Mixed Use – Expect Failure

Urban development: mixed use, mixed results? Posted on July 25, 2014 Written by minnpost

Ever since Jane Jacobs cel­e­brated diverse, high-density neigh­bor­hoods in her 1961 clas­sic “The Death and Life of Great Amer­i­can Cities,” city plan­ners, politi­cians, aca­d­e­mics and even some devel­op­ers have been jonesing to recre­ate New York’s homey West Vil­lage where she lived back then.

Of course, to adopt Jacobs’ pre­scrip­tions for the per­fect city — short, walk­a­ble blocks, high-density liv­ing and main­te­nance of old, some­times out-of-date and impossible-to-upgrade build­ings — would have required a mon­u­men­tal upheaval in most of the nation’s sprawl­ing, car-centric metrop­o­lises. How­ever, her call for mixed-use devel­op­ment — com­mer­cial and hous­ing jum­bled together to pro­duce a lively street — was one goal that most cities could imple­ment with­out bull­doz­ing them­selves and start­ing from scratch.

Thus was born the notion of the mixed-use devel­op­ment. Put a condo or apart­ment build­ing on top, a Starbuck’s, a yoga stu­dio and a flower shop beneath, and bippety-boppety-boo, you’ve got your­self — you hope — an inter­est­ing, walk­a­ble street. Clump a bunch of these things together and maybe you’ll wit­ness the birth of a charm­ing urban neigh­bor­hood, the likes of which you’d find in Copen­hagen, Lon­don or Buenos Aires.

In the past two decades or so, the mixed-use devel­op­ment has become an ideal that city plan­ning depart­ments try to encour­age. Min­neapo­lis, for exam­ple, grants a 20 per­cent den­sity bonus in com­mer­cial dis­tricts to build­ings that devote at least 50 per­cent of their ground-floor space to com­mer­cial use. St. Paul does not pro­vide any such incen­tive, but Mayor Chris Cole­man has waxed enthu­si­as­tic about the Pen­field and the Win­nepeg, two new apart­ment build­ings with ground-floor retail; only last Fri­day he pitched a residential-retail-movie-theater com­plex on Wabasha Street to replace the aban­doned Macy’s. Even the sub­urbs have jumped in. There’s Excel­sior on Grand in St. Louis Park, and Hop­kins has seen the devel­op­ment of Mar­ket­place & Main and has under con­sid­er­a­tion Fifth Avenue Flats, both com­bin­ing apart­ments and retail space.

All of this is well and good. For sure, streets with store­fronts are more fun to walk down than those with sur­face park­ing lots — and they very def­i­nitely pro­duce more com­merce, spend­ing, jobs and tax rev­enues. But when I drive around town, I see a whole lot of mixed-use build­ings with unused retail space. So I won­der: Have we gone over­board with this dogma? ’It went in loca­tions that couldn’t sup­port it’

Mary Bujold, pres­i­dent of Max­field Research, a real-estate con­sult­ing firm, believes that the mixed-use devel­op­ment may actu­ally be a bit ahead of its time. Back in the ‘90s, she says, “when we started request­ing that peo­ple do mixed use, it went in loca­tions that couldn’t sup­port it.” At that point, the trickle of pop­u­la­tion back to the city had just begun, and there wasn’t enough pop­u­la­tion to pro­vide the busi­ness stores needed to stay afloat.

That trickle back to the city has turned into a small but steady flow. Still, peo­ple won’t nec­es­sar­ily walk to stores on the street, even when they live in the same build­ing. I had to engage in major brow­beat­ing and fishwife-style nag­ging to get my hus­band to buy a half-gallon of milk or a jar of olives at the small gro­cery on the ground floor of our build­ing rather than dri­ving to Rainbow.

If the store had been in a build­ing five blocks away, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. And our cli­mate doesn’t help. If the store had been five blocks away and we’d been in the throes of the Polar Vor­tex, I would have dri­ven to Rain­bow myself rather than step out into the elements.

“It’s very dif­fi­cult to break the car habit,” says Bujold. “Here in the Mid­west we don’t have a his­tory of being pedes­tri­ans.” (Not for the last cen­tury any­way.) Appar­ently, a lot of other peo­ple in our neigh­bor­hood suf­fer a sim­i­lar addic­tion to the car, because the gro­cery closed its doors last fall, leav­ing an empty store­front.
Requires design and archi­tec­tural finesse

To make a mixed-use build­ing suc­cess­ful takes design and archi­tec­tural finesse, which not every archi­tect and devel­oper have, says Sam New­burg, a real-estate ana­lyst who blogs as Joe Urban. There has to be clear sig­nage, win­dows big enough to attract peo­ple from the side­walk, obvi­ous paths into the store from the street and from any park­ing area. He points to West River Com­mons on East Lake Street as an ideal. Devel­oped by Michael Lan­der, it has only 8,000 square feet of retail — a restau­rant, cof­fee shop, gift shop and take-and-bake pizza, all of which is located on the busiest side of the build­ing. And, a small plaza offers out­door seat­ing for the cof­fee shop.

New­berg adds that the empty retail space I’m see­ing is in the newest build­ings. “It’s much eas­ier to lease up the apart­ments than the retail space,” he says. The devel­oper usu­ally receives enough income from the res­i­den­tial units to cover his costs and can wait until he finds the right retail to go in the building.

Maybe New­berg is right. When I drove back to some of the empty store­fronts I’d seen on Lyn­dale, I found some of the retail filled in — a gift shop, an art gallery and some­thing called a “phar­ma­cie” in one build­ing and a chi­ro­prac­tor, hair-removal place and soon-to-arrive sushi restau­rant in another.

Still, whether those busi­nesses will sur­vive is an open ques­tion. With the excep­tion of a pizze­ria, the stores in my own build­ing seem often to be echo­ingly empty. And I have to won­der whether plan­ners have been order­ing up too much retail alto­gether. After all, we’re liv­ing in an age when big box stores are clos­ing, malls and down­towns alike are strug­gling, and most of us have become accus­tomed to buy­ing at least some of our stuff online. If all the ground floor retail that plan­ners and politi­cians are encour­ag­ing has no stay­ing power and devel­op­ments wind up with revolving-door ten­ants and boarded-up store­fronts, well, we would not have cre­ated vibrant mixed-use streets. Just the oppo­site.
’Loca­tion, loca­tion, location’

“There will always be a need for retail,” says Stu­art Acker­berg, an Uptown prop­erty owner and devel­oper of the Rain­bow Build­ing and Shops, the Lyn-Lake Build­ing and the Mozaic condo, among oth­ers. “Peo­ple are social beings, and they want to go out, be with other peo­ple, touch things, feel things.”

But, in retail as in all real estate, he adds, the rule is always “loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion. Those mixed-use build­ings are not empty in Uptown, not at 50th and France or at 50th and Xerxes,” he says. Cer­tain areas don’t have enough pop­u­la­tion, the right demo­graph­ics and peo­ple with enough dis­pos­able income to make those neigh­bor­hood busi­nesses viable. “We want to do mixed-use every­where, but it isn’t always pru­dent,” he says.

What to do with the store­fronts that go empty? I reg­u­larly drive by the Min­neapo­lis Grand on Chicago Avenue. Its ground floor has been avail­able for lease for months, but nary a store or doctor’s office, not even a cof­fee shop, has appeared. Yes­ter­day, how­ever, work­men were busy in one of the units. “What’s going on?” I asked one. “We’re con­vert­ing it into apart­ments,” he said.  Sin­gle use, anyone?

Source:http://agenda21news.com/2014/07/urban-development-mixed-use-mixed-results/

Comments

Mixed use isn’t new, Storekeepers traditionally lived above their store and they owned the property. It was the best security system they could find and their commute to work was to go downstairs.  They literally worked from home.  My grade school friend Charlie lived over his father’s hardware store.  My father-in-law owned 2 acres of highway frontage and put in a filling station with service bays, a barber shop, a shoe repair shop and an implement sharpening shed.  He leased out the service bay and did the rest himself.  His house was on the property, so he basically worked from home.

In the “old days”, the business owner simply had to get zoning to allow them to live on their own commercial property and that was easy.  They were on “commercial property”, but were routinely allowed to live on the property. Those were the days before politically correct zoning when common sense was the rule.

It’s different now.  Development driven construction has its problems.  If retail clerks could afford to live in apartments located where they work, that would be practical. But these apartments are too expensive for “minimum wage” occupants.  The difficulty finding commercial tenants is tight and getting worse.  We are overbuilt in retail.  New retail space simply empties out older retail space.  It would be cheaper to rescue older strip malls that are already located on commercial property on commercial boulevards. Many businesses are now “home-based” to save on overpriced commercial rent.  If mega-apartment complexes had their own schools, that would make sense.  Alas, none of what we’re doing makes sense.  The shopping centers we kill off with overbuilding creates problems for the same municipalities who push this nonsense.  Property companies have taken over ownership of commercial property and it’s rare to find a business owner who owns his own commercial property.  Now business owners who rent from these property companies experience maintenance problems in properties over 20 years old and not well maintained.  Municipalities should keep the pressure on the property companies to maintain its suites to keep these shopping centers from deteriorating. Municipalities should also consider not approving more commercial development if it will kill a well-located existing shopping center.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader