group, Biko Associates, and Donjek.
The plan builds on an earlier plan, the 2002 Lowry Avenue Corridor Plan, in two ways. It sharpens the vision for Lowry Avenue established in the 2002 plan. And it offers a set of implementation strategies to further the goals of the plan in areas such as fostering new development and strengthening business districts.
The plan was completed following a multifaceted community and stakeholder engagement process. It was adopted by the Minneapolis City Council on December 17, 2010.
Lowry Avenue Strategic Plan (2010)
Future Land Use and Built Form
The land use map in the strategic plan takes the approach of limiting commercial opportunity to several key nodes as an economic development strategy that would result in the concentration of future commercial development. Minneapolis 2040 reverses this approach, opening up more land to commercial development with the goal of increasing access to commercial goods and services in the areas. To that end, Lowry Avenue is guided with a variety of commercial mixed use future land use categories. The avenue is also identified as a ‘Goods and Services Corridor’ which further emphasizes the importance of the street as a location for commercial expansion. The Minneapolis 2040 future built form map guides Lowry Avenue for the ‘Corridor 4’ and ‘Interior 2’ categories, with the extent of the ‘Corridor 4’ designation largely matching the extent of the residential medium density designation from the strategic plan. The ‘Interior 2’ and ‘Interior 1’ categories are applied in areas that are adjacent to but not directly on the corridor.
