When half a town center is better than none

By late this summer, residents will move into the first of 317 apartments in Voorhees Town Center in southern New Jersey. By next January, the first of 108 condominium units should come onto the market. Accompanying the housing will be 195,000 square feet of retail and office space, an 8,000 sq. ft. clubhouse, underground parking, and a handsome boulevard. All because local people refused to let the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT) solve the problems of the declining Echelon Mall by building a Wal-Mart on part of its site. PREIT had bought the 1.1 million sq. ft. mall in 2003, knowing it had problems. A Sears store, one of Echelon’s four anchors, had closed in 2001, just three years after being added to the 1970-vintage mall. Another anchor, JC Penney, closed its doors a year later. Responding to the rising vacancy level, PREIT proposed demolishing part of the mall, replacing that section with a Wal-Mart. Local people opposed the Wal-Mart idea, and it failed to gain approval. PREIT then came back with a second proposal: raze the Sears and Penney stores and some of the in-line stores, and replace them with an open-air town center organized along an attractive landscaped boulevard. The township liked that concept, so about 471,000 sq. ft. of mall have been knocked down since January 2007. PREIT renovated the remainder, containing in-line stores anchored by Macy’s and Boscov’s. BartonPartners of Norristown, Pennsylvania, produced the town center design, which recently received an endorsement from the Delaware Valley Smart Growth Alliance. Cope Linder Associates of Philadelphia was land planner. “It’s not perfect,” admits Susan Baltake, administrator of the Smart Growth Alliance, since a sizable portion of the mall and its parking lot remain. But both the Alliance and local people are happy to be getting a pedestrian-oriented center, with structured parking and a mix of uses. The center is within two miles of two PATCO commuter rail stations. A shuttle from the mall to a PATCO station was discontinued some years back. Charles Elliott, senior vice president of Dewey Commercial Investors in Wayne, Pennsylvania, which is developing the residential units, thinks it may be restarted. “You could live here without a car,” he says. A failed ‘Main Street’ experiment This is not the first time Voorhees has tried to move beyond conventional retail development. In 1987, John B. Canuso, with Radnor Corp. as a partner, built a complex called Main Street at Voorhees, about 1.5 miles from the mall. Main Street at Voorhees consisted of offices, stores, condo units, restaurants, and entertainment, and initially proved very popular. Wendy Patton wrote a 2005 Rowan University master’s thesis that examined why Main Street at Voorhees did poorly in the long run. Many of the stores were too expensive, Patton wrote. One sold $2,000 mink coats for children. Eventually, most of the stores closed, as did entertainment venues. Main Street had a flawed design. The stores were hidden behind an office building and housing, several hundred yards from the main roads. Neighbors could not easily walk to the complex. Another flaw, from a new urbanist perspective, was that the differing uses did not physically relate well to one another. Main Street consequently ended up being an office complex that happened to have housing nearby, as opposed to a lively, mixed-use center where one use reinforced another. New town center mix In some important respects, the new Voorhees Town Center appears to have learned from Main Street’s mistakes. It will feature a more pedestrian-oriented design and will be more visible than Main Street. Buildings will include three stories of apartments on top of 56,000 square feet of ground-level retail along part of the boulevard, says Elliott. Those buildings will “create a grand entrance” at one end of the boulevard, Elliott says. Also along the boulevard will be a clubhouse, a plaza, one- and two-level stores, and 50,000 sq. ft. of offices. There has been talk about the possibility of an indoor marketplace, inspired by the food-oriented Reading Terminal Market in Center City Philadelphia. Behind the boulevard’s buildings will be apartments over garages. To the rear of those will be the condos. Pedestrian passages will connect the purely residential portions to the boulevard. The town worried that the housing would generate too much traffic and burden the school district. Therefore PREIT reduced the number of units and limited the number with three bedrooms, cutting the potential for a school-age population. BartonPartners tries to put the absence of children in a favorable light by observing that “town center living is geared more toward young professionals and retired adults.” The project is to be completed by summer of 2009. Despite the depressed housing market in much of the nation, “our apartment business is very strong,” Elliott says. “When the whole for-sale business started to spiral downward, our apartment business increased.” Units will range from about 600 to just under 2,000 sq. ft., and will have monthly rents ranging from $1,000 to $3,000. Elliott expects condos to sell well because the area around Voorhees has strong household growth and not many condos are being built there. He estimates that condos, from 900 to about 1,600 sq. ft, will probably start in the low $200s and top out at $450,000 to $460,000.