Retail shifts toward livability, says mixed-use expert

No one has won more acclaim for designing mixed-use centers in recent years than Richard Heapes. His projects include Mizner Park, Bethesda Row, Santana Row, and Blue Back Square. Heapes has exhibited a flair for creating lively collections of stores, restaurants, housing, and offices — places that people return to again and again. Trained as an architect, Heapes is a founding partner of Street-Works LLC, based in White Plains, New York. When he was invited recently to speak to the annual meeting of the Town Green Special Services District in New Haven, New Urban News Senior Editor Philip Langdon used the occasion to interview him about retail trends that affect New Urbanism. NUN: Is the era of the enclosed shopping mall finished? RH: In the last 10 years there’s been an assault on the model of the shopping mall. We’ve seen “power centers,” “category killers,” outlet malls, urban entertainment centers. And now there are lifestyle centers, though there’s not a lot of life going on there, and very little style. There are over 2,000 malls in America yet there are only two new ones under construction. The length of time that people stay in the mall is lessening each year and is now down to much less than an hour. Meanwhile, in the past five years, retailers, department stores, and mall owners have all been busy consolidating, buying one another and not paying attention to their customers. NUN: Reports from PricewaterhouseCoopers have been saying for years that the outlook for many malls — those that aren’t the top ones in their markets — is poor. RH: What’s different is that the mall owners now believe that they’re vulnerable. They now understand there has been a change in consumer desires. Some have started to add other components to the model — The Cheesecake Factory, movies, etc. Some have brought in Target as an anchor, for service retail, “everyday” shopping, so that you’ll go there twice a week. But the malls are still essentially all retail-only environments. Some have sued their competition, as has happened to us in West Hartford, where the Taubman Companies have tried to stop us from developing Blue Back Square [a mixed-use addition to an old, street-oriented town center]. While it might cost $10 to $25 million to reposition a mall, it will only cost $1 million for a prolonged series of lawsuits. NUN: How much of the trend in retailing is driven by the price of the goods or services? RH: I look at retail as being organized around four factors: price and convenience, or variety and community. In recent years, 90 percent of all retail construction was in one quadrant: retail that’s super convenient and super priced. However, to continue their growth, the big-box guys are coming around. Now most of the big retailers are coming to urban centers. They’re trying to go downtown where there’s an environment of variety, community, authenticity, and “realness.” Today’s consumers want Main Street and towns, and the retailers are trying to figure out how to do that. NUN: Are the big-box retailers willing to build genuinely urban stores — multistory buildings up to the sidewalk? RH: With competition stiff and profit margins slim, most retailers want to spend as little as possible on their buildings. The building is viewed as a liability, not an asset. And guess what — they look like it. Ordinarily a Target store might cost about $15 to $20 million. In downtown Stamford, Connecticut, there’s a new Target, which we were architect/developer for, which cost several multiples of that. It looks like a department store with small shops at the sidewalk, four levels of parking, and a two-level store on top of that. Big-box retailers need to expand into urban markets and are beginning to “pay to play” in terms of urban design, creative store layouts, and other costs. NUN: What are the keys to the success of your projects? RH: We’re about variety of experience in a nonproject format. We believe in mixed-use places and districts with people living there that are as seamless as possible with their larger urban context. During the public hearings for Blue Back Square, I invited The Hartford Courant to visit Bethesda Row and tell us where our work started and stopped. They spent three days there and couldn’t. In addition to people living there, food’s importance cannot be overstated. There’s something authentic about the food experience. Greengrocers are really an emerging thing. In the way that trees convince people this is a place to walk, food convinces people that this is a place to live. We believe that street trees and housing are very important and you can solve many of the problems of making sustainable places in urban America with these components. NUN: Can you achieve this kind of development in every sizable community? RH: Cities and towns go through cycles, or different stages of a cycle. Some cities are in a “viability” cycle. They’re just trying to survive and create a sustainable economic base. Many of these issues are really regional in scope. A sustainable economic base, good infrastructure, and regional facilities are some of the issues. Other cities are in a “livability” cycle or a “memorability” cycle. Livability issues tend to revolve around how to make a city a good place to live: housing, schools, parks, and open space. Memorability issues tend to organize around how cities can do things in a way that is unique and idiosyncratic to the people and influences of that time and place. Much unsuccessful planning in America has been due to using strategies that do not align with a city’s current phase of issues, often fighting the last war or the one that people wish to fight. Urban retail strategies generally have the most likelihood of success during a city’s transition from livability to memorability. The market is there, people live there and form the base for sustainable retail. Giuliani came into office when New York had serious viability issues. He worked on clean and safe, which helped the city evolve toward issues of livability. The Times Square redevelopment was born during the viability era — how to save Broadway and the Theater District. It was delivered, however, as New York was dealing with livability issues and was criticized as too clean, too homogeneous — not for New Yorkers anymore. As New York has moved through a livability rebirth cycle, the city now faces many memorability issues, which are all in play at the World Trade Center site. New Yorkers realize they have to redevelop that in a memorability way. This is not a linear process. I believe it is cyclical. San Francisco, for example, has spent much of the past ten years dealing with viability issues like a new baseball stadium, tearing down the Embarcadero, revitalizing the Ferry Terminal, and affordable housing. NUN: Can you make a memorable place with lots of chain stores? RH: There are fewer and fewer interesting tenants to choose from every year (though retail cycles are very short). Many department stores are gone. Even when you build good streets, there are still the same tenants available. Where you get real variety is in housing, having residents. We add to that, real service businesses like hair stylists; food businesses; unique impulse retail; restaurants; wine stores; art galleries; and most importantly things that make interesting regional destinations, like libraries and theaters combined with great public spaces. Those are the tools to make memorable places. The role of retail is simply to get the people there, not to be the main attraction or experience. NUN: What are your design principles for retail? RH: Our retail code says “you can’t do things like the guy next door.” We want variety and contrast. I’m antiformulaic. I’ve always liked Robert Venturi’s term “messy vitality.” I believe you can’t have a highly organized street-level system and produce a lively retail street. That’s where I differ from new urbanists. New Urbanism is largely form-driven. Such codes and set physical vocabularies are antithetical to the organic nature of retail, of great commercial places. Formulas such as the five-minute walk as a planning tool for serious shopping environments are irrelevant if not also untrue. The market size required to support significant shopping districts, including such simplicities as a grocery store, are community-sized and will be sustained primarily with people who arrive there through some sort of transportation, primarily the car. Whereas new urbanists seem fixated on physical predictability (most of them are control freaks), we’re trying to create an organic marketability, where the project isn’t really complete until people and businesses move in and mess things up a bit. We try to manage our process to get the best of these economic impulses. I’ve always thought that Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language model of linking experience to physical form was a more appropriate (and precise) way to describe and organize the commercial environment. NUN: But don’t some new urban retail projects have the kind of contrast and surprise you’re suggesting? And isn’t it good to aim for an overall order, within which there’s variety? RH: Don’t get me wrong, of course you need good urban structure and planning to organize regions, districts, and neighborhoods. And I credit the new urbanists largely with shaping a new paradigm that paved the way for different development types, including mixed-use. But while the new urbanist model is brilliant when applied to the development of residentially driven neighborhoods and places, I believe that in its complete orientation towards physical form it is completely inept at organizing vibrant, organic retail-based places that are market-driven. It’s not their fault; I spend many days wondering if in fact it’s even possible, given the economics of today’s risk/reward thresholds. NUN: So how would you sum up the situation today? RH: In America we don’t need to build any more retail. I wish we could have a national moratorium. Our retail is slowly being consolidated within “supercenters.” As a result we need to build a better mousetrap for shopping — with real places, the authentic places where people want to shop and dine, with housing and offices, with schools and libraries, etc., and most importantly just being together. Places that people give a damn about, starting with those who develop and build them. I think we’re getting better at doing this, but I do get dismayed at how quickly our building industry boils everything down to the lowest common denominator. Still, I think we are getting better. For our future’s sake, we’d better be. u