How to calculate demand for 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.

Goody, Clancy Associates, a Boston architecture and urban design firm, has used its experience to devise a mathematical formula for retail and housing. “It’s important to examine these sorts of relationships, particularly when you’re trying to revitalize older neighborhoods or to create new communities,” says David Dixon, head of urban design. “This is not a science,” Dixon cautions, “but a way to determine order-of-magnitude relationships. The broad numbers I usually use are meant to provide a range and to emphasize the imprecise nature of the calculations.”

The example below, from a study in eastern Cambridge, Massachusetts, lays out the basic steps Goody, Clancy uses to match retail to housing.