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.

One of my readers, lostfortcollins.com, directed me to this fabulous video on nature returning to the abandoned neighborhoods of Detroit. Now my curiosity is really piqued, and I will add to my plate doing some further research and reporting on Detroit.

The original video is on Current.com

http://current.com/e/76380402/en_US

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I will admit that I have never been to Detroit, nor have I ever had any inkling too, but with all the recent press that Detroit has been getting with regards to the automobile industry, and the state of the housing economy there, I thought I would make a Google visit. As with most of my tours, I start with the downtown area. I immediately became intrigued with Detroit with the overall layout of downtown. All the major streets are broad parkways that are heavily landscaped, and all of these parkways pinwheel out from a central park. Very nice indeed, and a classic layout seen in many great cities. I also like the fact that the ballparks are oriented to the adjacent streets. The whole downtown area is very pedestrian friendly (at least from bird’s eye), and extraordinarily well laid out.

Of course, from the air, you also see the downside. There is a tremendous amount of surface parking lots, and a fair amount of empty space between buildings. This provides opportunity for infill, with a good structure already in place. This of course, ignores the current economic climate of Detroit.

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Now one of the things that amazed me even more, was traveling less than a mile and a half outside of downtown, and there are blocks and blocks and blocks of vacant land…street are there, but few structures. I have to ask myself, what happened here? In most cities, you see very dense neighborhoods fairly close to the city core. And this isn’t unique to this one area of Detroit, cruising around, this goes on for miles.

But why? Is there environmental pollution? Were these neighborhoods intentionally torn down, was there some kind of great fire? If you go miles out from the city core, you can find all kinds of new home development going on (or at least there was). So why has the city core all but been abandoned?

With all the talk these days about sustainability and redevelopment, this is an area where redevelopment should be strongly encouraged, in and orderly fashion. Why is the development in the suburbs, eating up raw land and having to extend utilities, when there is all this land close in, with all the infrastructure in place to support new development? I realize I am taking a rather simplistic view of this, as there are all kinds of other factors such as crime rates, environmental concerns, economic concerns etc. But these kinds of issues have been overcome in other areas, so why not here? I think as a society, we need to take a hard look at our priorities, and take a harder look at sprawl and urban development.

If anybody has any insight as to what happened in these neighborhoods of Detroit, I would love to here them!

One of the things I like to do is to visit different locations using Google Earth. I find this to be a fantastic tool to virtually visit areas around the globe that I have never been too. It is rather fascinating to see some of the various development patterns is different cities, towns and countries. With street view, it becomes even more fascinating to actually get on the street and see stuff, do 360 degree views and so on. Doing this for awhile, it finally hit on me, that I should actually blog about my visits, talk about what I see, and share my thoughts. Of course this will be done with very little or no knowledge of local politics, history and what not. I look forward to seeing the comments from my readers as well.

In our our area, and most of the front range of Colorado, this has been an incredibly warm, dry, and windy winter. It is so warm, we already have Tulips up several inches and crocus blooming. Today I noticed that the Nannyberry’s are leafing out, and the blossoms on the Lilacs are turning purple…all a good month early! I am not ready to start watering yet, nor am I ready to clean up the yard yet. Knowing our luck, everything will leaf out, then we will get a massive freeze and snowstorm and wipe it all out.

Guess it is time to get the lawn mower fixed.