Centers
OfAttention
More developers are resurrecting the town
center with numerous mixed-use projects.
By Brianne Harrison
Associate Editor
Not so long ago, most people lived in or near a town center, with easy access to shopping and community activities. But the post-war boom and rise in car ownership
spawned suburban sprawl, resulting in many town center-free communities. Now, however, more developers are beginning to reassess how retail spaces should be built and are creating new main
streets and town centers with a number of mixed-use projects.
“We’re going to continue to see more outdoor community-oriented main street environments,” says Mike Stone, senior
director of the retail services group at Cushman & Wakefield.
And many of those developments will be accompanied by residences, offices or both.
“We’re seeing a complete focus on mixed-use of retail residential
or retail office,” says Brian Silbert, president of Silbert Realty and
Management, Millington. This type of development may have
grown out of the craze for lifestyle centers, which began cropping
up in New Jersey in the late 1980’s, when the Grove at Shrewsbury
opened on Route 35 in Monmouth County. Since then, lifestyle
centers have continued to be popular, with several either under
construction or having recently opened throughout the state.
It didn’t take long for developers to realize that pairing a residential element with the lifestyle center gave them “a way to maximize their cash flow,” explains Stephanie Greco of
Greco-Sackheim Realty Group, Englewood.
For builders, part of the appeal of mixed-use is the fact that, depending on how the projects are designed, they can take up less
land than a traditional mall, and land is something New Jersey is
quickly running out of.
“In New Jersey, there really isn’t any more room to build regional malls,” says Stone. “Number one, there are enough of them,
and number two, they have such large land requirements and investment costs that there really isn’t an opportunity to build one.
“There are a couple of forces leading in the same direction—
residential developers who want amenities for their residents, and communities that are out of land and need to build vertically because
they can’t continue to spread,” Stone says
More developers are adopting the model long used in cities like
New York, where the first floor of a building is dedicated to retail
space and the floors above are turned into apartments or offices.
The built-in retail is often used as an incentive to persuade residential and office tenants to move in.
“Including a retail component in an otherwise residential development makes it a more exciting place to live and, therefore, could
raise the value of the housing,” says Stone.
This concept works even better in reverse. “Usually the retail
will follow the residential,” says Silbert. “Residential will fuel
