Open an overhead door early on the back side of the property and this is what is out there: deer working the tree line, turkeys in the grass, sandhill cranes standing in the pond looking prehistoric about it.
That is not a marketing sentence. It is what somebody sees standing in their own doorway with a cup of coffee at six in the morning.
Why it stays that way
Roughly ten acres behind the buildings is pond and wetland, and beyond it a wooded hill sixty to seventy feet high sitting under a utility easement. Nothing goes up there. Not a building, not a lot line, not somebody else’s back wall.
Units facing that direction look at the preserve and nothing else, permanently. In a metro where the field behind a building is a future warehouse roughly ninety percent of the time, permanently is worth something.
The part we chose
Keeping a natural area intact on a commercial site is work. Grading around it, draining around it, leaving usable ground alone. We did it on purpose and we would do it again, because the alternative was a retention pond with a chain link fence and nothing to look at.
Come at the quiet hour
Mornings are better than afternoons out here, for reasons the wildlife decides. 5000 Odessa Ave NE, St. Michael. Tours by appointment.