glaserworks
There has been little doubt in the local retail, construction and planning community that our greater metropolitan area has more retail than it needs. There has also been little doubt across the country that the creation of the retail strip mall, separated from all other land uses as much by law as by asphalt, has gobbled up our countryside, caused the congestion of our roadways, and contributed to the demise of a walkable, urbane manner of living.
The strip mall, along with the nearly universal separation of land uses (office parks, residential subdivisions, etc.) has mandated that people must drive everywhere for everything. That, in turn, has sealed the fate of each strip mall to lasting only until the next bigger and ‘better’ strip mall is built farther up the road. The disposability of the suburban strip mall is surpassed only by the disposability of most of the goods sold within it.
A typical strip mall may start its life with a Dillards as its anchor, but eventually that becomes a ‘second-tier’ retailer, then an Odd-Lots, then a Goodwill Store, then a ‘Ware-in-the-World’ flea market. We’ve all driven by this ‘greyfield’ devolution before.
Cities, communities and developers in other parts of the country have realized that this situation is an unwise use of land; that the template of a series 15 year commercial mortgages strewn along a miracle-mile like Colerain Avenue is not the best method by which to plan a city, or create a neighborhood with special places.
Shrewd developers have begun to realize that simply adding some new signage will not put off the bereft future of most strip malls. A complete transformation is needed; not just a title change to "Town Center" but a real change to being the center of a town. These developers are changing the very use of strip malls into mixed use places: centers of neighborhoods and key pieces of walkable neighborhoods.
The book, Greyfields to Goldfields, highlights several case studies of forsaken strip malls that have been successfully converted into mixed-use developments. These transformative development strategies do not just create a new balance sheet, they build neighborhoods. As Yaromir Steiner, who developed Easton in Columbus and The Greene in Dayton, once said, "It’s easy to put a shopping center out of business, but it’s impossible to put a downtown out of business."
Local communities and developers should see fields of grey asphalt as opportunities for transformation.