The Part of Highland Bridge That's Already Finished (It's Not the Shops)

Walk the paved path that dips under Mississippi River Boulevard from Uŋčí Makhá Park, and you'll hit a temporary metal staircase that dumps you onto an overlook above Hidden Falls. It's not much to look at. The railing is basic, the concrete is new enough to still look gray instead of weathered, and a permanent staircase is still waiting on funding for a second construction phase. But if you've watched the old Ford plant site sit behind fencing since Ryan Companies broke ground there about six years ago, that little staircase is the first piece of Highland Bridge that actually does something. It connects the development to the rest of the city's trail system, no detour, no waiting for a building to lease up first.

That's the part of this story most people miss when they drive past on Ford Parkway and see cranes. The path came before the storefronts. The pond came before the parking. For a project that spent four years stalled out entirely, the order things arrived in tells you more about how to use this place right now than any list of what's coming next.

The trail worked before the retail did

The city's own project description calls this a "stacked storm water system," which is a dry way of describing something that turned out to be the site's most recognizable feature: an open creek channel that collects runoff across the development, threads through a tunnel under Mississippi River Boulevard, and empties into Hidden Falls at a controlled rate. Sean Ryan, the development manager overseeing the project for Ryan Companies, told Twin Cities Business the winding pond became something nobody planned for as a landmark. He called it "an icon of that site."

That's not marketing language dressed up. It's an accurate description of what happened. A stormwater requirement turned into the thing everyone in Highland Park now uses to orient themselves, and this year it also became the connective tissue between the neighborhood and the Mississippi River Boulevard trail network that runs down through Hidden Falls Regional Park. Ten miles of internal paths already thread through the Highland Bridge site itself. None of that required a single retail tenant to sign a lease.

Why the shops took four years longer than the path

If you're wondering why it's taken this long for anything with a storefront to show up, the honest answer involves financing, not design. Construction on the 122-acre site stalled out almost completely around 2022. Market-rate apartment financing dried up in what Ryan described to Twin Cities Business as a "perfect storm," even while senior housing and affordable units, less dependent on private capital, kept moving forward on schedule.

The fix came in May 2025, when the city amended its development agreements with Ryan Companies, committing to 447 additional housing units across three buildings and 36,500 square feet of new commercial space, while adjusting the tax increment financing plan to reflect current market conditions. St. Paul also pulled back its rent control ordinance to exempt construction built after 2004, which Ryan credited as the piece that actually got shovels back in the ground. Groundbreaking on the Gateway Project's market-rate apartments followed that June.

The upshot for anyone living nearby: the four-year gap wasn't a design problem or a demand problem. It was a financing problem that got solved by a specific policy change, and that's why the retail buildout is arriving in one dense burst now instead of gradually over the years the site sat quiet.

What's actually opening this fall

That burst is visible right now at the corner of Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue, where five buildings are converging toward completion over the same few months. The centerpiece is a four-story building called The Albert, named for Albert Kahn, the architect who originally designed the Ford assembly plant that ran on this site from 1926 until it closed in 2011. Leasing on its 97 apartments began in May, with move-ins targeted for August. As of early July, its ground-floor retail spaces were reported to be 90 percent physically complete, with four lease agreements still being finalized and tenant names not yet public.

Next to it, three standalone one-story commercial buildings are going up alongside a 13,000-square-foot Tierra Encantada bilingual child care center, expected to open later this summer. A new civic square at that same intersection began construction in early June and is set to finish this fall. Two large decorative friezes salvaged from the original Ford plant will be installed there as sculptural pieces, a deliberate nod that ties the site's industrial past to whatever comes next.

"Now is our moment to realize the full vision of a vibrant neighborhood where our community can truly thrive."

That's Mayor Melvin Carter, quoted at the 2025 groundbreaking that finally got this corner moving. It's the kind of line that sounds like every other ribbon-cutting quote until you notice the timing: this is a mayor speaking about a project that had spent four years going nowhere, now watching five buildings rise at once.

The one anchor that never stopped

While all of that was stalled, one piece of Highland Bridge kept functioning the entire time. The Collection, a mixed-use building owned by Weidner Apartment Homes, opened back in 2022 with market-rate apartments and a Lunds & Byerlys on the ground floor. It's easy to forget that grocery store has been open and normal for four years now, quietly serving the neighborhood while everything around it sat behind fencing. If you want a sense of what "finished" actually looks like at Highland Bridge, that's it. Not a rendering. A working grocery store with real foot traffic.

What's still ahead

The next phase of construction is scheduled to start this September, when Weidner begins work on another apartment building northeast of the water feature, roughly 170 units with 2,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. M/I Homes has entered the picture as a new partner too, platting land bounded by Woodlawn, Montreal, and Saunders avenues for 144 townhomes, with the first 12 units already through the permitting process. Pulte Homes is separately building 167 row homes, expected to finish in late 2026 or early 2027.

Zoom out further and city planners gave the Planning Commission an updated build-out picture in May 2026: somewhere between 2,600 and 2,800 residential units total, along with more than 55 acres of public open space and roughly 66 acres set aside for private retail and housing. Ryan estimated to Twin Cities Business that the whole site won't be finished for another decade, depending on market conditions holding steady this time.

So if you're waiting for Highland Bridge to feel like a finished neighborhood before you start using it, you're waiting for the wrong milestone. The trail under the boulevard already connects to Hidden Falls. The pond is already the icon everyone said it would be. The grocery store has been open for four years. The shops are still catching up, and this fall is the first time you'll be able to walk out of an apartment at The Albert and actually buy something in the building next door. Until then, the smartest way to experience Highland Bridge this summer is the way residents already are: as a trail system that happens to have some very expensive scaffolding around it.

If you're watching this corner of Highland Park change and wondering what it means for your own home's value, or you're weighing whether a place still under construction is worth a second look, Sara Moran has been tracking this stretch of Ford Parkway building by building. Let's talk about your next move.