The City of Brooklyn Center has purchased the struggling Brookdale Square retail center and plans to redevelop it.
CBRE, the commercial real estate services provider that represented the seller, Brixmor, announced the deal this week. The company described the property, which is located at 5900 Shingle Creek Parkway, as a “prime redevelopment opportunity.”
Brookdale Square comprises 23 acres, on which sits 185,000 square feet of “retail improvements,” CBRE said. The retail center is near the Shingle Creek Crossing regional mall, a new 450,000-square-foot center that is anchored by a Wal-Mart store.
Brixmor, a New York-based property owner, bought Brookdale Square for $8.75 million in 1996, and its current “market value” is $5.4 million, according to Hennepin County tax records. But it appears the City of Brooklyn Center paid far less than that.
The city paid $3.9 million to acquire the development, for which it is planning a number of upgrades, according to Finance & Commerce. (The full story is available here, behind a paywall.)
Early plans call for apartments, town houses, and retail, and a Brooklyn Center city planner told Finance & Commerce that he'd like to see “an Excelsior & Grand type of development”—referring to the mixed-use development in St. Louis Park.
The city official also told the newspaper that city planners are likely to spend between six months and a year refining plans prior to opening the project to bids, and the overall development could take five to seven years.