Reports: Retail

New Urban News Article with sidebar, 3/1/2004
By one estimate, roughly 1,500 new housing units are needed to build one new block of stores.
Many communities hunger these days for “Main Street retail” or “neighborhood retail.” Few, however, know how many households — and shoppers’ dollars — are needed to make a shopping area successful. Retail has posed a persistent challenge for new urbanists.

New Urban News Article with images, 4/1/2009
The current downturn, says a top retail expert, is “shaking out plans and centers that were poorly conceived.”
Robert Gibbs, head of Gibbs Planning Group in Birmingham, Michigan, has advised town center developers, municipalities, and new urbanists through good times and bad. He is known especially for his consulting on retail development. In the current economic crisis, New Urban News decided to get Gibbs’s views on how new urban retailers and their centers are doing and what strategies they should pursue. Gibbs was interviewed by Senior Editor Philip Langdon.

Chapter 5 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide
How to create walkable, mixed-use retail at a time when national retail chains often have unyielding formats geared toward the automobile? This chapter explores the challenges of big-box and several other forms of retail. Consultant Robert Gibbs examines corner stores, convenience stores, neighborhood centers, community centers, and regional centers. Goody Clancy Associates lays out steps for matching the volume of retail to the number of households and their spending power. Urban retail expert Richard Heapes distinguishes between lifestyle centers and New Urbanism. Stephen Mouzon explains how to place large stores in urban blocks in various Transect zones.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 10/1/2009
Best-of-kind businesses are being enticed to a new Main Street in Habersham, South Carolina, that had previously failed to catch on.
Despite the worst economy in decades, developer Robert Turner this year has infused new life into the town center of Habersham, a 282-acre traditional neighborhood development in Beaufort County, South Carolina. Habersham’s progress indicates how a poorly performing center can in many cases be reenergized — by attracting the right kinds of businesses and activities.

New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2005
One chain increasingly tailors its stores to the urban market by including two levels, escalators, and structured parking.
Until recently, all Target stores were the typical single-story boxes with surface parking. But in the last half-decade, Target has built or acquired 35 multilevel stores with structured parking and another 8 stores with parking underneath. In all, about 3 percent of Target’s 1,350 stores nationwide have unusual urban formats that Target calls “unique.”

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 6/1/2009
Along Interstate 64 in southeastern Virginia, a $276 million mixed-use town center is opening at a tough time. Three- and four-story buildings with first-floor retail are rising near seas of parking and suburban arterial roads in Hampton, a city of 145,000 containing little or no existing urbanism — in a metro area of 1.8 million people.

New Urban News Article with images, 3/1/2008
Pennsylvania REIT is creating a town center at a New Jersey mall and forming a similar strategy in Orlando, Florida.
Last year General Growth Properties announced that it will gradually redevelop many of its shopping malls into mixed-use centers. Now the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT), which operates 38 malls in the eastern half of the US, is embarking on much the same strategy, starting with its floundering 1,127,000 sq. ft. Echelon Mall in Voorhees Township, New Jersey.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 10/1/2003
Supermarkets fit into pedestrianoriented sites with basement parking, liner stores, housing above, and other techniques.
North America’s grocers are discovering that if they build a better food store, customers will beat a path to their door — or, in some instances, to their basement parking garage. Across the US and Canada, a growing number of supermarket companies no longer automatically insist on constructing a 55,000- to 65,000-square-foot box sitting behind a big expanse of asphalt. Instead, they’ll agree to operate stores that come up to the sidewalk, that have small shops along their perimeter, or that — in dense urban settings — have parking underneath.