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Developers, urban planners agree more on ‘smart growth’

By Dees Stribling

For years retail development has been blamed as a primary ingredient in sprawl. But does the arrival of the lifestyle center and the mixed-use project with strong retail components mean that retail is now a primary ingredient in smart growth?

It depends on what “smart growth” means. Smart growth is not a radical new planning idea anymore. In fact, it’s so mainstream that whatever consensus there was on meaning has been obscured by a multitude of advocates and a variety of development plans that claim to be examples.

“It might be that retailers are catching on to smart growth, but it’s a little difficult to tell, since finding a definition that everyone can agree on is a problem,” said Larry Kilduff, president of The Kilduff Co., a Mequon, Wis.-based urban development and consulting firm. “Not too many retailers or retail developers would actually come out against it, but I suspect their definitions of smart growth aren’t quite the same as some urban planners’. Developers might not buy into everything that planners say smart growth means, and vice versa.”

Still, he says, some of the basic elements of smart growth are sufficiently familiar that retail projects in various places and under diverse circumstances could be said to be following some smart-growth principles: emphasis on pedestrian-friendliness with discreet parking, for one such. Or the term could mean retail as part of a mix that encourages people to live, work and play in the same area.

Sue A. Murphy, president of Tampa, Fla.-based P&M Consulting Group, says she’d be hard-pressed to precisely define smart growth. “But in its simplest terms, smart growth is about the efficient use of existing infrastructure, either in an urban setting or what’s called a New Urban setting,” she said.

The move toward smart-growth principles among retailers and retail developers is being driven in part by local governments, which are increasingly picking up on smart-growth ideas, Murphy says. “Some smart growth is code-driven, and that affects retail development in a number of ways,” she said. “For example, governments are often deciding in favor of mixed uses, as opposed to single stores, particularly in in-fill locations.”

Market forces, especially those that favor walkable, mixed-use development, are a factor encouraging retail as a component of smart growth, says John Norquist, president of the San Francisco-based Congress for the New Urbanism. “Retail developers are increasingly sold on the idea,” he said. “After all, they aren’t building many new interior-facing malls anymore. Lifestyle centers or town centers with blocks and main streets — that’s where the market is headed now. Even companies such as Target and Kohl’s want to be on the ‘T’ intersection of lifestyle centers.”

The current shift away from the malls of decades past and from stand-alone big boxes is a part of smart growth, says Norquist, especially when it puts retail in a mixed-use context. “Retailers are finding that they can sell their products and still have a relationship to other human activity, such as where people live or work,” he said. “Stores don’t have to be in a box surrounded by a parking lot.”

Even discount retailers are incorporating elements of smart growth into their expansion plans. Target and Home Depot feature smaller urban designs with multiple floors, escalators, street entrances and sometimes underground parking.

Target representatives declined requests for an interview, but the company has developed some noteworthy urban in-fill locations recently, including a three-story unit at the Nicollet Mall (a downtown street lined with a variety of retailers), in Minneapolis; a unit on Chicago’s North Side; and a store at the Atlantic Terminal Mall, in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is reputed to be one of the busiest Targets in the country.

Even Wal-Mart, in the right circumstances, can be said to adapt to smart-growth principles, says Norquist, who worked with the retail giant in locating at an urban redevelopment site in Milwaukee when he was mayor of that city. “It was the site of the Capitol Court Shopping Mall, which had died by the 1990s,” he said. “It was scraped clean by the developer, who put in blocks and streets. But it was an urban neighborhood, and the only retailer of any size that would come in was Wal-Mart. We found that Wal-Mart would accept fronting on a street with other buildings touching it if they could have their square footage — that’s what they really cared about.”

But not all smart-growth principles jibe with the schemes of retailers. One example involved parking placement and lighting at two different Walgreens in the same urban market, Kilduff recalls.

“At one of them, parking was near the door, but the other had its parking away from the door, in the rear, to promote a more pedestrian-friendly street,” Kilduff said. “The trouble was, customers complained that at night the outside of the store with the parking in back wasn’t as well lighted as it should have been.”

It was actually a matter of misperception, Kilduff says, because both stores followed the retailer’s strict standards with regard to exterior lighting and in fact had exactly the same amount of light near the entrance. “But because people had to walk further to the entrance, they believed that it was darker than it should have been,” he said.

A small problem, to be sure, but indicative of what retailers can face with smart growth, Kilduff says. “If the customers don’t accept it or don’t like it for some reason, then the retailers aren’t going to do it,” he said. “Retailers and retail developers will be amenable to smart growth as long as it doesn’t interfere with their business models.”

Parking may be in fact the biggest obstacle to acceptance of smart-growth principles by retailers. It has to go somewhere, but retailers tend to prefer to have it close by, while smart-growth advocates lean to more-distant, or at least to more-discreet, locations. In a few places, such as in-fill sites in densely populated, heavily pedestrian New York City or Chicago, parking is not an issue. But these are the exceptions.

“Parking is one of the biggest issues in designing retail in a mixed-use environment,” said Steven McKay, head of the retail practice of DLR Group, a nationwide architectural and engineering firm. “It’s a technical issue, but it can be a tough one. Most retailers have to have a certain number of parking spaces. That’s easy in a regional mall. But if you create a mixed-use environment with urban streets that have on-street parking, that doesn’t usually satisfy the parking requirement. The problem is, how do you create a unique sense of place and still have enough parking?”

The logistics of combining living, working, playing and shopping in one place can be complex too, McKay says. “How you live above a retail street and how you service residences can be complicated, because we all have deliveries and garbage pickup and so on,” he said. “But as retailers get more used to being part of mixed-use developments, they’re becoming more sensitive to the needs of the other users.” I n spite of these technical difficulties, McKay says his experiences designing mixed-use projects in such diverse places such as Florida, Kansas, Michigan and Oregon have shown him that it’s possible to reintegrate retail into the life of a city, which is one of the goals of smart growth.

The difficulties are nothing a good design cannot overcome, McKay says. “The mixed-use idea isn’t going to go away,” he said. “The American shopper expects it now. It will drive retail development, because it creates community and maximizes land usage.”