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NEWER URBANISM

Yaromir Steiner’s Zona Rosa opens in Kansas City next month

BY IAN RITTER

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Maybe it’s the creek that runs through it, or maybe the different architectural styles. But even under construction, Zona Rosa does not look like most suburban open-air centers.

Then again, none of Yaromir Steiner’s projects look like most suburban open-air centers.

Zona Rosa is Steiner’s latest open-air, mixed-use center. More to the point, it represents the latest refinement of his New Urbanist thinking, an approach meant to create communities that contain all the components required for daily life — homes, workplaces, entertainment — within walking distance.

Zona Rosa is a new community of shops, homes and offices.

But Zona Rosa, which is opening May 19 about 12 miles north of downtown Kansas City, is not designed to be practical merely for its residents and retail tenants. It is intended to serve the purposes of future generations too. For Steiner, the center’s success will be determined by its permanence.

“A mall, when it dies, [is] very difficult to do something with,” Steiner said. Zona Rosa’s mixed-use status, on the other hand, combined with the flexibility designed into the buildings themselves, will help it ride through all the market swings of the various separate real estate sectors. For example, office space on the project’s second level has been designed to accommodate a retailer, if necessary. “I hope that all of Zona Rosa’s buildings could be something different,” he said.

But if the $200 million project has a long future ahead, it also looks as if it had a history already. The center is a collection of streetscapes of different architectural styles, made to look like they were built over decades. Though Zona Rosa is named after an urban area in Mexico City, the styles are a combination of art deco, old Kansas City buildings and other designs — but not the Spanish architecture of its namesake.

“Every building has its own personality,” said Steiner.

The central part of Zona Rosa is much like a small town, and the creek, once-polluted and eroded, has been restored by Steiner + Associates and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at a cost of $2 million.

The success of Zona Rosa will lie in its permanence, Steiner explains; if one type of tenant moves out, its buildings can easily be adapted to accommodate another.

Zona Rosa was designed with no architectural theme tying it together, says George Black, a senior associate at Development Design Group, the architectural firm that designed Easton Town Center. That groundbreaking New Urbanist development opened in 1999 in Columbus, Ohio, by the Georgetown Co., The Limited and Steiner + Associates. (Columbus is home to Steiner + Associates, which Steiner founded in 1993. Before that, he was president of Constructa US, during which time he helped build the open-air CocoWalk, Miami.)

“It’s purposefully not representative of one style,” Black said. “It’s purposefully a collection.”

This has required some flexibility on the part of retail tenants, who find themselves going into storefronts they would typically not have in a mall or in other open-air centers. Indeed, it’s not always easy to persuade them to do this, Steiner concedes. Even so, they have not been deterred, it seems. Of the 80 tenants, among the larger ones are Barnes & Noble, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Victoria’s Secret. Others include Abercrombie & Fitch, Aeropostale and Express.

Steiner says he has taken New Urbanism further at Zona Rosa than he did at Easton. This time, for instance, apartments will be over the shops, not separated in blocks outside the retail district, thus further integrating the community.

“At Easton we broke many rules,” he said. But he added, “There’s a limit to how much you can push it.”

In Zona Rosa’s wide areas of open space between buildings, Steiner says he would like to see such events as concerts and farmers’ markets.

“In our thinking, the anchor is the public spaces,” he said, suggesting that they serve residents, workers and shoppers alike. “Strategically, we think it’s important because it creates an environment that the customer likes.”

The effort to make Zona Rosa popular and enduring recalls another Kansas City retail project: the renowned Country Club Plaza, built by J.C. Nichols in the 1920s and still going strong today as a prime retail and resident destination. But Steiner shies away from such comparisons, noting that the two developments are quite different.

And the locations of Zona Rosa and Country Club Plaza could not be less similar. Country Club Plaza is in the heart of one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, near the downtown, but Zona Rosa is going up in Northland, an area that has taken years to come into its own, off Interstate 29 near the Kansas City International Airport. Northland, in Platte County, is a mix of suburban neighborhoods and farmland. It has not experienced the same amount of growth as the city’s southern neighborhoods or the suburbs of Johnson County, across the border in Kansas, where housing and retail development has boomed.

Platte County residents have been obliged to drive 30 miles to Johnson County for their serious shopping — at Developers Diversified Realty’s Town Center Plaza, a lifestyle center in Leawood, or Oak Park Mall, a super-regional in Overland Park, owned by Copaken, White & Blitt, says Pete Fullerton, executive director of the Platte County Economic Development Council.

But the Northland area is changing. The Platte County population, currently near 80,000, grew 27.5 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Consequently, there is a large market for Zona Rosa’s stores. The Economic Development Council expects them to do $200 million in retail sales annually — equivalent to 20 percent of the $1 billion in retail sales of the entire county last year.

Steiner is not the only developer (or the first) to have noticed the area’s potential. RED Development opened the 136,000-square-foot Shops at Boardwalk lifestyle center in the fall, across I-29 from Steiner’s development. Fullerton says the market can support both centers. “It’s a different product,” he said of The Shops at Boardwalk. “It’s not the New Urbanism destination shopping center that Zona Rosa is.”

The first phase of Zona Rosa opening next month includes 500,000 square feet of retail, 24 apartments and 45,000 square feet of offices, as well as a four-screen Majestic Premier theater.

Future phases, currently in the planning stages, could include more than 100 additional apartment units, a department store and a hotel; the project could exceed more than 1 million square feet when completed.

One of Steiner’s greatest assets as a developer is his ability to make his centers destinations where shoppers will linger for longer than they might at a regional mall, says Steven B. Greenberg, president of The Greenberg Group, a Hewlett, N.Y.Ðbased real estate advisory firm.

“What Steiner did at Easton is nothing short of remarkable,” Greenberg said. “He’s very careful and attentive to tenant mix.”

Greenberg’s company tallies the sales per square foot of Easton’s 1.5 million square feet of retail tenants at $450. Easton’s second phase was completed in 2001, and the company is discussing more phases.

Future Steiner projects could get even more residential than Zona Rosa. Greene Town Center, a project in Dayton, Ohio, that the company plans to open in the fall of 2005, will get 150 residential units.

But other than his projects being mixed-use and suburban, Steiner says he does not have a strict blueprint for future centers. He plans to build two a year over the next four years.

“We don’t have a magic formula,” he said. “Projects come to us from all sorts of situations.”

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