TOWN CENTERS VS. ENCLOSED MALLS

DEVELOPERS AND PLANNERS AGREE: TOWN CENTERS ARE HERE TO STAY,
ENCLOSED REGIONAL MALLS ARE GOING AWAY

By Steve Wright

Enclosed malls -- those places where dad bought a mower at Sears, mom purchased a dress at JCPenney and sis got some toys at Montgomery Ward – aren’t dead. But they sure are getting a run for their money from the New Urbanism-flavored town centers that offer more of a mixed use, grid patterned sense of place than those plastic-feeling, climate-controlled bastions of the food court, Spencer Gifts shop and Orange Julius stand.

Victor Dover knows this well, because his Coral Gables, Florida-based Dover, Kohl & Partners firm has developed a sub-specialty of reprogramming dead or dying regional malls.

In the Orlando suburb of Winter Park, a team including Dover Kohl worked in the late 1990s to restructure the Winter Park Mall, a 1960s era enclosed shopping mall that steadily declined through the `80s and `90s.

“(Enclosed) shopping centers are the kind of investments that are never worth more than their value the day they open,” Dover observed. “With a town center, you add to the value each year it evolves because you’re building community, not a mall.”

Working with the City of Winter Park, a team of experts and a seasoned developer – Columbus, Ohio-based Don M. Casto Organization – converted a flat lining enclosed mall into Winter Park Village: a street-oriented, multi-phased redevelopment that includes housing.

“We didn’t expect housing to come immediately. The response was, `who wants to live in a parking lot at the dead Winter Park Mall,’” Dover recounted. “But as soon as they opened the movie theatre, an outdoor café, an ice cream shop, a hamburger joint, people wanted to come in to a setting where they could walk to fun things.”

Charles C. Bohl, Director of the Knight Program in Community Building at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture and author of Place Making: Town Centers, Main Streets and Urban Villages, is bullish on the long-range future of town centers.

“Look at the decline in enclosed shopping mall construction -- only three built in 2003, a significant number of mall failures/closures, plus a net loss in the number of shopping malls over the past few years,” Bohl states. “Compare that to the past few years when roughly 100 town centers were planned, under construction or built.”

Bohl said good urban design, civic character, community-orientation a public realm and residential – “people actually LIVING in these places” are the essential differences between town centers and conventional development. He said all retail depends on good site location, sound market analysis, and carefully designed tenant mix and leasing strategies.

“But town centers have an additional dimension that boils down to `Walt Disney World 101.’ After decades of painstaking surveys and analysis, Disney's management team discovered that it was not the `attractions’ that were fueling the repeat business that is absolutely essential to the economic success of the company’s theme parks --- it was the overall quality of the built environment and the pleasure people receive from strolling, sitting and enjoying the place itself,” Bohl explained. “The same is true for town centers and main streets.”

“Town Centers in Mashpee Commons (Mashpee, Massachusetts) and Mizner Park (Boca Raton, Florida) have now outlived the shopping center/mall they replaced, showing the potential for town centers to create enduring places within communities rather than disposable `machines for shopping,’" he added.

In mall-crazed Los Angeles, where the car is king and pedestrian activity is oft viewed as aberrant behavior, Santa Monica-based developer Caruso Affiliated is making a mint producing open air town centers.

Rest assured, the mallrats are still pumping their money into enclosed retail pleasure domes such as Beverly Center. But mega-successful Rick Caruso takes his inspiration not from sterile enclosures, but from frequent visits to Italian piazzas.

“People enjoy being outside, even in areas that don’t have year round good weather like Los Angeles. In a mixed use, outdoor plaza, you have the ability to make the place your own, to hang out with family and friends. It’s a total shopping and dining experience, so everybody has a good time.” said Caruso, noting that by comparison, enclosed malls offer a “flat,” shopping-only experience.

Caruso said the key to town centers isn’t the absence of a continuous roof overhead; it’s having the right mix of merchants blended into a place with a strong streetscape, beautiful art, water features and matured landscaping. Caruso Affiliated’s The Grove has a full-scale electronic trolley that transports people from its 575,000 square-foot destination to the neighboring Farmers Market.

When The Grove opened in 2002, many thought it would be the death knell for the beloved Farmers Market that dated back to 1934, but had been on the decline for nearly a decade.

“There were significant concerns that the charm and history of the then-ailing Farmers Market would be impacted negatively by the Grove,” Caruso said. “The fact is, many Farmers Market merchants say the Grove has created a 200 percent increase in business.”

While enclosed malls and power centers tend to kill off main street businesses, Caruso said The Grove proves that pedestrian-oriented town centers can revive neighboring mom and pop shops.

Columbus, Ohio-based Yaromir Steiner is so wedded to developing pedestrian-friendly, grid-patterned mixed use, that his company logo states “Steiner: Developer of New Town Centers.”

Steiner + Associates produced the award-winning, frequently-studied Easton Town Center in Columbus, a city that had grown in sprawled suburban patterns for decades. The 1.5 million square foot Easton created a new center of retail, dining, housing and hotel uses in a main street setting about eight miles north of downtown Columbus.

“We will never build a three-anchored enclosed mall. We may convert a failed mall into a town center, but we are not building isolated retail centers,” Steiner said.

Steiner’s latest street-friendly, urban-patterned, town center with open air plazas is Zona Rosa, a 1.2-million square foot blend of specialty retail, restaurants, office, hotel and residential in Kansas City, Missouri’s Northland Area.

“In Easton, the apartments are nearby, but not directly mixed with the retail and entertainment,” he said. “In Zona Rosa, we built a few units over shops in the first phase and the response has been so positive that we are planning 100 some units in the second phase.”

Steiner said he finds it both hopeful and ironic that city planners are now asking for town center- and main street-style development.
“Years ago, I tried to master plan a development with dwellings above the shops,” he recalled. “The town planner said it couldn’t be done – that there had to be at least a minimum 50 feet between retail and residential. I said, `what am I supposed to do, hang the loft from a 50-foot pole above the shop?’”

Steiner, who has developed or planned more than a half dozen major urban destinations in the past few yeas, doesn’t believe urbanism is a flash in the pan.

“Town centers are not a new trend. They simply are a full circle back to the way urban places should be – with all uses integrated. The idea of segregating everything into different zones was a failed experiment.”

Wright is an award-winning journalist who has written about growth, development, architecture, town planning and urban issues for more than a decade. He lives and works in a traditional, walkable, sustainable community in a restored historic home in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana.