5Qs for Allison Greenfield on the remaking of Michigan’s largest mall
On July 1, Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights, Mich. shut its doors.
On July 2, Lionheart Capital laid open its plans to turn the site into the new downtown of Michigan’s fourth-largest city.
Lionheart’s Out of the Box Ventures unit, which works at infusing new value into distressed retail real estate, plans to employ at least $1 billion in the development of retail, residences, and office spaces in the place once anchored by Macy’s, Sears, and Lord & Taylor.
[READ MORE: Michigan mall set to get billion-dollar makeover]
Chain Store Age spoke with Allison Greenfield, Lionheart’s chief development officer, about how and why Out of the Box got involved in this city-changing project.
What are some of the core property values Out of the Box demands before embarking on such wide-scale renovation?
What we look for is good location, good price, and good underlying community and government engagement. Sterling Heights is still a very vibrant young community. There are still a lot of high-skill-set manufacturing jobs in the area. The median household income is close to $90,000. Young families want to move in, and older citizens aren’t eager to move out.
What led you to Lakeside?
The local government. They were actively searching for a really good mall redeveloper and found us. At first we thought we might keep the mall and adaptively reuse it. But we ended up thinking that we needed to create a new mixed-use development like the many you now see going up in the Southeast and the West. Our street grid, however, is informed by the old passageways of the mall.
Will the lake in Lakeside play a bigger role in the new development?
We’re planning to loop seven acres of park around the lake and create a greenbelt around our ring road. We’re still working with a baseline plan, but multifamily, office, and retail will be woven in. This will be a 10-to-12-year buildout. Over that time period, the needs of the market change, and we believe we’ll have zoning that will allow for some flexibility.
When do you plan to break ground?
We think we’ll be able to get going in 12 to 18 months. We’ll be raising all the horizontal in one fell swoop — streetscapes and utilities in a 24-month build. We’ll also have the central park, which was the center of the mall, and retail and entertainment.
What’s been the reaction of the community?
When we closed the mall, people came from all over town to say goodbye to it. It was the center of a town that had no true center. So we said, “Let’ be proactive in creating one.”
