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Not enough of a good thing
With few new grocery centers being built, developers are upping the ante on existing ones
Pat Donahue, together with his late brother Dan and business partner Tom Schriber, has been in grocery-anchored shopping centers since the ’90s. That’s when Schriber calculated that the company’s long-term fortunes, which had rested on mall development up until then, would be better wagered on high-traffic “necessity-based” retail.
“At malls you get ’em three times a month.
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In the cool, cool, cool of the city
More and more these days, shopping center developers find themselves in the role of town planner. Once dedicated to creating pleasant spaces for people to shop in, they now are challenged to create places for people to live, play, eat and be entertained in. Build that, they’re told, and shoppers will come. But droves of millennials fleeing suburbs in search of more fulfilling urban lifestyles are giving developers an assist. In some cases, they’re hewing their own downtowns out of rough old sections of town. In others, old downtowns are remaking themselves to welcome this new city stock.
