What If We Stopped Treating Demolition as the Default for Urban Renewal?
By Alex Haecker, AIA | July 16, 2026
@drawnwell
SPOTLIGHT
This guest commentary was published in the June 23, 2026, edition of the Star Tribune.
A hospital campus in St. Paul. A 51-story office in downtown Minneapolis.
At first glance, St. Joseph’s Hospital and City Center seem to have little in common. One traces its roots to 1853 and nearly 175 years of community service. The other emerged during a different era of downtown development and now faces an uncertain future as office demand dissolves. Yet both are prompting the same question: What should we do when a building no longer serves its original purpose?
Too often, the default answer is demolition. Recent discussions surrounding both St. Joe’s and City Center have included the possibility of tearing them down and starting over.
As an architect, my view is simple: We should use every square foot already built before we build another.
That belief is not just a professional philosophy. It is why I went into architecture. My career path was shaped in 1989 by the tragic demolition of Jobber’s Canyon in Omaha, a 24-building historic warehouse district leveled to clear space for a corporate campus. It remains the largest loss in the history of the National Register of Historic Places.
Watching an irreplaceable urban fabric be discarded taught me early that architects must learn to see opportunity where others see obsolescence. If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of Jobber’s Canyon, or Minneapolis’s own midcentury clearing of the Gateway District, we must rethink our “scrape and build” culture.
The Power of What Already Exists
Before we ask what should replace a building, we should first ask what the building itself could become.
Adaptive reuse is not about nostalgia or resisting progress. It is about making progress more sustainable, resilient, and rooted in community.
Medical buildings like St. Joe’s are uniquely suited for this work. They are built with robust structural systems, significant floor-load capacity, substantial utility infrastructure, and adaptable floor plates.
We do not have to guess whether this can work. Across the street, Mary Hall—originally built in 1926 as the St. Joseph’s Hospital Nurses Home—was preserved and adapted into 88 supportive housing units. It is a living example of what can happen when public purpose and architectural vision converge.
The same mindset should be applied to City Center. Instead of viewing demolition as the inevitable answer, we should be evaluating how a creative mix of residential units, hospitality, education, urban food production, or other uses could breathe new life into that 51-story structure.
The True Cost of Starting Over
The construction industry accounts for a major share of global carbon emissions. While municipal climate plans often focus on operational carbon—the emissions generated by heating, cooling, and lighting buildings—they overlook embodied carbon.
Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas emissions generated through raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and installation of structural materials like concrete and steel.
When we demolish buildings, we do not start at a clean environmental zero. We throw away the carbon already invested in that structure and incur a new carbon debt through replacement construction.
Consider the plans for the St. Joe’s site, which call for clearing the 5.5-acre campus and demolishing more than 250,000 square feet of existing buildings. That means discarding a substantial amount of concrete, steel, infrastructure, and public investment before a new project even begins.
Now scale that question up to City Center. A new, highly efficient “green” building can still take decades to pay back the carbon debt incurred during demolition and construction. In a race to mitigate climate change, we do not have decades to break even.
Demolition Should Be the Last Resort
The Twin Cities aspire to be leaders in climate, innovation, and urban resilience. But we cannot fully live up to that promise if our default response to changing real estate markets is to fire up the bulldozer.
Treating massive, durable structures as disposable assets is an ecological luxury we can no longer afford. Before bulldozers are deployed at St. Joe’s, City Center, or any other major site, city leaders should pause, open the planning process, and bring adaptive reuse experts and climate experts to the table.
As architect Carl Elefante, FAIA, famously wrote, “The greenest building is the one that is already built.” It is time to start acting like it.
Alex Haecker is a principal at AWH Architects, a Minneapolis-based architecture and design firm specializing in adaptive reuse, historic preservation and sustainable design.
Related Articles
