New 400,000 SqFt mall in Lynnfield

[Macwymon]

As an aside...I've lived in Lynnfield for 40 years and Meadow Walk as a net positive.

[3cents]

Lynnfield is one of the towns I'm considering to buy a house in. I'm wondering whether this new mall project will affect prices of houses (in the years to come) in nearby streets? I do notice that houses along Walnut or one street away are selling.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

Yeah, I'm underwhelmed by it myself. I guess I'm wondering about the need for more retail around here?

Good luck to 'em but I can't see myself shopping there.

[mbe3204m]

Originally Posted by lrfox

Personally, I don't care for it. It's simply a strip mall. It's a strip mall that will be shiny and new when it opens and it'll be outdated in about 5-10 years. More than that, we have hundreds of strip malls in Eastern MA that are 50% vacant (or 50% full... maybe I'm a pessimist?). Many big malls aren't doing so well. Natick Collection is struggling, Square One Mall is struggling, Patriot Place and Legacy Place have tons of vacancies. We don't need another suburban strip.

The link is typical developer material that's used to sell "magic beans" to the general public. Renderings are ALWAYS prettier than the finished product. ALWAYS. Look closely. You'll see colors that are brighter than anything in real life (clothes, cars, awnings, crosswalks, etc) and tons of leisurely activity. It's lipstick on a big, ugly pig. It's meant to make you go "ooh and ahh" and disregard the fact that it's a generic strip mall.

In addition, they promise open spaces for people to relax with a book or a coffee. Even in the shiny rendering, they're little more than median strips in the middle of a parking lot. Not exactly a wonderful place to relax. In Massachusetts where it's cold 6 months out of the year, your outdoor public spaces need to be perfectly executed in order to encourage use. Flowers and grass in the middle of a parking lot is not great public space.

Then there's the size. You've brought up comparisons to Burlington and North Shore malls. Well, those malls are 2 to 4 times the size of this proposed project (which is only 400,000 square feet as opposed to 1+ Million sq. feet at those malls in Eastern MA). It's not even a destination size strip mall. It's just average.

This is the worst part of it:


Are they serious with this? Why do we need to build a strip mall to create a "village-like feel?" Don't we live in New England? This region (especially Eastern MA) is the American epicenter for the "village." We have dozens of town and small city centers in Eastern MA that could use an influx of 400,000 square feet of retail and restaurant businesses. They're the real thing! Not some prefab, hacked up attempt to make a strip mall parking lot feel like a nice place to chill with a book (it isn't and never will be). How about the developers get together with Quincy. They're trying to revamp their downtown area with [URL="http://www.newquincycenter.com/index.shtml"]$1 Billion in investments[/URL]. Why not enter into a partnership with Quincy and work together? Then you have a REAL village at the intersection of I-93 and Route 3. In addition it'll be on the commuter rail AND the Red Line. Quincy's just one example. I'd rather see a 400,000 square foot retail investment in Waltham, Norwood, Beverly, Haverhill, Lynn, etc.

Adapting our existing town and city centers for retail uses again is the way to go. Look through these threads of people looking to move to MA. How many do you see asking, "Where can I live so I can drive to strip malls?!" Very few. Most people want to live in a community with a walkable town center (it seems every other thread is someone asking where they can live near a town center with shops, restaurants, etc). My beef with projects like the proposal here is that we have so many that are currently underdeveloped that we don't need to build new, faux village centers (that fail as village centers anyway).

Love the ideas in theory; here are a couple of counterpoints:

- while this area of the country is the "epicenter for the village", most spaces in small town centers are already crowded/tight enough and don't offer enough parking for there to be a sudden influx of 400K square feet of space. those places are "quaint" precisely because they were developed long ago and short of leveling a whole ton of buildings, there's not much else you can do with the space, so it preserves its essence for a long time.

- have you seen legacy in Dedham? Maybe not so impressive but it's still a destination and cool that the option is there to go and kill some time with a movie, whole foods food court, etc.

- per first point above, adapting our town centers for this type of thing takes a long time. I grew up in Reading and it took over 20 years of infighting / squabbling at the local level for them to finally get a decent town square together, after what was an ugly and outdated area of town for way too long. They attracted a couple decent restaurants and have finally built some niice/newer buildings on the periphery of the square area. In the meantime, what happened? Jordan's/Home Depot/etc. all opened and developed the area on Walkers Brook Drive because the property wasn't being used for anything else, it was easy to get in and out of the area via exit 39 (vs. taking route 28 from 128 for Reading Center), and the tax money coming to the town was a windfall. A developer comes in and says "you want our tax money or not?" they all say yes and say "ok use this space here, we'll help out with infrastructure improvements, and away you go." Much harder than trying to get a board of selectmen to agree on leveling an entire block or two and rebuilding it for one developer when there will invariably be plenty of opposition against it. I love that idea too, but it's a bit of a pipe dream.

[NickL28]

Originally Posted by lrfox

Personally, I don't care for it. It's simply a strip mall. It's a strip mall that will be shiny and new when it opens and it'll be outdated in about 5-10 years. More than that, we have hundreds of strip malls in Eastern MA that are 50% vacant (or 50% full... maybe I'm a pessimist?). Many big malls aren't doing so well. Natick Collection is struggling, Square One Mall is struggling, Patriot Place and Legacy Place have tons of vacancies. We don't need another suburban strip.

Can you tell me where you read this? The malls in this area seemed packed any weeknight or weekend (even now after the holidays). On Boston.com, it has talked about how many retailers have had the best year in the past five or six years and how people seemed much more willing to spend than in previous years.
Ever drive on Route 9 in Natick on Saturday or Sunday afternoon? Went to legacy place one Saturday and it took over 30 minutes to even find a place to park. Restaurants had a 90 minute wait for a table as well.

[lrfox]

^That post is nearly 2 years old. The information used for the post is a year older than that (2009-10). thus coming at the height of the recession. Natick Collection opened in the midst of the recession and struggled to fill retail spaces. It's doing better now. Patriot Place in Foxboro still has a lot of vacant retail space. You only need to walk through to see it. If you can't, the occupancy rate is 95% but that's based on 1.3 million square feet of total space available and much of Patriot Place is occupied by large box stores like Bass Pro (360,000 square feet alone), Showcase Cinemas/Showcase Live, Staples, Trader Joes (grocery, but large store in the old Circuit City space), Old Navy, and some big restaurant spaces like Toby Keith's, Bar Louie, CBS Scene, and Skipjack's. Where they're hurting is in the main mall area in the small retail storefronts. Close to 50% of those are still unoccupied.

Malls like Burlington, Cambridgeside, and South Shore Plaza have held pretty strong. On the other hand, malls like Silver City in Taunton, The Atrium, Westgate Mall (which was recently foreclosed on by Bank of America) Swansea, and Chestnut Hill are continuing to lose tenants and still struggling to fill the vacated spaces. Silver City Galleria in Tauntion, for example, has depreciated in terms of appraised value by nearly $100,000,000 since 2005 (source: Boston Business Journal).

So while retail is up, that's only a recent trend. Still, there are a lot of empty retail spaces (many former Linens-n-Things and Circuit City stores alone leave hundreds of thousands of empty square feet) that need to be filled.

[Massmailinator]

I am digging the new Market Street mall.

Go there every other week or so!