The Future of Shopping Centers in the United States and Abroad

Yes! There is one. Despite factors out there that currently might lead people to question the future viability of the industry.

Before the current credit crunch, the industry was already starting to see a shift from traditional malls to lifestyle and mixed use centers. Tenant's however, were starting to move back into denser urban centers instead of the suburban outlying areas they had favored in the past. Big boxes such as Home Depot and Target, who had traditionally avoided downtown areas because of the inability to build efficiently their prototypical stores, were starting to work with developers to create store formats that would work in denser areas, whether through multi-story buildings with parking garages or in retrofitting historic buildings and providing typical urban delivery services. We were starting to see this happen in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.

They were following behind grocers and multiplex theaters who were also venturing back into core urban areas such as Publix in Miami and Whole Foods in Manhattan.

Retailers were already telling the developers that they wanted the benefit of higher density. When they start expanding again, we believe that those projects in denser downtown areas will be one of the first to start moving again, many with even greater support from the municipalities than before due to budget cuts and shortfalls from decreases in sales taxes and property taxes and the need to drive more employment centers back into downtown areas for commercial viability as well as to keep existing downtown residential areas viable and thriving.

Retailers and developers who are willing to be even more creative together and combine retail with entertainment, sports arenas and civic and cultural centers and transportation hubs will not only be bringing life back into downtown areas, but also capturing drastically under served retail markets whether it is in Detroit or Manhattan or Warsaw, Birmingham and New Delhi.