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GENERAL GROWTH PROPERTIES TURNS 50

EVER-EVOLVING GGP TESTS NEW FORMATS

BY ANNA ROBATON

In 1954 the Bucksbaums, then grocers, built Town & Country Center after a developer dropped out.

In a return to its roots in central Iowa, General Growth Properties is building a project that offers a glimpse of what its malls may look like in the future. The object is to build something that is much more than just a shopping center.

In September 2002 the company broke ground on nearly 2 million square feet of retail space in West Des Moines. The $200 million Jordan Creek Town Center, the largest development the company has under way, is set to open in August.

Borrowing ideas from some of its own redevelopment projects and from malls others have built, General Growth has set out to create an environment that will tempt visitors to linger. The vast retail offerings combine a 1.2 million-square-foot enclosed mall with a cluster of big-box and specialty merchants on the 200-acre site. General Growth is also emphasizing restaurants, entertainment and outdoor public spaces.

Jordan Creek Town Center.

“Never have we put the whole package together in a new development like this,” said CEO John L. Bucksbaum, CSM. “This is quite representative of different types of projects you will see in the future.”

With the project’s two-level enclosed mall, General Growth is relying less on department store anchors than it has in the past; there will be only two: Younkers and Dillards. The third anchor will be a 135,000-square-foot Scheels sporting goods store.

Other big draws will include a 20-screen Century theater, a 35,000-square-foot Barnes & Noble and nine restaurants — four at the mall and five along a 3.5-acre lake at the center of the property.

Streetfront shops, Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma among them, will flank the mall’s main entrances. The shops will face the interior and exterior of the building, a design element intended to make the mall more inviting and less of an enclosed box.

Supplementing the mall’s retail offerings will be a 400,000-square-foot, open-air shopping district with about a dozen big-box and specialty tenants, including a 24,000-square-foot gourmet food shop called The Market at Jordan Creek. The connected shops will be placed in a village-style setting, with awnings, wide sidewalks, streetlights, seating areas and lots of landscaping.

General Growth has also reserved over 35 percent of the site for open space, including the lake, walking paths and a bike trail that will connect to an existing regional trail. The lake area will have a Marriott Residence Inn, expected to draw business travelers as well as vacationing families, and an amphitheater.

General Growth was drawn to the market by its fast-growing population and rising income levels, both of which are due in part to a booming financial services and insurance sector. The population of West Des Moines is growing at twice the national rate, and the average household income within a three-mile radius of Jordan Creek is expected to rise to $140,000 a year in 2007 from $110,000 in 2002, says General Growth.

The Des Moines area already has three regional malls. But General Growth, which was for many years based in Des Moines, is betting that its project will shine in part because many of the retailers that have leased space are new to the state, including Ann Taylor Loft, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Chico’s, Coldwater Creek, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma.

A company-commissioned study found that Jordan Creek would capture $82 million a year that is now being spent outside central Iowa. Some residents currently travel as far as Kansas City, Minneapolis and Chicago to find the types of retailers that are opening at Jordan Creek, says Ron Den Adel, the company’s vice president of development. “What we noticed,” he said, “was not so much what is there, but what is not there.”

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