Makeovers Bring New Life To Old Malls

By Haya El Nasser
USA Today
April 23, 2003

WINTER PARK, Fla. — One by one, shops and restaurants in the Winter Park Mall shuttered permanently. The 2,000-space parking lot emptied. The old Dillard’s department store struggled to stay afloat in a 30-acre sea of concrete.

“It went from bad to worse,” says local resident Rita Lowndes. “Just dreadful.”
It’s not so dreadful anymore.

The mall is gone, but Lowndes and her friends are lunching at a new venue on the same spot — one of the many outdoor cafes at Winter Park Village. There are streets, sidewalks and storefronts. A 20-screen movie theater anchors one end, a Borders bookstore and café another. The old Dillard’s has turned into The Lofts, industrial-chic apartments and offices with exposed pipes and concrete floors.

Glamorous in the 1960s and 1970s, old malls and shopping centers are dying. But rather than mourn, many urban experts are rejoicing.

Old malls are coming back to life as Main Street-style neighborhoods. In old suburbs and downtowns from Denver and St. Paul to Tucson and Chattanooga, developers are recycling malls and turning them into open-air urban villages.

The demise of malls and shopping centers is an opportunity for cities and towns to revive themselves. For developers, it’s a rare chance to get their hands on big chunks of land in urban areas where vacant real estate is scarce. And for those fighting sprawl, it’s a way to protect rural areas by building on land that’s already developed and is close to existing roads and mass transit.

But no one is more gleeful than a growing contingent of urban thinkers who promote recreating the village centers of old. They’re pushing the development of old-fashioned neighborhoods where people can live, work and play within walking distance — or at least near public transportation.

“When you’re talking about a 30-acre site, you can basically build an entire neighborhood there,” says Steven Bodzin, communications director for the Congress for the New Urbanism in San Francisco, a group that works to create neighborhoods where walking is encouraged.

Strategic locations
Old malls take up acres of prime space in areas near freeway exit ramps, major streets, bus lines and even subway stops in some places. More important, they’re in the city or close to it. At a time when many people are fed up with long commutes and crave new housing close to work, run-down and abandoned regional malls, strip malls and shopping centers are looking golden.

“Obsolete malls are getting a new lease on life,” says former Indianapolis mayor William Hudnut, now a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “It’s an untapped market.”

People are discovering it in:

· St. Paul. Phalen Center was built when the extension of a major highway was planned nearby. The road was never built and the strip center faded. The city bought and demolished it, turned most of the parking lot into a lake and is building housing, offices and stores around it.

“It’s the Joni Mitchell song in reverse,” says Chuck Repke, head of the local neighborhood planning council. “We took the parking lot and turned it back to paradise.”

· Lakewood, Colo. Ten minutes from downtown Denver, the city of Lakewood and private developers demolished the Villa Italia Mall and are creating a downtown in a city that never had one. The $500 million Belmar project has a public plaza at the center and 19 city blocks of parks, shops, theaters, offices, a hotel and 1,300 residences. The Denver developer, Continuum Partners, involved Lakewood residents in the planning from the beginning. They wanted a real city, says Will Fleissig, co-founder of Continuum.

· Tucson. The 30-year-old Park Place Mall downtown couldn’t keep up with the newer and bigger Tucson Mall a few miles away. General Growth Properties, one of the largest owners, developers and managers of regional malls, bought it for $50 million and spent $100 million on renovations. It’s still a mall. But in a return to the style of traditional downtowns, all the stores face the street.

· Orange County, Calif. In fast-growing Southern California, housing shortages are so dire that residential land is more valuable than commercial land. So converting run-down strip centers into housing is alluring. Less than three years ago, the Planning Center, a consulting company in Costa Mesa, Calif., counted 700 struggling strip centers in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. The company concluded that retrofitting a few hundred into homes could solve the county’s housing problem.

“We found examples of hundreds of acres of parking lots paved and nobody parking on them,” says Richard Ramella, a company principal. Since then, “we’ve been inundated by developers and builders.”

In the development world, pristine farmlands are called “greenfields” and old, sometimes polluted industrial sites “brownfields.” Those who oppose sprawl want to stop building on greenfields and start cleaning up brownfields to free up needed land. But developers don’t want to pay the costs of sanitizing toxic sites. So they search for greenfields even farther from cities, where land is relatively cheap and ripe for development.

Developing ‘grayfields’
Now they’ve discovered something that falls between green and brown: run-down retail centers called “grayfields.” They can be razed and rebuilt into new shopping meccas and residential neighborhoods without a major clean-up. No new access roads, water lines or sewer systems need to be built.

Up to 50 regional malls in the USA are empty, according to an estimate by the International Council of Shopping Centers. But there are many more crumbling shopping centers and strip malls, a total swelled in recent years by the closure of hundreds of Kmart and Montgomery Ward stores.

“There are a good 500 malls that probably have no reason for being,” says John Bucksbaum, chief executive of General Growth Properties, which has redone malls in Tucson and Minneapolis.

Winter Park Mall in this upscale central Florida town was one of the nation’s first air-conditioned malls. But it was soon upstaged by bigger and ritzier malls around Orlando, a few miles to the south.

Mall owners wanted to give it a facelift. But city planning director Donald Martin says the plan looked like another mall.

Martin pushed for something that would complement the renovation of nearby Park Avenue, the main street in this small city founded in the late 1800s as a winter playground for wealthy northerners. The city spent $6 million and property owners another $2 million to repave streets in brick. The old Colony Theater marquee was saved even after Pottery Barn moved in.

To jump-start the mall project, the city hired Dover, Kohl & Partners, a planning firm in Coral Gables, Fla. The town center quickly took shape. Local developer Eric Kovar built 58 lofts in the old Dillard’s. The painted “HOME” sign on one of the store’s original columns stands in one loft’s patio.

Despite monthly rents of $1,150 to $3,000, the lofts are full. Artists, students and empty nesters moved in.

“I can’t believe this was Dillard’s,” says Beth Mock LeBlanc, 32, who set up her ad agency in one of the lofts. “For a creative business, it’s exactly where we should be. We’re surrounded by community.”

For decades, the winning retail formula was a big enclosed mall surrounded by an even bigger parking lot. But the tide may be shifting now.

Victor Dover, partner in Dover, Kohl & Partners, calls grayfield recycling one of the most exciting developments in urban design.

“Every community has old malls or strip centers that are forgotten,” Dover says. “They are everywhere and nobody loves them.”