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Shopping Centers Today -> March 2003
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OPEN-AIR SECURITY
Shopping center safety isn’t just a mall issue
BY IAN RITTER
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Security at malls was always a much discussed topic, well before anyone had heard of Osama bin Laden, but the subject is rarely raised when it comes to community, neighborhood and strip centers. Does that mean open-air centers don’t face security issues? Hardly.
“You don’t have the masses of people [that malls attract], but they still have the same potential risk of crime,” said Thomas Walton, vice president of King of Prussia, Pa.-based Allied Security.
Strip center owners, which generally lack the financial resources to secure their developments as tightly as malls do — there are fewer tenants to spread the cost — face different security issues.
“Security for us is vastly different from the mall community,” James Sheuchenko, director of property management at Kimco Realty Corp., told SCT. Kimco is the country’s largest strip center owner. Customers tend to leave strips immediately after shopping, he said, so there is less lingering, and there are usually fewer areas for visitors to congregate. “They come in, and they come out.”
But that does not mean there is any room for complacency, Sheuchenko and other experts say.
Strip centers often are targets of vandalism, car break-ins, car theft and shoplifting, said Walton.
Kimco safeguards its centers with a grab bag of techniques, old and new. Substantial lighting in parking lots and the areas between stores is key, Sheuchenko said, as is the visible presence of security cameras.
Watchful property managers and police patrols are also powerful preventative tools, he said, adding that some municipalities, usually in low-population cities and counties, require that landlords hire off-duty police officers.
To deter loitering by youths, Kimco uses a tactic that, while humorous, is deadly effective: Muzak, or “elevator music,” which apparently drives youngsters — and no doubt a good many adults — crazy.
“When you have a young set of ears attuned to hip-hop or Britney Spears and you play Montavani, it’s poison,” Sheuchenko said. “The kids just do not like it; it’s very foreign to them.”
In the future, he said, Kimco and other companies will increasingly use surveillance cameras hooked up to the Web, which let landlords view images from remote locations.
As useful as such deterrents are, however, making strip centers safe can be challenging, according to Jonathan Lusher, senior vice president of consulting and inspection services at Bannockburn, Ill.-based security firm IPC International Corp.
“Strip centers, in some ways, are harder to secure [than malls],” he said. “The regional mall has a big security operation. [Strips] don’t have that budget.”
But even without the regiments of security guards that malls boast, said Lusher, strip centers can take some steps to block crime.
Landscaping can play an important role: Plants and hedges should not be allowed to grow too high, he said. “We need to make sure things are visible.”
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Plantings can also be used to protect buildings by helping to keep youths away from wall surfaces that they might otherwise cover in graffiti. Walls facing highways are often prime targets for graffiti vandals who want a large audience, he said.
In addition, centers can be designed in ways that deter crime, Lusher said. It is important to keep motor vehicles a safe distance from buildings, for instance, to prevent cars being used as criminal tools.
“We still see a lot of places where the failure in design allows people to drive their car into the front door of a jewelry store,” he said.
Regular maintenance can be another important crime-deterrent, Lusher said. Anecdotal evidence suggests, he said, that a dirty center will attract vandalism, while a clean center deters it.
The presence of police officers also helps keep criminals at bay. Though open-air centers generally cannot afford to hire security officers, that doesn’t mean they can’t lure them, as McLean, Va.-based strip center owner The Rappaport Cos. does, by offering police officers discounts.
“We print coupons for $7 or $8 and have the property managers take them to police precincts, where the captains pass them out to officers,” said Rap- paport CFO and COO David A. Burnham. “We’ve been doing this at two properties for at least five years. Those properties are in more of an urban situation. This way, there are officers in and out.”
At some of its urban centers, Rappaport Cos. does employ full-time security officers, said Scott Price, SCSM, the company’s director of property management. These help discourage criminals from visiting a property in the first place.
“A bad element will find an area where there is not a hassle for them,” he said.
At its upscale, open-air lifestyle centers, Atlanta-based Cousins Properties also has security guards on site, 24 hours and seven days a week to prevent problems from bad elements.
“The lifestyle center is a more mall-based tenant environment, so the expectation from both the tenant and the customer is that security is skewed toward a mall more than a community center,” said Steve Yenser, senior vice president of Cousins.
But at Cousins’ lifestyle centers, which average 200,000 square feet, security issues are very similar to the challenges community and neighborhood centers face, he said.
One thing every commercial property owner is trying to deter these days is terrorism. At least strip center owners may have less to worry about than mall owners in this case, said Lusher. “The chief advantage is that the smaller centers are pretty low on the list when it comes to a target,” he said.
But strip center owners should not feel too comfortable when it comes to smaller centers, opined Kimco’s Sheuchenko.
However, those owners of those centers are trying to stay prepared for threats of terrorism by constructing written response plans, coordinating with local authorities and regularly educating themselves on the nature of terrorism, Allied’s Walton said.
“This world is changing,” said Kimco’s Sheuchenko. “We should expect surprises from all angles.”
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