My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

Yesterday, the family made a visit to the local shopping mall, Foothills Fashion Mall, so our daughter could do some birthday shopping. I admit, I do not go to the mall very often, and I knew that some of the big tenants had left such as Mervyns and JC Penney, but I was still surprised to see the shear number of vacancies inside the mall. This mall is a dying mall. I remember seeing the same thing in other malls that used to be around Denver, such as Southglenn, Northglenn, and Cinderella City. All of which have been torn down and redeveloped.

Foothills Mall though continues to hang on. For most of it’s life, this mall was owned locally, and they would occasionally put money into fixing the place up. Ironically, they sold it a few years ago to General Growth Properties, because GGP had a reputation of breathing life into malls, and upgrading them. Everyone thought this sounded like a good idea. They even bought up many of the surrounding properties with the intent of including them into a redevelopment plan. Knowing the buildings were going to be torn down, many of the tenants moved out.

Now that GGP is having its own financial issues, redeveloping this mall is nowhere close to being on their radar screen. So now we are left with several vacant buildings around the mall, the mall half empty itself, and what was once the retail economic engine for Northern Colorado, is now adrift in a sea of retail wasteland.

Of course, this is hardly unique to Fort Collins. Malls all over the country have run out of favor with shoppers. What was once a highly popular way to shop, which killed thousands of downtown’s, is now falling victim to the latest retail trend – Lifestyle Town Centers. Of course, the big irony here is that these Town Centers are trying to emulate downtown’s. Anyway, I recently read an article in New Urban News, where in Denver alone, 7 malls have been torn down in the last decade to be redeveloped (I can only think of 5), and only one new mall has been built, and it has struggled. I think that Town Centers are about to run there course too, and we will be looking at the next trend in retail centers, whatever that may be. In the last 20 years we have had malls, factory outlet stores, power centers, and now Lifestyle Town Centers. Shoppers are a fickle bunch, flocking to the latest in shopping trends, leaving a wasteland of shopping centers behind, always going to the newest and latest place. This is hardly sustainable in my opinion.

Anyway, back to Foothills Mall, we shall see what happens with it. It needs to be redeveloped into a mixed use center. General Growth can’t do it. The best thing that could happen is it is sold to another company that can do it. Of course, in the current economic and financing climate, that won’t be happening anytime soon.