Malls “R” Us
Wedged between I-91 and the Quinnipiac marshlands sits Universal Drive — an isolated, mile-long stretch of big box stores containing your usual cast of characters: low, pale concrete buildings with chunky geometric rooflines, undulating concrete curbs of meager landscaping, acres of yellow-lined parking spaces, and their wide entrances. If you pull into North Haven Commons, one of the shopping centers on the strip, you’ll find Best Buy, Red Lobster, Big Lots, PetCo, and Buffalo Wild Wings. Two hundred thousand square feet of retail and restaurant space, all tucked into prefab boxes, surrounding 1,000 parking spaces on a cracked asphalt lot.
Looming front and center is the recently vacated Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us. After closing in April 2018, all that is left of North Haven Commons’ former anchor store is 40,000 square feet of unused retail space.
The challenges ahead for North Haven Commons are familiar to many malls and strip malls across the country. The amount of retail space closing in 2018 is poised to break records, with an expected 90 million square feet of space being vacated by distressed retailers — including Sears, Guitar Center, RadioShack, Sports Authority, and Macy’s. This mass closing of “brick-and-mortar” retailers has been dubbed the “Retail Apocalypse.” Credit Suisse reports that by 2020, 25 percent of all U.S. malls currently operating will be closed.
Toys “R” Us joined the list of companies filing for bankruptcy in September 2017. By June 18, 2018, it had closed all of its 735 stores. The demise of Toys “R” Us by the overall causes of the Retail Apocalypse: rising rents, over-expansion, changes in consumer habits, e-commerce, and debt.
The Retail Apocalypse is visible everywhere: in indoor suburban shopping centers, in open air strip malls, and in “power centers” — a term often used to describe an expansive conglomerate of discount big box stores. In a power center like North Haven Commons, Toys “R” Us is considered an anchor store — a large retailer with broad enough appeal to attract a large cross-section of shoppers. Doug Gray, the president of Eclipse Development Group, a land development agency based out of Irvine, California, is the creator of North Haven Commons. As an experienced developer, Gray remarks that anchor stores are “how the power centers, such as North Haven Commons, came into being. People want to park as close as they can, to shop specifically at that retailer. So what you hope, as a retailer, is that you can get synergism between tenants, so that somebody will cross-shop.”
With the loss of a big box anchor store, North Haven Commons will face the fate of many other malls and strip malls: fewer customers. “Vacancies are like cancer,” Gray tells me grimly. “And it spreads. Because all the sudden, the people who would normally shop at Ulta at night don’t want to go there ’cause there’s a dark box right next to it. So they don’t feel as safe as they would have, had the parking lot been more full with cars and people. So, yeah, they’re in a tough situation.”
For North Haven, the challenge now is to fill that vacant space — or risk the decay of the entire mall. Universal Drive, as a shopping strip, brings a great deal of outside revenue into the community. June Williamson, a professor of architecture at the City College of New York, who has studied suburban landscapes, explains how strip malls collect revenue, “The reward [for strip mall development] is often tax-based. Whether it’s an increment on the sales tax, or it’s the property tax that the community receives… they’re bringing in revenue from residents outside their community, and they’re capturing it within that town through this property tax mechanism.” The closure of a big box store like Toys “R” Us, therefore, can have widespread consequences on the financial standing of the town as a whole. “When the businesses close, it often produces a significant gap in the municipality’s budget — which hurts,” Williamson adds.
The North Haven community recognizes the store’s loss. In comments to the New Haven Register on the closing of Toys “R” Us, David Cadden, a professor emeritus at Quinnipiac University’s School of Business, says, “A space that remains vacant too long results in a zombification of retail centers. If you go into a mall or shopping center that has only 30 or 40 percent of the space filled, it’s going to creep you out and you’re not going to go back.”
The strip mall evolved as more and more of the American landscape became devoted to consumerism.
The ancestor of the contemporary power center is the Taxpayer Strips of the 1920s and ’30s. These were lines of humble storefronts that eventually gave way to department stores, movie theaters, and banks, that then began cropping up at major intersections. The 1940s saw the development of strip malls anchored by department stores and supermarkets. New American development was decentralized, resulting in the physical separation of shopping and other services, and creating sprawling outer suburbs. By the ’60s, outparcel buildings began to flank the older malls, creating rows of strip buildings along the road whose disorderly signage and loud, exaggerated look prompted Lawrence R. Rockefeller to call the American roadway a “ruined landscape” and inspiring Lady Bird Johnson to launch her campaign as First Lady to promote scenic beauty of suburban landscapes.
By the late ’60s, the strip mall had toned down, taking on earth tones, shingled roofs, and brick and wood paneling to attempt a friendly, neighborhood look. The 1970s, however, saw an explosion of discount department stores: Target, Kmart, Walmart. The ’70s also saw major institutional investors underwriting strip mall lease requirements, calling for tenants with top credit ratings — something that was only achievable by national retail chains. Those retail chains grew by square footage in the ’70s and ’80s. Their signage became standardized, their landscaping and parking areas swelled, and they began servicing areas as far as 15 miles away.
For decades, corporate growth meant expanding into larger and larger real estate. In the 1990s, increased specialization of malls and stores created the power center — which reflected Wall Street’s fondness of architectural uniformity — and the “category killer,” a warehouse-type store that sells just one kind of product, like Toys “R” Us. The power center’s massive parking lots reflect government regulations that mandate minimum parking requirements and positioning of stores away from the road.
Today, 90 percent of space in large malls is leased to chains. Malls built since the ’90s look virtually all the same. The strip mall has no wish to be a social or cultural center, and instead exists along access routes and travel corridors, reaching outwards from the edges of cities towards national expressways. They often are the first impression someone has of a city, and are passed through without any type of social encounter or experience. It’s gotten to the point where no one wants to build strip malls any more. North Haven Commons may be one of the last.
The North Haven Commons development was completed in 2008, designed in a homey, Prairie style theme. “You have to create a sense of place, and it has to be an event to go shopping,” says Gray. “If you just do something like 99 percent of what’s in Connecticut — which is just the stale, bland monolithic development, people go there only because they have to.”
North Haven Commons is situated on the edge of the Quinnipiac River wetlands. “For many years, it was a steel reclamation yard, and then an auto wrecking yard,” Gray tells me. In 2004, Eclipse Development Group took on the challenge of developing the site, which had been contaminated with PCBs following years of industrial use. The group’s website reads, “although the River makes for a beautiful backdrop for this development, the care and precautions we needed to take along with the approvals from the appropriate governing bodies were fairly intensive.”
David Sacco, YC ’82, the project engineer for TPA Design Group, which implemented the development, says that “it was a difficult site for some reasons. There were some more soil conditions that had to be dealt with… and also being on the riverfront side, it needed to be built to consider flood implications. The development itself is not subject to flooding — it’s high enough that that’s not an issue, but that’s one of the things that needs to be considered in a site like that.”
Gray originally wanted Dick’s Sporting Goods to be one of the major tenants at North Haven Commons, but they didn’t sign on fast enough and so he put in Big Lots, which pays less rent. After meeting with brokers and thinking of potential site plans, Gray looked at access visibility and then after conducting intensive research and creating a competition map, decided what tenants to bring into the development. He negotiated with the tenants on placement of spots, and then signed them on.
Gray believes in synergy between tenants. “The tenants you tie together help each other. And that’s why I always put food with them. Because with larger developments, it keeps the shopper within the development the longer, so more money,” Gray says. His development contains restaurant pad buildings, which are on each side of the entrance to the parking lot, and are finished on all four sides to attract customers to eat.
“Look, retailers don’t understand real estate — hell, 90 percent of them don’t even understand retailing,” Gray tells me. For him it’s common sense for retailers to work together. Gray’s original idea for the power center was to add in a fire pit and an outdoor eating space. “They’d drive by and see it on the way to the Target, and go oh, that’d be nice,” he says. But the Connecticut brokers were not receptive to that idea.
“Well, one of the things that you find in the Northeast is that there actually are old downtowns and main streets,” Williamson comments. If you were to have a walkable center, you would put it in the historical downtown. “There’s a sense in the Northeast that you can have both — so the big boxes go in one location where you just want to build it as cheaply as possible, and then if you want to go out to eat and sit outside and so on, you’re gonna go where there’s remnants of that kind of experience.”
Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at Georgia Tech, write in their book, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, about the idea of a “good place.” This is the kind of place where locals would socialize and hang out. It’s a diner, bar, coffee shop, or even a hair salon or hardware store. Suburban landscapes lack a place to grow social capital outside the hierarchy of the home, the workplace, and the school. The strip mall creates dependence on the car, aiding in this suburban isolation. Dunham-Jones and Williamson write that the strip mall is the “willing suppression of local identity by national systems of corporate investment and mass consumption.”
But in Retrofitting Suburbia, Dunham-Jones and Williamson propose a second life for derelict big box stores and strip malls. They suggest redesigning and reimagining the strip outside the realm of retail chain stores. Suburban residents are already used to the architecture of the malls and strips that surround them, so instead of tearing them down there is an easier and more economical action: putting something else in the storefronts. For the North Haven Commons’ empty Toys “R” Us, Williamson suggests putting in a gym, maybe with an indoor pool, or a memory care center for seniors with dementia.
“The wellness centers, where you might have a running track inside and workout areas and maybe an indoor pool. Pop some skylights up in the roof. You can turn it into a public library — things like that,” Williamson tells me, “Then, on the flip-side, there’s also industrial-type uses. Whether it’s hydroponics, for growing marijuana, things like that that use the large footprint building.”
Currently North Haven Commons is utilizing a different method to fill the Toys “R” Us: a Halloween City. Its banner in orange and black is strung up where the old store’s signage had once been, but only temporarily. On Nov. 1, the North Haven Commons location and the other 250 or so Halloween City pop-ups will close, and the strip mall will have to continue looking for permanent tenants.
“Some folks say, well, why does it matter that a Halloween store opened up, we know that’s only temporary, well yes, but for the temporary two months, it’s bringing people to the plaza,” Richard LoPresti, the chairman of the North Haven Economic Development Commission, says.
To further benefit from the closure of Toys “R” Us, Party City is now expanding to open another pop-up, Toy City, planning to open 55 locations this season. “The Toy City concept is a logical extension of our brand — one that allows us to leverage our existing pop-up store capabilities and capitalize on the category whitespace that has recently been created,” says Party City, the company that owns Halloween City, in an email.
Party City isn’t the only retailer to leverage Toys “R” Us’s downfall. According to USA Today, JCPenny, Walmart, and Kohl’s have increased their toy offerings. Toys “R” Us also created the majority of the 3.5 million square feet of vacated retail in 2018, which CNN reports will start being filled by Ross Stores, TJX (parent company to TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, and Marshalls), and Burlington Coat Factory.
“Defying the Retail Apocalypse” according to Business Insider, is Dollar General, which is opening 900 new stores and remodeling 1,000 locations in 2018. TJX and Ross, both discount retailers, are planning to open 238 and 70 new stores respectively. Forbes even goes as far as to report that the performance of the inline strip center is holding up well as populations grow around the strip mall and new types of tenants come in. Mostly when retail spaces become vacated, strip mall owners turn to other big box retailers to fill the void. “There’s a long list,” Williamson says. “[Developers] have connections with those who set up leases with the chain retailers. And that’s the world they’re in. So, unless something forces them to move beyond that world, that’s where they’re gonna stay.”
Although there’s not much the town can do about chain stores closing, Michael Freda, the first Selectman of North Haven, told the Record-Journal, “we have a relationship with the plaza owners. We’re working to ensure they can find a retail replacement, but it’s up to the plaza owners to determine what businesses they allow in.”
Williamson hopes for the retrofitting of big box stores, but recognizes that things can do well in some markets and poorly in others. Experiential and service-oriented strip tenants are filling the spaces of what once were exclusively retail stores. In North Haven Commons, Image Laser Hair Removal is right next door to Vein Clinics of America — medical clinics that are more and more frequently moving into strip malls. Nicole Azimov, the Medical Liaison at Vein Clinics of America, says that they’ve been at their North Haven location for two years now. She is in favor of the clinic being in the power center, “I would just say that storefront property in general is easiest to have…your logo is in front of the building…and there is more visibility at the front of the complex.” They’ve embraced their commercial location, and advertises on their website that they are “next to Buffalo Wild Wings in the same plaza as Olive Garden — Red Lobster.”
In 2018, there aren’t many large scale strip malls being built. Sacco says that TPA “hasn’t done anything of that size and configuration since then,” making North Haven Commons their last significant power center. “In the last 10 years…they’ll be some combination of retail, plus residential, plus commercial, rather than something that is purely retail space,” Sacco says. Most new buildings are mixed-use, and according to Gray, “everyone’s moving back towards the city. So you’re seeing much more urban development happen.”
It seems like we’ve seen our last strip mall going up, but as Gray comments, “Again now, will that shift over time? Sure. Retail’s in a constant state of flux.”
The country also is still dotted by the existing strip malls, over 65,000 of them according to the New York Times. In a country that contains 23.5 square feet of retail space per person, we’re still wondering what the changes in the retail landscape will look like. Thinking of solutions, Williamson says, “There is a lot of room for good design here with a strong vision that could come from a civic leader, or an elected official, or some developer who owns a number of properties and is willing to do something different in some special location.”
Williamson takes one more look at the picture of North Haven Commons and is inspired with another idea. “Yeah. I’m looking at this, and it would be really interesting, if they were all to be vacated, to imagine putting agriculture on the parking lots…you can put down a barrier over the asphalt, bring in fresh soil, and go from there.”
