Nine new buildings planned, under construction or recently completed throughout St. Paul’s official “Creative Enterprise Zone” are poised to reinvent the city’s historic warehouse district surrounding Raymond and University avenues.

Sunrise Banks is opening a 57,000-square-foot new headquarters on Wabash Street, near the county line. Directly along University Avenue, upscale housing developments like Flaherty and Collins Properties’ 2700 University and Exeter Realty’s C-&-E Flats are underway.

Beacon Interfaith has completed Prior Crossing, an apartment complex for homeless young people, near University and Prior.

Dominium has proposed more than 600 apartments — a mix of affordable housing and market-rate units — at the former Weyerhaeuser paper warehouse on Emerald Street.

Demolition of an old industrial building at 2323 Charles this summer has made room for “The Ray,” 80 market-rate apartments that will be constructed behind the Carleton Artist Lofts. More projects are in planning stages.

Sandy Jacobs, a real estate broker with the Update Co., is excited by the momentum.

“We rent to a lot of nonprofit groups and a lot of small businesses,” said Jacobs, who will host a Dec. 1 grand opening for the Update Co.’s new three-story office building at 661 LaSalle St.

Dubbed the “CEZ” for short, the Creative Enterprise Zone’s 10 linear blocks along University Avenue from Emerald to Prior streets offer affordable rents for “creatives,” or designers and manufacturers of light and creative industry. The branded business district was officially added to St. Paul’s Comprehensive Plan in 2013.

Related: A quick guide to St. Paul’s ‘Creative Enterprise Zone’ projects

But the sudden influx of housing along the Green Line light-rail corridor has raised questions about the future of this warehouse district near St. Paul’s western border with Minneapolis.

With so much former industrial space suddenly offline, what does the future hold for these types of creative uses?

“There’s a concern that we’re losing a lot of industrial properties to residential,” said Amy Sparks, the part-time executive director of the Creative Enterprise Zone. “It’s the largest contiguous industrial area in St. Paul.” Related Articles Metro Transit workers reject contract offer, vote to authorize strike

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Catherine Reid Day, a business consultant who helped get the Creative Enterprise Zone added to the city’s comprehensive plan, said the zone is an effort to keep both kinds of spaces while continuing to preserve innovation.

“The root of what we do is ‘people are makers,’ ” Reid Day said.

On top of residential growth, Vandalia Tower — which is almost 80 percent occupied — is up for sale, just as the former Silgan can factory on Prior Avenue is readying to debut the new Black Stack Brewery and the CanCan Wonderland mini-golf destination. A large section of St. Anthony Park — the epicenter of St. Paul’s clean, “green” industrial zone — is changing fast.

Meanwhile, across the city line, an overlapping effort to rebrand and redevelop a neighborhood is creeping east.

North of Prospect Park, the University of Minnesota is working with 30 community partners to market 370 acres of underdeveloped industrial land as the “Towerside innovation district.” The district, which is home to university laboratories, the giant United Crushers grain elevator and Surly Brewing properties in Minneapolis, also extends into St. Paul as far east as Minnesota 280.

‘MAKE IT HERE’

As much as celebrating the structure itself, next month’s “Make It Here” mixer at the Update Co.’s new office building aims to spotlight the mix of young entrepreneurs, start-up companies and established small businesses that have sought work space within two blocks of Metro Transit’s Raymond Avenue light-rail station.

Former factory structures such as the Dow print shop building at 2242 University Ave., Vandalia Tower — the old KingKoil mattress factory at 550 Vandalia St. — and the former Silgan/ American Can factory at 755 Prior Ave. today house photographers and furniture upholsterers, start-up architectural firms and small brewers side by side.

The city’s University-Raymond Commercial Historic District has helped safeguard the warehouses from the proverbial wrecking ball, and the development community has teamed with “creatives” to do the rest.

“The jobs that have moved or are created here are kind of high quality, ‘clean’ jobs, if you will,” Day said. “We host events so that artists and creatives and entrepreneurs can (network and) make proposals. We’re facilitators.”

And the facilitating appears to be going well. Alchemy Enterprises on Raymond Avenue helped design Bang Brewing on Capp Road. Studio on Fire, a letterpress firm on Carleton Street, created coasters for the Urban Growler brewery on Endicott Street. Bootstrap Coffee Roasters, which is based in Vandalia Tower, is sold down the street at the Workhorse Coffee Bar, which curates tiny art installations at “The Smallest Museum in St. Paul.”

Workhorse co-owner Shannon Forney, who founded the micro-museum, is coordinating a Knight Foundation grant with the twin aims of boosting the visibility of the Creative Enterprise Zone through signage, branding and wayfinding markers, and creating official counts of businesses entering and leaving the zone.

When Peter Remes, a principal with Vandalia Tower owner First & First real estate, recruited Wisconsin-based Lake Monster Brewing to the complex, the brewers asked an essential question for any business looking to relocate: Why here?

Sparks, who participated in discussions, responded, “Do you want to say you’re ‘in Midway,’ or do you want to say you’re in a ‘Creative Enterprise Zone’?”

The pitch worked, multiple times.

Sparks helped introduce another brewer, the Urban Growler, to the Update Co., its current landlord. Using “pop-up” classes run by electronic music duo Beatrix Jar, she also helped keep interest alive in the spot now occupied by Workhorse Coffee at 2399 University Ave. W.

Jacobs, of the Update Co., said her firm owns eight buildings in the Creative Enterprise Zone, and they’re 96 percent occupied.

Many visitors fail to understand that the Ramsey/Hennepin county line and Minneapolis/St. Paul border run along Emerald Street, three long blocks west of Minnesota 280. The ambiguity has actually helped her land tenants who might otherwise throw the other city a cold shoulder.

“Minneapolis people have always been nervous about venturing into St. Paul, and St. Paul people have been nervous about saying they’re in Minneapolis,” Jacobs said. “That’s why this neighborhood is perfect.”