Dan Erdman is working at lining up tenants

Dan Erdman is working at lining up tenants for a 100,000-square-foot shopping area he would like to build at Middletown Hills, the 150-acre development that his father, the late Marshall Erdman, began planning several years ago near Madison, Wisconsin. Robert Gibbs conducted a marketing study that was “very promising” about the prospects for a grocery store, according to Jane Grabowski-Miller, the development’s director of design. Whether the “town center” will be built depends on how the current talks with retailers go. Supermarket chains in the Midwest have questioned why they should depart from their usual form of development. But “that’s what [conventional developers] said about this whole project,” Grabowski-Miller observes, “and now they’re trying to copy it.” So far, a cafe, a small amount of office space, and four live/work units occupied by businesses have been built in the town center. Middleton Hills has about 177 households. If completed, the center would also draw trade from residential areas in the vicinity and would benefit from traffic on an expressway about a mile and a half away.