Drive past the southwest corner of Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue this month and you'll see cranes, structural steel, and four separate buildings racing toward completion at roughly the same time. Walk the path along the pond a quarter mile away and you'll see something else entirely: mature plantings, dog walkers on a loop that already feels like it's been there for a decade, and a grocery store with its own taproom humming along like it opened years ago. Because it did.
That gap is the story of Highland Bridge right now. The public half of this 122-acre site, the parks, the pond, the trails, got finished and settled into daily life a while back. The commercial half, the part that will actually determine what living here feels like day to day, is being decided this fall on one corner, by leases nobody outside Ryan Companies has seen yet.
The Pond Already Feels Old
Highland Bridge sits on the footprint of the Ford Motor Company's Twin Cities assembly plant, which ran from 1926 until it closed in 2011. Ryan Companies became master developer in 2018 and closed on the land at the end of 2019. Since then, the site has quietly built out ten miles of bike and pedestrian paths and a storm water feature that winds through the development like a creek. Sean Ryan, the development manager overseeing the project, has called it "an icon of that site," and if you've walked it on a September evening you'll understand why that's not just developer talk. The path loops past the water and ties into the surrounding street grid, so the fall color show is already easy to reach on foot from most of the site.
The Lunds & Byerlys that anchors the development's north end opened in 2022 as the first retail space on the old Ford site, and it's been the neighborhood's default answer to "where do I actually go" ever since. The building does more than sell groceries. The second floor holds The Mezz, a self-serve taproom with 30 taps of local beer and wine, plus a full-service Caribou Coffee and a Bachman's floral counter downstairs. At the ribbon cutting, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter told the crowd the city was "very excited for the future of this part of town." Four years later, the grocery store and the trail loop are the parts of that future that already arrived.
The Corner Still Being Decided
Everything else is converging on what Ryan Companies calls the civic square, at the southwest corner of Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue, where the developer is finishing five buildings on a 2.97-acre site as part of what it calls the Gateway project. Four of those buildings are one story. One is a four-story building named The Albert, after Albert Kahn, the architect who designed the original Ford assembly plant that stood on this exact ground for 85 years.
The Albert will hold 97 apartments alongside ground-floor retail space. Leasing opened in May 2026, and residential move-ins were targeted to begin this month. The retail spaces themselves were reported as 90 percent complete as of early July, but as of that same report, the ground-floor lease agreements were still being worked out, with tenant names promised "soon." Nobody driving past that corner right now can tell you what's actually going to be in those storefronts by winter.
The three freestanding retail buildings surrounding The Albert add another 14,000 square feet of commercial space between them, with completion planned for later this summer and into fall. The fourth one-story building is already spoken for: a 13,000-square-foot Tierra Encantada bilingual child care center, expected to open in the coming weeks after the tenant finishes its own interior build-out. The whole Gateway project, budgeted at $68 million and started in June 2025, is targeted for substantial completion by November 2026, about three months from now.
What's Confirmed, and What's Still a Guess
If you live near Highland Bridge and you're trying to figure out what your neighborhood is actually becoming, it helps to separate the two categories.
Confirmed: Tierra Encantada's child care center, expected to open in the coming weeks in the fourth one-story building. The Albert's residential leasing, already underway, with move-ins targeted for this month. Substantial completion of the entire Gateway block by November, roughly three months out.
Still unresolved: who occupies the ground-floor retail inside The Albert and the roughly 14,000 square feet split across the three standalone buildings. That's the piece that decides whether this corner becomes a coffee-and-errands stretch, a dining destination, or something closer to what the site's own marketing describes as an aspiration for cafes, grocery, and more experiential retail. Right now it's still shells with renderings taped to the windows.
Why This Took Four Years to Get Here
Understanding why this corner sat quiet for so long explains why so much is landing at once now instead of trickling in over several years. Construction on Highland Bridge's market-rate housing stalled around 2022, when rising interest rates and construction costs put a hold on privately financed apartment buildings across the Twin Cities, even as income-restricted and senior housing on the site kept moving because it didn't depend on the same capital. Sean Ryan has described that period as a "perfect storm" for market-rate multifamily projects specifically.
What finally broke the freeze wasn't a change in the broader lending environment. It was a tax increment financing package that made the Gateway project's economics work again, alongside a citywide adjustment to St. Paul's rent control ordinance in May 2026 that exempted newer construction. Ryan has been direct that the TIF package, not the rent control change, was the deciding factor. Once the financing cleared, four buildings that had been stuck on paper for years all broke ground within the same construction season, which is why they're all racing toward a finish line together this fall instead of opening one at a time.
It also isn't the last wave. Weidner Apartment Homes, the Seattle-based partner that already operates the mixed-use building anchoring Lunds & Byerlys, has briefed the St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority on two more buildings on the site, known as Blocks 11 and 16. Block 11 is planned for roughly 175 units and about 2,000 square feet of retail, with construction expected to start this summer and run 18 to 20 months. Block 16 is expected to follow about a year after that. Highland Bridge's commercial identity isn't going to stop shifting once the civic square fills in. It's just the first corner to get there.
What to Watch This Fall
For anyone already living around Highland Bridge, the next few months are worth paying attention to in a specific order. Watch for Tierra Encantada's opening date, since a licensed child care center at that scale changes weekday traffic patterns on Ford Parkway before anything else does. Watch for lease announcements at The Albert and the three standalone buildings, because those names will tell you more about the neighborhood's direction than any rendering has so far. And if you haven't walked the full trail loop past the pond in a while, early fall is arguably the best stretch of the year to do it, with the water feature at its most photogenic and the crowds from summer thinned out.
The finished half of Highland Bridge already proved what this site could become. The corner at Cretin and Ford Parkway is where the next answer gets written, and as of this fall, the ink isn't dry yet.
If you're weighing what these changes might mean for a home near Highland Bridge, whether you're watching values shift as the retail mix fills in or wondering how a new child care center and a wave of fresh apartments could affect resale timing down the road, Smitten Real Estate Group knows this corner of St. Paul block by block. Let's Connect.
