Virginia town center opens in tough economy

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.

The project by Steiner + Associates of Columbus, Ohio, a leading town center builder, is the redevelopment of the Coliseum Mall, a 1973 enclosed mall that had 1.3 million square feet of retail. Mall Properties, the developer of the original mall, is a partner with Steiner. The new town center will have a similar square footage, but it will include office space and 166 residential apartments in addition to retail, entertainment uses, and restaurants.

Because the old mall was not dead, Macy’s and JCPenney were retained as anchors. Macy’s occupies the same building — the only one that wasn’t torn down — and JCPenney was moved to a new building. Target is scheduled to open a stand-alone store in July, and Barnes & Noble, a previous mall tenant, has reopened. By July, Peninsula Town Center will have 50 percent of its retail open. “That was the main advantage of redeveloping the mall — the anchor stores wanted to stay, so we didn’t have to go chase them,” says Yaromir Steiner, chief executive officer of Steiner + Associates. “The other advantage was that the city saw a dying mall and was very concerned — they wanted to replace it with something that was paying taxes.”