Except for the bright colors, it could be a scene out of the hit movie Pleasantville.
Shoppers popping in and out of storefronts lining the town square, while a few old-timers gossip on benches. A few yards away, kids romp on the park lawn, as moms push strollers along the brick-paved walks.
Andy of Mayberry would be right at home.
But the scene in Southlake, a Dallas suburb, is a creation of local real estate developers, not Hollywood.
Builders of the new Southlake Town Square shopping center promised that their 133-acre commercial project patterned after early 20th Century downtowns wouldn’t be a standard suburban strip center.
Developer Brian Stebbins thinks the project has met expectations and then some.
“Where else do you see people coming to have a picnic in the middle of a shopping center?” said Stebbins, who watched recently as five families lunched on the lawn to enjoy the spring weather. “When people come here they feel like they have been somewhere.”
It’s a feeling that real estate developers hope will translate into big profits.
A new downtown building boom is under way in the Dallas area. But it’s not taking place downtown.
Instead, developers in suburban Southlake, Plano, Flower Mound, Coppell, Keller and other communities are building “downtowns” as new centerpieces of the suburbs.
Proponents of the projects that re-create downtown-style streetscapes say they are responding to consumers who are weary of miles of endless shopping strips, garden apartments and sprawling malls.
“People want something more than just a place to park their car, jump out and run into some building,” said Stebbins. “They want some of the things you see in older cities.”
Skeptics of this development fad say builders are fooling themselves building artificial downtowns when so much of the retail and office space in Dallas’ central business district is sitting empty.
“It reminds me of Main Street at Disneyland–an elaborate fake,” said Catherine Horsey, head of Preservation Dallas. “If we are successful in getting people to come back downtown, we won’t have to build new downtowns in the suburbs.”
Real estate companies building and leasing this latest urban planning scheme say they are just putting the kind of environment consumers like close to where they live and work.
At Plano’s Legacy business park, for instance, a new 150-acre “town center” designed by award-winning Florida architect Andres Duany will have shops, apartments, office space and entertainment to service the almost 36,000 office workers in the area.
In the fast-growing residential community of Flower Mound, developer Cole McDowell is building Parker Square, a 350,000-square-foot complex of retail and office buildings designed to mimic a 1920s town square.
“American as apple pie and Fourth of July,” marketing pitches promise.
More important, the first two buildings in the project are leased to tenants and agents have prospects to fill several more.
“Leasing activity has been tremendous,” said Parker Square leasing agent Kurt Cherry.
“Until we built this project, there haven’t been any buildings like this in Flower Mound.”
Both Parker Square and Southlake Town Center were designed by Washington, D.C., architect David Schwarz. Schwarz also was the architect for The Ballpark in Arlington and downtown Dallas’ new Victory sports arena.
Both projects have a central town “park,” buildings that line streetfronts with a variety of facades and landscaped sidewalks to encourage foot traffic.
Most of the developments also include more than one type of building, mixing shops, office space, apartments and movie theaters in common buildings or together on one block.
While David Schwarz’s retro real estate designs have critics, Stebbins said the early sales results at Southlake Town Center should convince doubters.
“Six of the national retail chains here set all-time opening records,” he said. “And in the five weeks since the opening, all of our retailers have exceeded their projections.”
With such sales potential in what is already one of the most over-stored retail markets in the country, developers are quickly looking to copy elements of the “town center” approach in all types of shopping centers.
That worries developer Robert Shaw, who as head of Columbus Real Estate helped launch the residential and retail boom now under way in Dallas’ hot Uptown neighborhood.
“You can’t go out in the green fields and build one of these on every corner and expect them to all be successful,” said Shaw, whose latest project is a revitalization of Plano’s historic downtown area just east of North Central Expressway. “The only time this concept works is if it’s the urban center of a much larger community.
“Not only is there the risk of these projects looking like movie sets–not authentic,” he said. “But because of the costs involved there is the potential for some eye-popping failures.”
The back-to-Main Street move being embraced by suburban developers can be overdone, agrees Dallas shopping center architect Charles Hodges.
“No, it’s not something you can mass-produce,” said Hodges, whose firm has designed award-winning retail projects across the country. “But I think we need to give this concept a little time to prove its durability.”
Like festival marketplaces in the 1980s and “power centers” in the early 1990s, town square projects are the hot design trend for the next millennium, he said.
“There are benefits to be gained by creating a campus-style retail center that encourages people to lengthen their time of stay and not just drive up to one store, shop and move on,” Hodges said. “The big challenge for developers is everybody is too rushed these days to spend two or three hours shopping.”
Higher sales numbers will make a believer out of almost every retailer. But property brokers say that so far it’s the developers, not the retailers and restaurant operators, who are driving the move toward town square projects.
“I don’t think the tenants really care,” said Herbert Weitzman, president of real estate broker Weitzman Group. “I think it’s the ego of the developer and the architect involved that is driving these projects.”
In most locations where the town square projects have been started in suburban Dallas, the demographics and customer base are strong enough to attract merchants to almost any kind of shopping complex, Weitzman said.
“I understand what these developers are doing–everybody is trying to find their own niche,” he said. “But if they can’t get the return, the retailers won’t pay for some of these more costly improvements.”
Before spending millions of dollars to create a town center for his huge Circle T Ranch development northeast of Ft. Worth, developer Ross Perot Jr. plans to see how the other projects perform.
“We aren’t in any hurry,” said Perot, who is also in the midst of retail center planning for the Victory mixed-use development in downtown Dallas. “We think we have a rare opportunity to see what everybody else does, then decide what works and what doesn’t.”
Catherine Horsey still hopes the fad is short-lived.
“There’s a lot more to creating an urban environment than just building a bunch of old-looking buildings,” she said. “You have to have a variety of people and shops and the whole urban experience.
“I would hate to think that this becomes a sanitized substitute for the real thing and that people in the suburbs only know faux Main Street,” Horsey said.
