MOORHEAD -- A new effort to revitalize downtown Moorhead is just beginning, but there are high hopes already for what it could mean.

Civic, business and higher education leaders gathered Thursday, Feb. 16, at The Rourke Art Gallery + Museum to announce a yet-unnamed project that has raised nearly $500,000 of pledges from 28 investors to fund the effort for the next three years.

listen live watch live

Dave Anderson, the first director of the Downtown Community Partnership that has worked on revitalizing downtown Fargo since 2000, said Moorhead’s new effort goes back four years to conversations he had with other residents about the possibilities for this neighborhood.

“What we have for you today is a beginning,” he said. “We don't have a lot of answers. Those answers are going to come in a community process that begins right away with planning and getting ideas and really putting together what it is that will be a community downtown.”

New dreams

The presidents of Moorhead’s three higher education campuses -- Concordia College, Minnesota State University Moorhead and Minnesota State Community and Technical College -- will serve as co-chairs of the new effort.

Organizers are now completing the incorporation process to make the organization into a nonprofit under the FM Area Foundation, and they said that one of the first tasks will be to hire an executive director to lead the effort and create a plan as community meetings begin.

M State President Peggy Kennedy said the goal is to collaborate, whether it’s higher education institutions, community members or business leaders, to make a vibrant hub of the community.

“I think that today is the day we start to help make that dream come true,” she said.

William Craft, president of Concordia College, said a revitalized downtown Moorhead could help draw students to study here and decide to make a life here after graduation.

The exact opportunities for higher education in a refreshed downtown are still unknown, but Kennedy said it could include everything from having urban planning and design classes in a renovated building to new professional development or workforce training options.

Craft said he dreams of a neighborhood that’s attractive to young families pushing strollers, older residents pushing walkers and everyone in between so students can be “engaged deeply” in their community.

Initial conversations about the future of downtown have made it clear that residents want it to be an area for people of all ages, Anderson said. While organizers can get some insight from the decades-old revitalization of downtown Fargo, he said it’s important for Moorhead to find its own identity.

But there are hurdles to the project, especially the wholesale “clear-cut” of old downtown buildings as Moorhead, like many other communities in the 1970s, razed the neighborhood to build a mall and lost the kinds of historical properties that many downtowns boast today.

Anderson said some kind of program like North Dakota’s Renaissance Zone, which offers tax incentives in exchange for improving properties in certain districts, also could be an important tool to spur development if the Minnesota Legislature can come up with a plan.

“It really is kind of baby steps,” Anderson said about the task ahead. “Getting the vision, getting the conversation going, getting commitments from people that are already here and then nurturing it almost like a garden.”

Part of that work, Craft said, is ensuring that downtown Moorhead will be an authentic reflection of the city’s identity rather than an imitation of other downtowns.

“It’s a matter of being true to who we are,” he said.