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ATLANTA’S GREENBRIAR MALL TRIES TO RECAPTURE GLORY DAYS

By Dees Stribling

When it comes time to fix up 1960s-era malls, often enough it means they get pulled down, but that isn’t happening to Greenbriar Mall, one of Atlanta’s oldest enclosed centers. Instead, the mall’s owners — Dundee Realty Corp., a Canadian company that owns primarily nonretail commercial properties; and Atlanta-based Hendon Partners — are out to recapture some of the luster the center enjoyed back when it had Atlanta’s retail stage to itself. The idea is to pocket the underserved shoppers that reside in a growing part of the city. “The Greenbriar Mall is a prime repositioning opportunity,” said Rick Carson, development partner at Hendon. “It’s a well-known property in a growing neighborhood.”

The 680,000-square-foot mall dates from 1965 and almost immediately became a shopping mecca for southwest Atlanta and the nearby suburbs. In the early days, it was anchored by Rich’s and JCPenney and earned itself a place in fast-food history by being the location of the first Chick-fil-A restaurant.

By the 1980s the demographics had changed, with a black population replacing a white one. The mall faced competitive pressures from Southlake Mall, which had opened in 1976 a few miles away in Morrow. Still, Greenbriar chugged along reasonably well as a locally oriented mall, even if not the regional center it had originally aspired to be.

Today the mall is still roughly the same size, but the Rich’s is now a Macy’s, Burlington Coat Factory has replaced JCPenney, and a 12-screen Magic Johnson Theater opened 10 years ago. The rest of the mall is about 93 percent occupied with a mix of nationals and locals.

Dundee Realty had planned to sell Greenbriar outright, but decided in June to form a joint venture with Hendon instead. “We were selected at first as the buyers of the mall,” said Carson. “When we showed them our plans, however, that apparently revived an interest in the property for them, so the JV was formed.”

The partnership, owned 50-50 by Dundee and Hendon, with the latter as managing partner, plans to renovate and reposition the mall. For the day-to-day operations, Hendon has retained Atlanta-based O’Leary Partners, which also manages Underground Atlanta, a retail complex in downtown Atlanta.

Hendon is also repositioning other retail properties it has bought in recent years, including the North DeKalb Mall, in Decatur, Ga., and the Golden East Crossing Mall, in Rocky Mount, N.C. Carson says the company became interested in Greenbriar because southwest Atlanta’s growth suggested that the area showed promise in terms of retail trade. Since 2000 John Wieland Homes, Pulte Homes and others have been building single-family houses here; new apartment complexes have risen too, and Duke Realty has begun work on a nearby office park. But what really got the attention of Atlanta’s retail real estate community was the success of the 750,000-square-foot first phase of the Camp Creek Marketplace, a retail project that opened in 2003, not far south of Greenbriar. It was southwest Atlanta’s first major retail development since Greenbriar’s opening. “It was like a lightning rod,” said Sonya Moste, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta Development Authority. “As soon as the Camp Creek Marketplace opened, it was very popular. The shops it offered had previously been much further away, and people in southwest Atlanta were driving to places like the Buckhead area to shop at them. In retail terms, it showed that the area was being underserved.”

Camp Creek Marketplace, a 1.1 million-square-foot outdoor lifestyle center just off Interstate 285, counts among its tenants Barnes & Noble, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Lowe’s. Its success is an example of a trend in retail development nationwide: The discovery that many urban markets — frequently those with predominantly black populations — are under-retailed and thus offer significant opportunities for both developers and retailers.

The perception that urban neighborhoods are unable to support the kind of retail that routinely prospers in the suburbs has obscured the growing economic clout of many black neighborhoods. This is certainly the case near Greenbriar. Roughly 300,000 people, predominantly black, now live within a seven-mile radius of the mall; the area reports a respectable median household income level just north of $50,000 a year.

“The area and its residents deserve a better retail shopping experience,” said Carson. “Camp Creek Marketplace shows that they want it, too. That property is our competition, of course, but actually it’s good for Greenbriar, since it proved to retailers that the market is a strong one.”

Now Greenbriar will be repositioned in light of its place in a strengthening market. That process will involve the securing of new tenants and some infrastructure work, but the changes will be neither radical nor sudden.

“The redevelopment’s going to be a cautious process,” said Carson. “For instance, the mall looks a little dated, but essentially it’s in good shape. So the funds available for renovating the mall will be mostly [for things] visible to the consumer, things they can see, but not an extreme makeover.”

Hendon plans to redesign the food court, bring more natural lighting to the interior and attract more kiosk and cart tenants. Currently, the mall has few kiosks and no carts.

Bringing in a new national tenant to take over a former Cub Foods store is a high priority, because its site is highly visible to passing drivers. Equally important is filling a spot formerly occupied by Circuit City. Also, there are outlot parcels on the property that have never been developed but that the owners say have potential. As yet, no tenants have committed to these spaces, but Carson says the owners are in discussions with a number of nationals. Ideally, he says, whoever signs for the high-visibility spaces will be draws in and of themselves.

Because the area around Greenbriar had previously been sluggish in terms of real estate development for so long, the city placed the mall within a tax-allocation district a few years ago, which provides tax breaks to developers and owners, and that has spurred the development within the neighborhood. The city of Atlanta has also committed to the mall redevelopment effort in the form of streetscape upgrades along the roads near the property, which apparently are aesthetically challenged enough for potential tenants to complain, Hendon says.

“Malls have different lives as time goes by,” said Carson. “Greenbriar has adapted and survived largely intact to changing circumstances. Its neighborhood is changing again, for the better, so the mall should as well.”