Meet Minneapolis wants downtown to be a social justice, women’s sports hub

In 10 years' time, Minneapolis tourism officials want the city to be known for vibrant nightlife, a bustling riverfront, a modernized convention center, as a women’s sports epicenter and as a social justice capital.

These lofty goals and more come from Meet Minneapolis — the city’s convention and visitors bureau — and its 39-page destination master plan that aims “to optimize Minneapolis’ visitor economy to ensure year-round vibrancy, a thriving downtown and radiant cultural hubs.”

The document is the latest in a string of plans to help Minneapolis — especially downtown — continue to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent civil unrest.

In 2023, Mayor Jacob Frey’s task force gave its vision for a revamped Nicollet Mall. Later that year, the Minneapolis Foundation issued its report on how to revitalize downtown. Last year, Frey released his 18-page Downtown Action Plan, while the Downtown Council announced its 10-year plan as well.

There have even been derivatives of these plans, such as Minneapolis' partnership with Metro Transit to brainstorm options for taking buses off Nicollet Mall, a popular idea in many of these proposals.

“We cannot afford to stand pat as other destinations are aggressively enhancing their viability,” Meet Minneapolis President and CEO Melvin Tennant said in a statement before the agency’s annual meeting Wednesday. “This strategic plan aligns the public, private and civic sectors around actionable steps to increase the positive impacts of the visitor economy — not just for visitors but for the people who live, work and build their lives in Minneapolis.”

Meet Minneapolis' plan revolves around six “big ideas” for the next decade:

In an interview, Tennant celebrated wins for Minneapolis tourism in 2024: For the first time since 2019, the city filled more than 2 million hotel rooms, playing host to national events like the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials and Big Ten basketball tournaments as well as hundreds of major conventions from groups such as the American Public Health Association.

But Minneapolis still lags behind most peer cities in recovery for a variety of reasons, Tennant said. For one, the city has not seen a robust return of business travel, perhaps in part because large employers still allow remote work. Meet Minneapolis also books conventions several years out, meaning there is continuing fallout from organizations that avoided the city in the wake of Floyd’s death.

“We were still dealing with questions and reputation management in 2021, 2022,” Tennant said. “So we probably don’t even know what we lost from conventions that would have been showing up this year from that booking window.

“I can tell you that during those dark days after George Floyd was killed, and we were in the midst of various types of unrest and riots, that some of us whose job it is to market our our great city, it was hard,” he added. “We know that it’s part of our story, and we need to tell it authentically.”

Tennant said Meet Minneapolis will defer to community members on how to best share that story. The agency’s plan also suggests the city could build a more inclusive future by investing more in its seven recognized cultural districts, including Central Avenue, East Lake Street and West Broadway.

Several aspects of the new plan aim to embrace identities and strengths that have emerged organically in Minneapolis, Tennant said.

For instance, the city has become a hub of sorts for women’s sports at the youth, collegiate and professional levels thanks to successful athletes, coaches and franchises — something that became even more evident with the popularity of last year’s gymnastic trials, the Lynx’s playoff run and the women’s Big Ten basketball tournament.

“It is a level of activity and a level of interest in a segment of sports that no other city can claim,” Tennant said. “We clearly have something to build on.”

Many of Meet Minneapolis' loftiest goals will require initiative and financial support from the government or private sector. Some large organizations have started to outgrow the Convention Center, prompting the request for substantial renovations. Tennant said it’s too soon to know how much that work would cost or how to fund it.

The plan also asserts that the two blocks surrounding the Convention Center need 500 additional hotel rooms and a more lively streetscape to make Minneapolis more appealing.

The agency intends to support a slew of downtown revitalization efforts from the city, the nonprofit Downtown Council and others. That includes the proposed pedestrianization of Nicollet Mall and the desired redevelopment of the riverfront Post Office.

“Downtown is at the center of the universe that we market,” Tennant said. “I look at all our plans and efforts as very complementary.”

As a starting point, the agency identified a handful of short-term priorities, including: a push to standardize downtown skyway hours; more wayfinding to help visitors navigate the waterfront; making the Great Northern Festival a city-wide, multi-month winter program; and advocating for the hiring of a city director of nightlife.