When Sally Branch was the past president of the Hillside Neighborhood Association, the group talked about the lack of quality retail in the area. Now that she is the current president, they’ll almost certainly talk about it again.
“What we want to know,” says Branch, who has lived in the neighborhood behind the
Branch and her neighbors aren’t alone in wondering about this fact of life. Urban is hip. Urban is in. But no matter how upscale our neighborhood has become during the past decade — no matter how many half-million dollar homes we own or how many Range Rovers we drive — we still don’t seem to count to most national and regional retailers.
Yes, many of them are beginning to realize they need to do business in inner-city areas, and this change explains the influx of drug stores and home improvement chains, as well as the resurgence of the area around the
But most retailers aren’t as flexible as Carrabba’s John Murphy, who is willing to take into account the differences between
“Retailers want to move into the inner city, and these days, that means everything below LBJ,” says Jimmy Christon, a developer who has worked extensively in our neighborhood, including a renovation of part of the
“The biggest problem is finding property for them. They’ll take a look at what you have, but if they can’t find a site at a price that makes sense for them, they won’t do it.”
This process isn’t something they like to discuss, and a variety of retailers, developers and brokers either declined to be interviewed for this story (like the Staubach Co., which recently took over leasing at Hillside Village), or didn’t return repeated phone calls.
Still, it’s possible to piece together what’s going on, and what’s going on boils down to this: All those national retailers we’d like to see — be it REI or Barnes & Noble, Old Navy or Williams-Sonoma — probably won’t be coming here anytime soon.
Here are six reasons why:
Retailers build stores for the people who WILL live in a neighborhood, and not for those who ALREADY live there.
Sound far-fetched? Not really, says John Fox, who teaches at SMU and is a national authority on retailing. National retailers look for specific demographics, a process that has become so sophisticated that it takes into account not just income, but family size, car ownership, population density and shopping habits. Retailers are so eager to get their exact demographics, he says, that they’ll even build stores in areas before the residents get there.
This explains Frisco’s Stonebriar mall (and its surrounding corners, jam packed with strip center after strip center) as well as the
In our neighborhood, on the other hand, there’s no opportunity to anticipate. Our residents, who include two-income families with kids and young urban professionals, already are here. The housing already is here. So we don’t fit the current model, and retailers pass on us.
One of things that Fox studies is how much retail specific cities have.
Or, in real estate parlance, we’re a “tweener,” says David English, senior vice president for Corrigan Real Estate Services, which leases the Dixie House portion of the
Retailers want to be near their competition — preferably across the street.
Why did Home Depot build a store at Skillman and Abrams? Because Lowe’s was building a store at Jupiter and
. Why did CVS build a store at Skillman and Mockingbird? Because Walgreen’s built a store at Matilda and Mockingbird. This approach, like putting stores in for customers who don’t live there yet, is another key to understanding modern retailing, says Mickey Ashmore, the president and CEO of United Commercial Realty, a long-time neighborhood resident whose company has both owned and leased the Casa Linda shopping center. (It also explains why Lowe’s and Home Depot put stores near each other in Oak Cliff, an area each probably would have ignored just a couple of years ago.)
National retailers want visibility and to be near other national retailers, including and especially their competition. They want to be on major highways that have lots of traffic and that are close to popular malls. Typical is the Bed Bath and Beyond center just northeast of NorthPark, Ashmore says, which qualifies on every count — size, location, proximity and traffic. You can see them surrounding almost any successful mall, from Town East to the Galleria.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many of these kinds of locations in our neighborhood.
Our strip malls and shopping areas aren’t big enough to accommodate the larger stores that retailers build.
Grocery stores aren’t 35,000 square feet anymore, but 60,000 square feet. A small department store such as Ross needs 30,000 to 40,000 square feet, as do chain bookstores. Even a Starbucks can run as big as 8,000 square feet. And this doesn’t take into account the so-called big boxes like Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot, which can be the size of three football fields.
Our retail spaces, on the other hand, are just fractions of those sizes, too small for anything but dollar stores, convenience stores and the like. Even as nice a center as Casa Linda is just too small, says Ashmore.
“The layout is obsolete,” he says. “There’s too much small shop space and not enough room to put in a junior anchor like a Ross or TJ Maxx.”
Neighborhood landlords and property owners (many, but not all, from elsewhere) don’t want to renovate to attract better tenants.
Most areas in our neighborhood are too small for most national retailers (both in store size and total area) and also don’t have the required visibility. One solution, Christon says, is to tear down and start over, like his company did at Northlake Center (Northwest Highway and Ferndale) in Lake Highlands, or to make extensive renovations, which is how the Centennial and the Starbucks ended up in the theater section of the Lakewood Shopping Center.
The catch is that too many center owners aren’t interested in making that kind of investment, which can run into the millions of dollars. Their holdings are already profitable, so why spend money on something that may turn out to be less profitable? The center owners also may be absentee landlords, so the quality of the tenants doesn’t bother them quite as much as it does the neighborhood. Since these locations are so profitable, they’re unwilling to sell them unless they can get top dollar. The Bronco Bowl site that Home Depot bought in Oak Cliff went for a reported $6 million.
Finally, the competition can be so intense for the land that is available that only the most high-dollar projects will succeed. Christon says he was interested in renovating the strip center at Mockingbird and Skillman, and that several national retailers were looking at the deal. But he lost out to CVS, which was so desperate to get a foothold in the neighborhood that it handily outbid everyone else. And that was just to lease the property, not to buy it, Christon says.
Many otherwise prime retail sites are owned by more than one group of people, making the decision-making process to renovate that much more difficult.
This is a uniquely neighborhood dilemma. It’s not unusual for four different corners to be owned by four different groups, such as Mockingbird and Abrams. That makes decisions to renovate difficult (why spend money to upgrade your center if the guy across the street isn’t going to?), but not impossible.
Where it becomes almost impossible is in situations like Skillman/Live Oak or
So what’s the conclusion? When will Ralph Lauren open a Polo Store in our neighborhood?
The best answer: Don’t hold your breath. As long as we’re willing to drive to
