Shopping Centers Today

JAN 2014

Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)

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in my opinion Bringing better shopping to battered communities By James Matanky I went to look at a neighborhood center in Chicago the other week. a bank had repossessed it and wanted to sell it to us. It was fully leased with a number of credit tenants — but not the right tenants. the property had been developed at the height of the market by an entity that didn't have sufficient expertise in underserved community retail. the center lies in a fairly highcrime area with a 40 percent unemployment rate. twenty-eight percent of the community lives below the poverty line, and fewer than 20 percent have college degrees. the center itself was filthy, with abysmal retail, poor signage, nonexistent landscaping and limited access. with peddlers and loiterers on-site, I didn't even want to get out of my car. So with such demographics and problems, was the center a dead loss? not so fast. It has over 124,000 people within two miles, with a median household income of $36,000 (approximately 76 percent of the city's average), and a per capita income of $16,600. there is also a tremendous unmet demand for most every retail category. the area has nearly $1.2 billion of retail potential, with over $542 million of that not being met. the term "underserved communities" is bandied about a lot, but at Matanky Realty Group we have had decades of experience with some dire 50 SC T / J a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 Fixing distressed centers in underserved communities takes effort, understanding and community involvement. examples, in which residents have lost access to the basic goods and services needed to sustain healthy families and lives. Fixing distressed centers in such communities takes effort, understanding and community involvement. It's a high-risk niche that few developers understand, but one that can be very profitable if done right. this center brought to mind another that we encountered several years ago with nearly identical demographics. It was at the intersection of three disparate communities: to the south was an african-american neighborhood still scarred from Chicago's 1968 race riots. northward was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and to the east lay a mix of eastern european immigrants and newly arrived yuppies. the area had plenty of fast-food restaurants and an abundance of convenience stores stocking expensive grocery items, chips and soda, but virtually no fresh produce. In short, it qualified as a food desert due to its lack of an adequate grocery store. Furthermore, the ZIP code had no bank — though plenty of checkcashing stores — and few basic goods and services. Most of the center's parking-lot lights had been shot out by drug dealers. there were boarded up shop windows, vacant spaces and dozens of seagulls in the parking lot looking for scraps of food. there were just three trees on the eight-acre site, only two of which were alive. But this neighborhood, like the one I visited more recently, had plenty of demand. So we teamed up with local community organizations, identified which goods and services were lacking, brought in appropriate tenants and insisted they hire locally. we installed new facades, landscaping and quality lighting, and hired locally for janitorial staff who would not only perform maintenance but who also would possess a sense of ownership of the property. lastly, we worked closely with local law enforcement. at the end of the day, we provided a safe, clean and convenient shopping environment, giving the community the respect and care that it deserved. It wasn't easy. But it was satisfying not just to be making money, but to be making a difference. Memories of that project return to me each time I visit a center like the one I visited the other week. SCT

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