With its thriving economy and top recreational opportunities, it is no surprise that Bloomington is one of Minneapolis’s most popular communities. Home to about 85,000 residents, Bloomington has the nationally renowned Mall of America, which brings employment as well as outstanding shopping, and entertainment to local residents. The city’s superb Hyland Lake Park Reserve attracts winter sport enthusiasts from all over greater Minneapolis and beyond and the local Bush Lake Beach is a wonderful place to enjoy lazy summer days. Housing is still relatively affordable here and this coupled with a good local school district only makes Bloomington more popular with working families.
I 35W into Minneapolis has effectively split Bloomington into two separate regions, "West Bloomington," and "East Bloomington", with the west functioning largely as a bedroom community and the east containing most of the industry, lower-income housing, and the Mall of America.
Location
Bloomington is about 10 miles southwest of downtown Minneapolis near the Minnesota/Wisconsin border in Minnesota’s Hennepin County.
Geography/Terrain
Largely flat, Bloomington is about 830 feet above sea level and covers a land area of 35.5 square miles. Thoughtful town planning has meant that about a third of Bloomington is permanently reserved for park purposes, and the city has two large wilderness areas, the Minnesota River lowlands, and the Hyland Park. The Minnesota River runs along the southern edge of the city, which also contains Long Meadow Lake, Bush Lake, Normandale Lake, Nine Mile Creek, and about 100 additional small lakes and ponds. The Mississippi River is about 10 miles to the east.
Distance to 3 closest major cities
Bloomington is just 10 miles southwest of downtown Minneapolis and 3.5 miles east of Richfield. St Paul is about 20 miles northeast of Bloomington.
Jobs
With a median income that is substantially higher than the greater Minneapolis average, Bloomington is characterized by low unemployment and ample job opportunities. While East Bloomington is largely a commuter suburb, West Bloomington is a blue-collar community with a solid economic base in retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. Proximity to the Minneapolis/St Paul International Airport has made the city as a whole a major hospitality center and it has over 7000 hotel rooms.
By far the largest employer is the huge Mall of America shopping and entertainment center in East Bloomington, which has over 13,000 employees; other major employers include the Hospitality Association (hotels and restaurants), Health Partners (health maintenance), Seagate Technology (computer manufacturing), the Bloomington School District, Wells Fargo, Express Scripts (pharmaceutical services), and the Toro Company (manufacturers of snowblowers and lawn equipment).
Housing
Bloomington’s housing market has long been stable, with prices that appreciate quietly while remaining affordable to new buyers. The region east of I- 35W is characterized by low-income housing while the region to the west of the interstate has finer homes. Overall, home prices are higher than most in the Minneapolis region but buyers will find a satisfying level of variation in price.
Parks/Sports/Recreation/Golf
With about 9,000 acres of public parks and open spaces in Bloomington (a third of the city’s size), residents have plenty of space to enjoy the outdoors and play their sport of choice. Ball fields, courts, and children’s playgrounds abound. The Bloomington Family Aquatic Center is an excellent facility, and Bush Lake Beach is another great place to have fun in the water in summer. Open between June and August, Bush Lake is part of the Hyland-Bush-Anderson Lakes Regional Park and sees about 100,000 visitors a season.
The city has two large wilderness areas, the Minnesota River lowlands, and the Hyland Lake Park Reserve. The river runs along the southern edge of the city, bringing watersports and nature spotting to residents, and the Hyland Reserve has the Hyland Ski and Snowboard area, a superb winter sport location with several innovative features, and a great disc golf tournament course for summer play.
Bloomington also has two regular golf courses and a driving range, and local players also have ready access to Minneapolis’s many top golf courses.
Special Attractions/Events
Above average median wages for the Minneapolis region, attract new residents to Bloomington, as do the superb recreational opportunities offered by the city’s two large wilderness areas. The Bloomington Center of the Arts supports the city’s thriving local arts scene and the famous Mall of America brings employment as well as shopping and entertainment opportunities to residents. The Park at the mall is the country’s largest indoor amusement park, and the center has an exciting Dinosaur Walk, flight simulators, a NASCAR Indoor Speedway, a four-story Lego showplace, and Minnesota’s largest aquarium. Locals get together to celebrate seasonal festivals and local sporting events and both the Parks and Recreation Department and the Mall of America host a wide range of fun programs and events year round.
Interesting Facts/Historic Buildings and Places
Long the ancestral lands of the Mdewakanton band of the Dakota (Sioux) Nation, the Bloomington region was first settled by outsiders in 1843, when Gideon Pond established the Oak Grove Mission and Peter and Louisa Quinn arrived and began clearing the prairie to farm it. The Quinns built their cabin near today’s 10th Avenue Circle and they taught European farming methods to the Dakota. In 1851 the lands west of the Mississippi (including Bloomington) were opened up for general white settlement, and by 1855 Bloomington was a small farming center with school held in a local home. Bloomington had its first town meeting in 1858 and a year later, the schoolhouse was built. By 1880, the settlement had 880 citizens and the town hall was built in 1892.
The turn of the century saw telephones, the railway, and cars appear in Bloomington and by 1930, the local population was well over 2,000. This rose rapidly after the Second World War, when the large scale construction of low cost and low density housing bought many returning servicemen and their new families to the area. The nineteen-fifties saw Bloomington become a major manufacturing center. Local council policy encouraged commercial and industrial development, further low-cost housing and new shopping centers, further cementing Bloomington’s character as a community of working families—a profile that exists to this day. Recent years have seen major upgrades of Bloomington infrastructure, parks, recreational facilities, and transport routes, and the development of the city as a primary retail hub for greater Minneapolis. Home to the Mall of America, the nation’s largest indoor shopping center, Bloomington is now a major tourist destination for shoppers.
- NUMBER1EXPERTS™ 
