Successful retailers are smart. They prefer to open stores in affluent, stable communities, where people have money and are looking for places close to home to spend it.
Consider East Dallas and Lakewood, where the numbers show a population of about 43,000 households and a median family income of nearly $40,000. The median age is 38. Almost 79 percent have attended college. Home prices register up to six figures and beyond.
East Dallas’ demographics rival those of the Park Cities, where median incomes barely top $40,000. but unlike the Park Cities, our demographics describe a community that retailers have largely ignored.
What’s going on here? If we’ve got the income and the education, why won’t the big retailers build their new stores just down the street from our homes? What can we do to ensure we aren’t overlooked next time?
Blame our dilemma in part on the lure of the suburbs, where wide-open spaces and an exploding population of homogeneous, high-income homeowners led retail developers to build, build, build throughout the 1980s.
Most of us in East Dallas and Lakewood agree that the malls and their attendant problems are located just where we want them, either on the “wrong” side of the expressway or in the suburbs.
But what happens when baby needs a new pair of shoes or Mom and Dad are in the market for some new clothes? The stores that carry this merchandise just don’t exist in large numbers in our neighborhood. We’ve got to travel to find businesses we need, and we’re not always happy about that.
Gary Lawler, president of the Vickery Place Neighborhood Association, admits he likes to shop at NorthPark Center at Northwest Highway and Central Expressway. But he also misses the mix of retails stores that once inhabited his neighborhood west of Lower Greenville Avenue.
“I wish there were more shopping locally along Henderson and Greenville for the people who live in the area,” Lawler says. “I’d like to see the grocery stores and shoe repair shops that we had years ago.
“We’ve lost a lot of that to the bars and restaurants. Those businesses are more for people from outside the area. It would be nice if we also had some drugstores and shoe repair shops.
“I’d like to be able to walk to shopping in the neighborhood, instead of having to drive to NorthPark,” Lawler says. “And I would do that if the basic fundamentals were nearby.”
IN SEARCH OF A LOCATION
But many developers have no interest in neighborhood retail or in renovating existing shopping centers, which is always an expensive proposition. Instead, developers prefer to build new shopping centers.
And because they say our neighborhoods lack available land for new construction, they see little new development for the area.
“I don’t think you have the retail space logistically located where stores are going to do a large volume of business to support the rent,” says Scott Coughlin of Clements, Realtors. “People are going to go to NorthPark, where they can shop many outlets at one time.”
Herb Weitzman of The Weitzman Group sold the land across Northwest Highway from Medallion Center where Venture is building its first discount store in Dallas. But Weitzman isn’t looking at any similar deals in the area.
“There’s just no land,” he says. “The area has always had good demographics. There just hasn’t been land.”
WANT TO BE A DEVELOPER?
Barbara Womble is vice president of marketing for Henry S. Miller Interests Inc., which owns Highland Park Village at Mockingbird and Preston, one of the Dallas area’s finest neighborhood retail centers.
Highland Park Village provides a blend of upscale and mid-price stores and other attractions for its Park Cities patrons.
“If a developer hasn’t done a mixed-use shopping center of any magnitude in your community, ask yourself, ‘Why?’” says Womble, a former resident of the Hollywood Heights neighborhood in East Dallas.
“Usually, you need two to four (well-traveled) roads that intersect, on at least 10 acres of land. Maybe that doesn’t exist in East Dallas. Maybe nobody’s tried hard enough (to develop the right intersection).
“Maybe NorthPark has satisfied the need. A large portion of its business serves East Dallas people who may (otherwise) prefer to shop in East Dallas.
“When developers put together these packages, they have to get the land and the thoroughfares all in place,” Womble says.
“And they’re not going to do it if they can’t convince themselves the demographics are right. You can’t pitch a Macy’s or a Nordstrom’s or a Foley’s if you don’t have it together.
THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
Recent evidence – a Target store going up at Cityplace, the Venture store, a Fiesta supermarket announced at the old Sears location at the south end of Greenville Avenue – shows that retailers are starting to take a new look at our demographics.
But what the department stores and the discounters and the grocery superstores have traditionally deemed the community’s weakness is also our greatest strength.
“We went to NorthPark when we needed everyday linens and apparel, the kinds of nice things you like to have if you live in a sophisticated city like Dallas,” Womble says.
“On the other hand, one of the reasons we chose to live in Hollywood Heights was because it wasn’t the stereotypical Dallas culture.
“East Dallas is beautiful, tree-lined and laid-back,” Womble says. “It’s not as uptight as North Dallas.”
But the market isn’t as easy to nail down, either.
“The inner city tends to be more diverse in terms of its ethnic population and income levels,” says Cityplace Co. President Neal Sleeper, whose company induced Target to begin construction on one of Dallas’ first inner-city discount stores at Haskell Avenue and Central Expressway.
“You could say that tends to not necessarily fit into (retailers’) computer model of the demographics they look for.”
SOME SUCCESS STORIES
As a result, good retail has been hit or miss here. Neighborhood shopping centers such as Casa Linda Plaza and Lakewood Shopping Village have been renovated in recent years to keep their customers from fleeing to the malls. The drab Medallion Center, where Target operates as the area’s only major discount store, is ripe for redevelopment.
Lower Greenville, a colorful and eclectic shopping and dining district, leads the nation in trendy condom shops. Look south along Abrams Road from Lakewood or Ross Avenue toward Downtown, and you find a territory where mom-and-pop retail has given way to convenience stores, pawnshops and resale stores.
But if retailers worship demographic data, it’s an affluent, young base of homeowners that has drawn their attention to the four corners of Mockingbird and Abrams.
When Drug Emporium opens its 25,000-square-foot store at Hillside Village (scheduled for the summer, although the site is still just a gaping hole at the center’s vortex), pharmacies will square off on each corner of the intersection.
Tom Thumb has anchored Mockingbird Commons on the west side of Abrams since abandoning Hillside Village in the mid-1980s. On the southeast corner, Albertson’s has settled into the former Skaggs-Jewel-Osco site, And a new Eckerd drugstore adds luster to the southwest corner.
A NEW LOOK FOR HILLSIDE VILLAGE
“A lot of money is the answer” to Hillside Village’s shabby design, says Chuck Westenhiser, project leasing manager for Jerry J. Moore Management.
“The colors we have are dated-looking. We’re going to come back in with some light gray tones and some blue accents on the center.”
Although Westenhiser won’t discuss the dollars the centers are spending, he will address the dollars they’re chasing.
“You have a household income within one mile of about $46,000. Within three and five miles, it’s $42,000. The median property value of homes within one mile is $112,000, and it’s $193,000 within three miles,” he says.
Compare those numbers to Highland Park’s income average of $41,714 and University Park’s $40,738 (as reported by Henry S. Miller).
Add population figures that show 50 percent of residents in the Mockingbird-Abrams area age 45 and younger, and “that translates to people with a lot more disposable income who are willing to spend money.” Westenhiser says.
Area homeowners are heartened by the Hillside Village renovation. Just last year, the East Mockingbird Neighborhood Association held an open meeting to discuss the center’s then-rundown condition.
“Hillside Village was having a real hard time competing with the strip centers on the other three corners,” says Allen Gwinn, president of the neighborhood association.
“I think (the renovation is) wonderful. It’s obvious the owners care about the place. I imagine good things are right around the corner.”
The changes at Hillside Village include plans by the owners of M.E. Moses to replace the dime store with a modern Amber’s arts and crafts store. Gourmet Foods Warehouse, which opened its first store last April at Preston Road and Forest Lane, is now pursuing upscale tastes at Hillside Village as well.
Partners Ron Solovitz, formerly a manufacturer of gourmet food products, and Glen Gordon, who managed Neiman Marcus’ epicure departments, believe they’ve carved out a new discounting niche.
“We decided off-price merchandising had come to every retail category, from shoes to sombreros, but no one had undertaken to provide upscale, large selections of gourmet foods at discount prices,” Solovitz says.
“The most frequent phrase we’ve heard (from customers) is: ‘We’re really glad you’re here,’” he says.
WHAT’S IN STORE FOR US?
In fact, new retail activity suggests the business cycle may be turning in our direction. Major renovation at the White Rock Marketplace on Garland Road and a new Albertson’s at Casa Linda Plaza established East Dallas as the leading market for new construction in 1992, according to M/PF Research Inc. of Dallas.
“We’re seeing a revitalization of our retail base,” says Sean Hockens, publications editor for M/PF, which tracks construction in the retail and office markets. “A lot of these shopping centers were built in 1950s and ’60s when the area was being built out.
“As the population moved to the suburbs in the ’70s and ’80s, we saw little new construction closer in. Now we’re starting to replace some of that old retail stock and expanding existing properties.”
Scott Coughlin says the old Sears store and the former Dr. Pepper plant on Mockingbird are prime locations for redevelopment as mini-malls that would offer a diverse retail mix (although Herb Weitzman insists that the expense associated with such projects may be prohibitive).
And Coughlin says the area badly needs more supermarkets, which would lead to revitalization of surrounding retail areas.
Cityplace’s Neal Sleeper suggests retailers who are cutting each other’s throats in Plano may now be taking notice of untapped urban markets. He says Cityplace discovered a pent-up demand for retail when it surveyed residents in nearby Bryan Place, Vickery Place, Roseland Homes and Oak Lawn.
For one thing, “land prices have fallen to a point where the big discount retailers can look at these areas, where they couldn’t before,” Sleeper says.
“What you’re seeing now is some companies that are taking a non-traditional look at the inner city and realizing there is a market that needs to be served.”
Target is just the beginning for Cityplace says Sleeper, who is pursuing Home Depot and hopes to attract a large grocery chain as well.
“I think the retailers who come to the inner city and pick their sites carefully are going to do extremely well,” he says. “There’s a tremendous need for that kind of retail. They’ll find they have an excellent market.”
