Humboldt Industrial Area

The Humboldt Industrial Area is an industrial district in far north Minneapolis, in the Camden community, occupying the land between 49th Avenue North and the CPKC main line, from Humboldt Avenue west to the city limit at Osseo Road. It is about a mile long and less than half a mile deep at its widest. With no permanent residents, it is a neighborhood only in the administrative sense — in practice, it is a working zone. Nearly two-thirds of its land belongs to the railroad, most of it the Humboldt Yard; the rest is a handful of industrial operations that serve the broader city's economy without participating in its residential life.

The district's most significant geographic relationship is with Shingle Creek, which borders it to the north across 49th Avenue. Houses and Creekview Park sit on the far side of the street; the near side is industrial. With no residents of its own, the industrial area was taken into the Shingle Creek Neighborhood Association's neighborhood plan in 1995. The boundary between the two neighborhoods is a stark land-use transition.

To the east and south, the Humboldt Industrial Area borders the residential neighborhoods of Lind-Bohanon, across Humboldt Avenue, and Victory and Webber-Camden, across the tracks, creating more boundaries between industrial and residential use that shape the daily experience of the surrounding communities. Its western tip touches the city limit, with Brooklyn Center beyond.

As far as we can tell, Humboldt Industrial Area doesn’t have a neighborhood welcome sign — at least, nobody has documented one that we can find. If you’ve seen one, tell us where it is — we’d love to be wrong about this.

The Humboldt Industrial Area's history is the history of the Soo Line. By 1938 at the latest, the railroad's Humboldt Yard was operating as a switching yard, and the railroad still owns nearly two-thirds of the district under the Soo Line name. It held the yard's northwest corner for more than 90 years — land that was partly marsh, filled in over time — before selling it for redevelopment in the 2000s. Some of the buildings along 49th Avenue are old too: the Soo Line's grain elevator at 2125 49th Avenue North, now General Mills', was standing by 1926, and county records date the Owens Corning plant at 1901 to 1945.

Ryan Creek has been moved at least once. It originally ran through the middle of the yard's northwest corner and was shifted toward the corner's southern edge sometime between 1965 and 1971 — a relocation the city later described as undocumented. In January 1979 a fire at the Howe Chemical Company warehouse, just west across Osseo Road, sent water carrying pesticides and fertilizer into the creek and onto the railroad land, and berms were built to hold it there.

That corner had never been built on. By the mid-2000s it was a vacant lot with a semi-trailer parking area and, the city noted, a magnet for illegal dumping. In 2005 the city wrote a redevelopment plan to clean it up and put a multi-tenant industrial building there, which went up in 2006. The rail yard kept switching freight through all of it.

The Humboldt Industrial Area's character is defined by its function as a working district. The landscape is flat, paved or graveled, and occupied mostly by the rail yard and low-rise industrial buildings. Outside the rail yard, the occupants are a grain elevator, a shingle plant, and warehouse and light industrial buildings. The architecture is purely functional — metal siding, concrete block, loading docks, and the infrastructure of vehicle access and freight movement.

The rail yard that fills much of the district remains active, moving freight and reinforcing its industrial character. The sound of trains is part of the daily soundtrack, a reminder that this is land that was platted for movement and commerce rather than residence and recreation.

The nearest neighbors live just across 49th Avenue, and city policy has tried to account for that. The Minneapolis Plan favored light industry on industrial land but discouraged warehouse and distribution uses where truck traffic would hurt residential neighborhoods, and the city's shoreland overlay, which limits building placement and height near water, reaches into the district because of Shingle Creek.

The Humboldt Industrial Area does not have restaurants, cafes, or bars. Workers in the district drive to nearby commercial areas for meals or bring food from home.

The Humboldt Industrial Area has no neighborhood park of its own. Creekview Park is just across 49th Avenue in Shingle Creek. Two creeks do pass through: Ryan Creek runs east–west along the north side, and Shingle Creek cuts through the east end on a strip of Park Board land, with the Shingle Creek Regional Trail beside it. Otherwise the area is not designed for or used for outdoor recreation, and the lack of green space is consistent with its industrial function.

There are no schools in the Humboldt Industrial Area. The district has no residential population to serve. Schools in the surrounding neighborhoods — Shingle Creek, Lind-Bohanon, and the broader Camden community — serve the families whose working members may commute to jobs in the industrial area.

Real estate in the Humboldt Industrial Area is exclusively commercial and industrial. The market consists of warehouse buildings, industrial facilities, and commercial lots, with values reflecting the industrial zoning, the structural condition of the buildings, and the environmental status of the parcels.

New investment has come slowly. When the city drew up a redevelopment plan in 2005 for a vacant 10-acre corner at 49th Avenue and Osseo Road, it called the project the first significant private investment in commercial buildings in the area in many years. Whether more follows depends on policy decisions about industrial land preservation and the economics of environmental remediation.

For businesses seeking industrial space inside Minneapolis, the draw is access: 49th Avenue and Brooklyn Boulevard at the district's edges, Highway 100 to the west, and I-94 less than a mile east of Humboldt Avenue.

The Humboldt Industrial Area is car-dependent, with minimal pedestrian infrastructure. That reflects the industrial character — this is an area designed for vehicle access, not foot traffic. The closest rapid bus stop is Osseo & 47th Ave Station on the C Line and D Line, just south of the tracks at the west end in Victory. Route 22 runs along parts of 49th and Humboldt avenues at the district's edges, but with no through streets, no bus runs through the district itself.

The road network provides good vehicle access to the freeway system. Interstate 94 is accessible within minutes, connecting the area to downtown Minneapolis and the broader metro. Inside the district there is almost no street grid: the avenues from the north stop at 49th, and only a short stub of 47th Avenue reaches in from Humboldt.

Biking is possible along connecting routes — the Shingle Creek Regional Trail follows the creek through the district's east end — though the rest of the district is not particularly bike-friendly. Cyclists on the trail are passing through rather than arriving at a destination.

The Humboldt Industrial Area is far from the warehouse districts near downtown that have turned residential, and the pressure here runs the other way: the neighbors want the industrial land to be a better neighbor. Shingle Creek residents, working with Lind-Bohanon, Victory, and Webber-Camden, completed a community planning and greening report on the industrial area in 2004, and the Shingle Creek Neighborhood Association endorsed the industrial park proposed here in 2005 and reviewed the city's redevelopment plan for it.

The city of Minneapolis has expressed interest in preserving industrial employment land, recognizing that the blue-collar jobs these districts provide are an important part of the city's economic diversity. Its 2006 industrial land study counted about 490 jobs on industrial-zoned land in its wider Humboldt study area in 2004 and found no overlay district there allowing residential use.

Environmental remediation is the wildcard. Some parcels in the Humboldt area carry contamination that is expensive to clean up — the city's 2005 plan for the corner at 49th Avenue and Osseo Road documented pesticides and petroleum compounds in the soil and groundwater — and the economics of remediation can either accelerate or delay redevelopment depending on the anticipated end use.