Is a West Village in our neighborhood’s future? No one knows for sure, and the reasons why are frustrating.
Put a few neigthborhood residents together, and they’ll come up with 300 or so questions about retail development in the neighborhood. What’s going to happen to Lakewood Shopping Center and Casa Linda? How come we don’t have something like West Village here? Why would we want something like West Village here? Why isn’t there more neighborhood retail?
Fair questions all, for retail development — like crime and real estate prices — is one of those things that makes our neighborhood what it is. So we put together a panel of nationally known developers and experts, all of whom have Dallas ties, to answer just those questions (each was interviewed separately by contributing editor Jeff Siegel). These are not bureaucrats or politicians; rather, these are the guys who pay the bills to throw the dirt:
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• Ken Hughes, whose projects have included Highland Park Village and the Old Town shopping center at Greenville and Lovers Lane. Hughes is best known for Mockingbird Station, one of the first so-called urban lifestyle centers in the United States.
• Robert Bagwell, whose Urban Partners developed West Village, another nationally known retail project that has been copied throughout the country.
• Brian Stebbins, who turned a cotton field near Highway 114 in Tarrant County into Southlake Town Square, perhaps the first of the new generation of lifestyle centers.
• Mickey Ashmore of United Commercial Realty, whose company provides leasing and other real estate services to some of the aforementioned developments, as well as others throughout the Dallas area.
Q: Urban lifestyle centers such as Mockingbird Station and West Village are the sorts of projects everyone wants to build now. When you’re looking to put something like this in a neighborhood, what do you look for? What does the neighborhood need to have?
Stebbins: You have to start with reality. You can only do what the market allows you to do. It’s not one of those things that if you build it, they will come. It has to be market based.
Ashmore: I get calls all of the time from municipalities that want something like that. But they are also within the trade area of a mall that has 70 percent of the tenants that would be in a town center. That’s not going to work. They just don’t understand the dynamics of the market.
Q: You mentioned trade area. Traditionally, that was defined by drawing circles on a map — one mile for a smaller center, three miles for a bigger one, and five miles for an even bigger one. Does that still apply? Or is there another way to measure trade area?
Hughes: Radials really don’t mean much anymore. It used to be how grocery stores spaced themselves, three miles apart. Now what you’re looking at is density, how many housetops are in the area.
Bagwell: You have to ask yourself, “Who is our customer?” and then you have to build something for those customers. Look at who lives around the area. At West Village, the customer is young, urban, high income, disposable income, well traveled, sophisticated, stylish. So you can’t build West Village somewhere that you don’t have that.
Stebbins: What’s the area’s age? We have 26 percent 40-59 and 24 percent 25-40, because they are peak spending years. Do they have children? How many are women, because purchasing decisions are made by women.
Q: So you’re talking about demographics. But are there other things that matter as well?
Ashmore: It also means driving patterns, driving time, natural barriers like White Rock Lake. What’s the proximity for the shopper? They don’t want to drive great distances. What’s the road infrastructure like? Is there easy access, like at NorthPark or Mockingbird Station, right on Central Expressway?
Stebbins: We defined specific things that we wanted. Our drive time, for instance, is 15 minutes. There were no malls within nine or 10 miles.
Q: That doesn’t sound too complicated. So why don’t we see more of these things, especially in East Dallas and Lakewood?
Hughes: Developers who do retail, in general, don’t do a good job of finding out what the neighborhood needs. They have to worry about the investor yield requirement, so they don’t build what the neighborhood needs. You really need to interview the neighborhood about what they need.
Bagwell: You have to find a developer who is willing to do it correctly. Most developers, they’re just happy doing a one-off. Some of them just don’t give a damn about a lot of these things. You just can’t plop something down, transplant it from somewhere else. If you did that, why would anyone go? What’s new about that, what’s different about that?
Q: Isn’t that a little esoteric for a shopping center?
Hughes: There’s a philosophy. You have to create a sense of place. People yearn for places to go shopping that have a neighborhood feel, that are more intimate, on a smaller scale. They want the neighborhood hardware store, the neighborhood toy store, and I think they’re even willing to pay for it with higher prices. I don’t even think they want all these big grocery stores, because for some reason we’ve gotten away from the smaller ones. Instead, you get big-box stores. But that’s not an adventure. That’s not a sense of place.
Stebbins: You have to give them reasons to go there besides shopping, reasons to go there every day. You don’t want just another strip center. That’s why we have the city hall [at Southlake]. They can get their driver’s license renewed. We have a post office. We’re going to add a movie theater and a restaurant row and a hotel. It really is about planning a community.
Q: You talk about local retail and how important that is. But how difficult is that to do?
Ashmore: Everyone says they want local retail. But they also want to shop at the Gap. And if you don’t get the national retailers, you can’t do the project.
Stebbins: We were very conscious of getting local retail, because that helps add to the sense of ownership in the community. We’re about 70 percent national and about 30 percent local, and that’s a really high local number. But having said that, those 30 percent of the tenants take up 70 percent of our time. You have to consciously want local tenants, and that’s why many developers don’t get them.
Bagwell: You have to have local retailers buy into your philosophy. Once they saw what we were doing, that we were a reflection of the neighborhood, then we got the neighborhood flower shop.
Q: One of the things that irritates people here is that we believe in all this, but we don’t have enough quality local retail. We have the demographics, we have the density, and we still have dollar stores. Why is that?
Ashmore: It comes down to NorthPark. It’s easy to get to NorthPark, it’s close to NorthPark, and that means it’s very, very difficult to get the usual suspects of tenants that you need. The closest we came was when I leased Casa Linda in the 1980s, and we had the Gap and some mall tenants. But they just didn’t do the business.
Bagwell: It isn’t easy to do financially. If you want to redevelop an area, like the strip centers at Mockingbird and Abrams, you’re going to have to pay not just for the land, but for the cash flow [since the purchase price will include the value of the rent the tenants pay]. Then, after you scrape the land, you’re not going to have the cash flow coming in that you paid for. Who is going to want finance that? Who is going to be able to afford to finance that?
Hughes: That part of town is so profitable for the companies that own the centers that they have no incentive to sell. You run into that a lot.
Q: Yet aren’t there areas here that could be redeveloped?
Ashmore: The Lakewood Shopping Center, all of Gaston and Abrams. There’s a pedestrian feel to it. The physical presence, the style of the buildings. Plus, some of the landlords, I think you could work with. I also think you could do something at Mockingbird and Abrams, especially if the Albertson’s goes out in the center on the southeast corner. You’ve got density, you’ve got access, and since so much of it would be empty, you could afford to scrape it. I think you’d be able to get some sexy development there, bring in some new tenants.
Hughes: You might be able to redo part of Mockingbird and Abrams. Some of it hasn’t done well, just a bunch of typical L-shaped shopping centers. There’s no place there, so you’d have a chance to do something.
Q: So it’s about being patient, then, for people in the neighborhood?
Hughes: This is a problem we’re going to have for the next generation. There are a lot of buildings, not just out there now, but that are being built, that are going to be functionally obsolete. And then what’s going to happen to them? Are big boxes still going to be the way people shop?
