Highland Bridge Missed Its Own Price Forecast by 72 Percent. Here's What That Means for Your Mac-Groveland Comp.

When Ryan Companies asked Saint Paul for $21 million in 2024 to keep construction moving at Highland Bridge, the pitch included an admission most developers would rather bury in a footnote. The rowhomes built so far, the company's own senior vice president told the city, are worth 72 percent more than anyone projected when the financing was set up. The 2024 market value of the site's developed and undeveloped parcels came in $77 million higher than the redevelopment agreement assumed.

That is not a rounding error. That is the team that literally wrote the pricing assumptions into a public financing deal getting the number wrong by nearly three quarters.

If the people who set the price target missed it by that much, a single median pulled off a real estate portal is not going to tell you what a home costs in this part of Saint Paul. And if you have been comparing Mac-Groveland to another neighborhood using one number, you have been comparing something that no longer exists as one market.

Three Sites, Three Different Answers

Ask three different sources what a home in Mac-Groveland costs right now and you get three different stories. Redfin's March 2026 numbers show a median sale price of $482,919, down 3.4 percent from a year earlier, on just 34 closed sales that month. Zillow's home value index, updated through the end of March 2026, put the neighborhood's typical value at $456,454, up 2.7 percent year over year. A separate trailing 12-month calculation had the median closer to $453,000, up roughly 5 percent.

None of these sources is wrong. They are measuring the same 30 to 40 monthly sales through different windows and different math, and in a neighborhood this size, that is enough to flip the sign on the trend depending on which handful of closings land in which month. A neighborhood selling 34 homes in a month does not generate a stable median the way a citywide number does. Add one $1.6 million Summit Avenue sale or one $290,000 fixer, and the whole figure moves.

But the sample-size problem is only half of it. The other half is sitting a few blocks away on Beechwood Avenue and Sweetwater Drive.

The Rowhomes Were Supposed to Anchor the Low End

Highland Bridge sits on the 135 acres along the Mississippi River where Ford's Twin Cities Assembly Plant operated for 84 years before closing in 2011. Ryan Companies became master developer in 2018, purchased the site in December 2019, and has spent the years since building what the city calls a mixed-use neighborhood: apartments, senior housing, retail, and a 15-block rowhome district built by Pulte Homes, with prices designed to sit at an attainable point in the master plan's housing mix.

That plan also depended on tax increment financing, a tool that captures future property tax growth to pay for infrastructure and to subsidize the affordable units built alongside the market-rate ones. The math behind that tool requires someone to forecast what the market-rate homes will actually sell for. Saint Paul's forecast assumed a certain price range for the Pulte rowhomes. The rowhomes sold for 72 percent more than that.

As of August 2026, Pulte's active Highland Bridge listings carried a median list price of $697,990, at roughly $389 per square foot, with completed homes on Beechwood Avenue and Sweetwater Drive running from the high $600,000s into the mid $700,000s. A January 2025 project update showed 67 of the first 76 rowhomes already sold, with 48 more under construction. Pulte later declined its option on a second 7.5-acre rowhome parcel, and Ryan is now working with a different builder to finish that phase, according to Star Tribune reporting on the city's financing request.

None of that activity shows up as "Mac-Groveland" on a portal search unless you widen the map slightly, because Highland Bridge sits just across the boundary in Highland Park. But the two markets are close enough, and connected enough by Mississippi River Boulevard, that they are absolutely competing for the same buyer's attention and shaping the same appraiser's comp set.

Two Housing Stocks Sharing One Zip Code

Walk the blocks around Groveland Park or Mattocks Park and you are almost entirely in homes built before 1940. Bungalows, Tudors, Colonial Revivals, the kind of century-old woodwork and porch depth that no builder is replicating at scale today. That stock is what generates the $450,000 to $483,000 figures showing up on the portals, and it is what most people picture when they hear "Mac-Groveland."

Drive a few minutes toward the river and you are in rowhomes finished in 2026, priced closer to $700,000, with floor plans and finishes that have nothing in common with the 1928 four-square two blocks away. Both are technically inside the same zip code cluster that includes Mac-Groveland, Summit Hill, and neighboring Highland Park addresses. Neither one is a reliable stand-in for the other.

This is the part a single median hides. A number built from both cohorts together tells you almost nothing about what either one actually costs, and it tells you even less about which direction either one is heading, because new-construction closings and century-old resale closings do not move for the same reasons. A rowhome closing reflects Pulte's remaining inventory and construction pace. A bungalow closing reflects a family selling into 34 days on market on a street that has not seen a new build in decades.

What This Means If You Are Actually Comparing Neighborhoods

If you are cross-shopping Saint Paul against another suburb using a headline median, ask which cohort that median is built from before you use it to judge affordability or timing. A neighborhood-wide number that blends 1920s bungalows with 2026 infill construction is not comparable to a suburb with a more uniform housing stock, even if the two medians land within a few thousand dollars of each other.

The more useful comparison is vintage to vintage. If you are looking at a pre-1940 home, compare it to other pre-1940 sales on similar lot sizes near Randolph Avenue or Ayd Mill Road, not to a rowhome that closed last month. If new construction is what you actually want, the Highland Bridge inventory and pricing gives you a cleaner read on what new construction costs in this part of the city than any blended neighborhood median will.

It also means treating any single-month percentage change with some skepticism. A market moving 34 sales a month can show a negative year-over-year swing and a positive one in the same quarter, depending on which handful of closings land where. The trend that matters is the multi-month pattern within a cohort, not the headline number on any one portal on any one day.

Is Highland Bridge technically part of Mac-Groveland?

No. Highland Bridge sits within the Highland Park neighborhood, immediately southwest of Mac-Groveland along the river. The two share zip code overlap and a lot of cross-shopping buyers, which is exactly why their pricing gets conflated even though they are separate housing stocks.

Will the neighborhood median keep climbing as Highland Bridge finishes?

As more new-construction closings enter the broader area's sales data, blended medians that include those transactions will likely trend upward simply from mix shift, even if resale bungalow pricing in Mac-Groveland proper stays flat. That is a mix effect, not necessarily a sign that century-old housing stock is appreciating at the same rate.

How much of Highland Bridge's rowhome district is left to build?

As of the January 2025 project update, 67 of the first 76 rowhomes had sold with 48 more under construction. Pulte has since stepped back from a second 7.5-acre phase, and Ryan Companies has said it is working with another developer to bring that parcel forward, so total build-out timing beyond the current phase remains in motion.

If you are trying to figure out what a specific block, not a blended average, actually supports right now, that is a conversation worth having before you set a list price or write an offer. David Brandner tracks these comps by cohort across Saint Paul and the rest of the metro, and can pull the specific vintage-matched sales that apply to your address. Get your instant home valuation to start with a number built on your actual comp set, not a citywide blend.