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PANEL: DEVELOPMENT NEEDN’T WORSEN SPRAWL

BY IAN RITTER

LAS VEGAS — Developers can build numerous projects across the country without contributing to suburban sprawl.

That was the message of the speakers at a Spring Convention workshop called “Smart Growth and Urban Development — 2004 Onward or ‘Success in the City’”.

“In the next 20 years we can have the largest building boom we’ve ever had and not pave over one more farm,” said Parris Glendening, who was governor of Maryland from 1994 to 2002 and today is president of Smart Growth America, a coalition of advocacy groups to fight sprawl.

The panelists, including developers and public sector officials, cited projects they described as antidotes to sprawl: two-level grocery stores, housing units above retail and industrial spaces recycled as mixed-use projects.

There is a price, though, said Susan Bass Levine, commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs.

“These projects are not easy,” Levine said. “They cost a lot of money. They take much longer.”

But they are feasible and desirable, she added. She pointed to two projects in New Jersey in which developers worked with government officials, one in Cherry Hill, eight miles east of Philadelphia, the other in Asbury Park, on the Jersey Shore, 55 miles south of New York City.

Aventura, Fla.-based Turnberry Associates is building the Cherry Hill project, a mixed-use center with 600,000 square feet of retail and 2,000 housing units on the site of a former racetrack. Asbury Partners is putting $1.2 billion into its project, to have 450,000 square feet of retail-entertainment and 3,100 housing units off Asbury Park’s Boardwalk.

“Here we have an example of private developers who had a vision,” Levine told the audience. “Do your homework. Listen to what the elected officials are saying to you.”

Developers may find that retailers are more excited about going into urban in-fill areas rather than into new, suburban centers, said Kurt Reich, executive vice president of acquisitions at New York City-based Thor Equities, a development firm that has made a specialty of urban retail projects.

“Many suburban regions are saturated with retail,” Reich said. “The suburbs tend to be overserved, while the urban areas are underserved.”

Besides, he added, retailers’ best-performing stores are most often in urban areas.

Thor is redeveloping malls in urban Atlanta, Detroit, New York and other major cities.

The key to success in such development is being able to see a site’s potential, said retail real estate consultant G. Lamont Blackstone, principal of DLC UrbanCore, the urban development division of Tarrytown, N.Y.-based shopping center owner DLC Management Corp.

“You cannot just discuss communities on the basis of statistics,” Blackstone said. “We have to be more sophisticated in terms of site-selection decisions.” Instead of “location, location, location,” he noted, the motto in urban areas should be “timing, timing, timing,” or developers could miss out on an attractive emerging market.