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Suburban Main Streets gaining favor

By Charles Lockwood

As many urban communities revitalize their Main Streets, some suburbs across the United States are going a step further: establishing Main Streets they never had.

By building Main Streets from scratch, residents in these post-World War II communities are trying to create a sense of place and identity their environment has never provided.

Although retail is an important driver of this new trend, these developments are not outdoor shopping malls masquerading as Main Streets. Like the major shopping streets of pre-World War II small towns and suburbs, they offer a full range of everyday purposes, including office, entertainment, hotels, housing and civic institutions such as public libraries -- and an abundance of retail.

Thirty miles north of downtown Los Angeles, The Newhall Land and Farming Co. is building the $100 million, half-mile-long Town Center Drive in its new town of Valencia, Calif. Two buildings are completed on this 53 foot-wide street: a three-story office building with retail and restaurants on the ground floor, and a 55,000-square-foot Spectrum Health Club. Several other buildings are under construction, including a 100,000-square-foot entertainment/retail complex, the 250-room Valencia Hyatt Hotel, an adjacent 20,000- square-foot conference center, and a six-story, 130,000-square-foot office building with stores and restaurants on the ground floor. Several hundred apartments will be clustered at the western end of the street.

James S. Backer, senior vice president of Newhall Land's commercial and industrial real estate sales and marketing division, is confident that Town Center Drive will win widespread acceptance from the marketplace and local residents.

"The traditional mix of Main Street uses --the distinctive ground-floor restaurants and shops that really serve local needs and demographics, and the wide tree-shaded sidewalks -- will attract people from early morning until late at night," he said.

The impetus for some Main Street development is coming from municipalities, rather than private developers. And the phenomenon isn't limited to the West Coast. In Schaumburg, Ill., a post-World War II suburb of Chicago, the local government designated 29 acres -- consisting mostly of underutilized retail properties and parking lots -- to create a pedestrian-oriented Town Square. In 1995, it started selling parcels to developers, who have built retail and professional buildings under strict zoning and development guidelines. The new Schaumburg public library, which attracts an estimated 1 million patrons a year, will anchor the Town Square, along with a large Dominick's grocery store.

"Schaumburg Town Square will be a place to grab a cup of coffee, to read a book," said Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson. "It will add more of a sense of community."

The new Main Street trend has become so popular that pedestrian-oriented, multiple-use streets are now a key feature in some just-completed or planned large-scale developments. In August 1997, Winmar Co. opened the 1.37 million-square-foot Redmond Town Center, developed around a new Main Street on a 120-acre site in Redmond, Wash. The phased six-block, 1,800-foot-long Main Street will have retail, restaurants, offices and 200 units of housing.

Several factors have spawned these new suburban Main Streets, including some retailers' desire to build suburban locations outside of malls. Leading retailers like The Gap, Williams-Sonoma, The Limited and Barnes & Noble want a separate identity, which means having their own building on a highly visible location like a major thoroughfare. Saks Fifth Avenue is opening smaller stores, known as Main Street stores, on existing retail boulevards in locations that cannot support full-sized, full-service department stores.

Secondly, more Americans are clamoring for a return to "community." Surveys indicate that most people place "a sense of community" as their top priority when buying a home. This hunger for community directly translates into a desire to congregate with other people in a public setting -- in other words, on a Main Street -- to shop, attend community events like a parade, or simply stroll down a safe, attractive street.

"Redmond Town Center is a direct response to the shift in society's focus toward the public realm, where people gather to socialize and participate in community activities, coupled with changes in the retail industry," said Henry F. Jones, the center's general manager.

Another raison d'etre for the Main Street is that it helps a suburb create a clear, marketable identity that will attract shoppers, residents, jobs and visitors.

Finally, Main Streets can offer a perception of safety for shopping, socializing and recreation that might be lacking in the vast parking lots and shadowed parking structures of some shopping centers.

But several factors could stop or slow the new suburban Main Street trend. National retailers could change their minds about the desirability of Main Street locations and return to enclosed shopping malls entirely.

Second, new suburban Main Streets require a major long-term investment. Schaumburg had to purchase and assemble the site for its Town Square. Schaumburg is a thriving residential and commercial community with a very solid tax base, but some other suburban communities are not so fortunate.

Developers of new Main Streets must also select the right mix of uses to make a successful project. Main Streets need retail and restaurants, but they can't be overwhelmed by them. Instead, they must have a broad mix of uses to become successful community hubs that are active day and night. Otherwise, they will be little more than outdoor strip malls offering a limited draw for the customers they need to thrive.

"Workplaces are critical to the success of Main Streets," insists Merritt Sher, founder of Terranomics Inc., the innovative San Francisco-based retail real estate company, "because they generate daytime activity, particularly customers for stores, and help make the street feel energized and inviting, not deserted and unappealing."

Housing also is important, creating a built-in, seven-day-a-week market for a street's restaurants and shops. Entertainment venues such as movie theaters attract people from the entire community, particularly in the evening and on weekends, generating a strong spillover for retailers.

What do the new Main Streets mean for existing malls? While in some instances these new developments might draw some sales from malls, they also can benefit them. For example, Valencia's new Main Street is directly connected to the main entrance of the two-story Valencia Town Center mall.

"Thus," said retail consultant Greg Stoffel of Irvine, Calif., "Valencia's new Main Street and its mall will feed each other customers, particularly because the developer is seeking retail tenants for its new Main Street that complement, not compete with, existing retailers in the mall."

Mall owners could already take this Valencia example one step further by constructing new Main Streets on a portion of their surface parking lots next to existing centers. The two retail uses could reinforce each other.

"Every community needs different types of retail," said Mr. Sher. "You need big boxes where customers are programmed for commodity shopping -- fast-in and fast-out. You need a mall where customers are programmed to buy and maybe watch a movie. And you need an agreeable, low-scale, slow-paced place to hang out, where customers don't feel programmed and don't feel they have to act quickly. That's a Main Street."