The other is more complicated, and more difficult. It is to urbanize the suburbs. There is currently a startling amount of abandoned and available land stretching across the diverse corners of suburban America. Much of this is “grayfields”—the land underneath enclosed shopping centers that were built in the 1960s and 1970s, flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, and were essentially dead by the first decade of the new century. Most enclosed shopping centers, if they are still holding on, are unlikely to do so much longer. The International Council of Shopping Centers estimates that there are one thousand enclosed malls left in the United States, but that most of them will not survive. The demographer Arthur C. Nelson calculated in 2009 that in the coming ten years, 2.8 million acres of grayfields will be open for redevelopment. Walmart alone has a real estate inventory of more than two hundred of its older stores that have become available for leasing.
The growing glut of grayfields is important for the urban future not because it represents the only block of developable suburban land—there is much more land that has never been built on at all—but because for hundreds of suburbs around the country, the shopping center was the one recognizable fulcrum of activity the community possessed. When the shopping center dies, there is no physical space to hold the community together at all. That is why, over the past ten years, suburbs around America have been struggling to convert dead or dying malls into something much different—town centers that emulate, as much as possible, the downtowns that exist within the city. Many—perhaps the majority—have been at best partially successful. They have failed to attract the residential, retail, and office combination that a successful downtown needs no matter where it is located.
But some have been trying very hard. If you are looking for evidence of that, you might want to go to Denver.
• • •
WHY DENVER should be emerging as the capital of the suburban town center phenomenon may seem a little perplexing at first. It is not, after all, a dense Eastern city. It is a sprawling, exceptionally auto-dependent Western metropolis. But there are good explanations. One is the glut of enclosed malls from the 1960s and 1970s that the Denver area somehow managed to produce. Strapped for cash by low income taxes and property taxes, Denver suburbs launched a competition with one another to bring in sales tax receipts by building shopping centers. In quite a few cases, this worked nicely for a while—until a newer, glitzier mall was built a few years later on land farther from the city. The ultimate result was that by the later years of the last decade, there were thirteen enclosed regional malls in the Denver area, and seven of them were failing and under serious consideration for some form of retrofit.
That is one reason Denver has produced so much original thinking and experimentation on the subject of suburban town centers. The other reason is Stapleton International Airport.
Stapleton was Denver’s only major airport from the dawn of commercial aviation until the 1990s, when the much larger Denver International Airport was built some thirty miles from the city. Technically, Stapleton is not part of a suburb at all; it exists within the city limits. But when it was leveled in the 1990s, it launched a complex discussion of just what its 4,700 acres of suddenly empty and relatively convenient land might be used for. It was an immense piece of property less than ten minutes from the heart of Denver. And it was demolished and replaced by a huge new mixed-use development aimed at capturing as much as possible of the urban experience.
Stapleton does not seem, at first glance, to be an ideal spot for urban retrofitting. It is too big, for one thing. More than seven square miles in area, it is much larger than Manhattan’s Central Park. There is no way to walk from one end to the other, even if one has the endurance; it is bisected by Interstate Highway 70. There is no public transportation inside it. Of the three major shopping centers within its borders, all built after the airport was torn down, one is little more than conventional big-box retail. This least distinguished of the retail centers was built first, to generate revenue that might make the other two more financially feasible. But at the southern tip, as one walks along the shaded sidewalks of Twenty-ninth Street, Stapleton offers a hint of what suburban retrofitting might actually be like. It is, in some of its development, an imitation of a city neighborhood. In fact, it is the biggest neighborhood in Denver. The houses spread out over most of its 4,700 acres, a blend of Victorian and Craftsman, Colonial, and Mediterranean revival. All of them are on small lots, none larger than a quarter acre. The fact that Stapleton was built this way, rather than as one more cookie-cutter suburban subdivision, is a tribute of sorts to the city of Denver, circa 1995; its master planner, Peter Calthorpe; and its developers, Forest City Enterprises.
Moreover, it has generally been a success. Prior to the recession, its 3,600 occupied units were increasing in value at a rate of roughly 10 percent a year. There are ten thousand residents of Stapleton now, out of a projected population of thirty thousand people two decades from now, a fair proportion of them empty nesters but a startling number of families. There are so many young children during the day on Twenty-ninth Street that the developer had to put in “stroller corrals” for the double-wide contraptions that the more affluent residents in their twenties and thirties have become addicted to. Stapleton has an elementary school and a middle school, as well as the magnet Denver School for Science and Technology. There is a two-and-a-half-acre green where the Fourth of July is celebrated every year.
Loft apartments and condominiums are standard housing at Stapleton, a newly urbanized piece of Denver territory built to replace the city’s demolished airport. (photo credit 9.1)
Stapleton is far from being the ideal retrofit, urban or suburban. Its efforts to attract multifamily housing largely have failed, and the office space has not filled out the way the developer wanted it to. It is, and will be, almost entirely car-dependent. But conceived as early as it was, at a time when suburban shopping-mall culture was still largely thriving, it was a bold and productive experiment. It got others thinking about what might be possible. “Stapleton was a significant proving ground,” says Denver planning director Peter Park. “You could try anything if you were a developer, see if it might work elsewhere. It elevated developer confidence that urban projects could do well.”
IT SEEMS ODD in a way to describe Stapleton as the progenitor of Belmar, the urbanist experiment on the other side of Denver, because their origins couldn’t be more different. Stapleton was built on vacant land whose useful life as an airport had come to a planned conclusion. Belmar replaced a shopping mall that went from being highly profitable to being a financial disaster in the space of barely five years. And yet they are part of the same movement and fulfill some of the same desires: They are attempts to establish an urban environment on empty suburban space.
Belmar is in Lakewood, an inner suburb just five miles west of Denver, and it stands on the site of the demolished Villa Italia, a relatively nondescript enclosed shopping mall but the only real center Lakewood ever knew, the only real public place for more than one hundred thousand city residents to visit. And they did go there, for more than just shopping. As the current mayor, Bob Murphy, says, “People got married at Villa Italia, had their proms at Villa Italia. It was the cat’s meow. But it wasn’t a downtown. It was a mall.”
As late as the mid-1990s, Villa Italia was still the engine whose tax revenues financed Lakewood’s expanding public needs; but by 2000, it was dying. Villa Italia is a testament to just how fast an aging shopping mall can collapse. Its stores went from 90 percent leased to 50 percent leased in the space of five years, a victim of the glut of malls opening in suburban Denver and the retail industry consolidation that robbed it of its most important anchor department stores. Instead of a welcoming spot for weddings, it became a dangerous place with an increasing gang presence and the need for additional police supervision. In the words of Bob Murphy, “It was a boarded-up mall with a chain-link fence around it. We saw the future and it wasn’t bright.”
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p; Something had to be done about Villa Italia, and done quickly, not only because its increasingly decrepit status was a civic embarrassment, but because Lakewood needed the money. There isn’t much else to tax in Lakewood; in its heyday, the mall provided as much as 50 percent of the town’s revenue base.
Compared to Stapleton, Belmar is a pygmy—104 acres compared to nearly 5,000. Its residential population, after more than five years of continuous development, is still less than three thousand. But in its own way, it represents a striking achievement. Stapleton was built on land that the city of Denver had already leveled. At Belmar, it cost $120 million to demolish Villa Italia and replace its acres of asphalt with twenty-three gridded streets. Much of this represents the vision of three men: then–city manager Mike Rock, then-mayor Steve Burkholder, and developer Mark Falcone, chief executive of a development firm called Continuum Partners. “The most important part of getting plans right is human scale,” Falcone insists. “People are thirsting for something more intimate.”
Sitting in a café at Wadsworth Boulevard and Alaska Drive on the busiest corner in Belmar, one finds it difficult to imagine that this was once the center of an indoor mall. Burkholder, Rock, and Falcone had to persuade the residents of a conservative and somewhat insular suburb of 140,000 people that it was ripe to become a major experiment in the retrofitting of suburban America. But they managed to do that.
And through a long sequence of advances and setbacks, Belmar has generally thrived. Its retail businesses have mostly hung on during the recession, although there are some vacant storefronts. Its restaurants are hard to get into on a pleasant summer night. It brings $1.3 million a year in revenues to Lakewood, although much of the sales tax money is scheduled to go back to the developer under a tax increment financing deal. It employs two thousand people, the largest employer being the Integer Group, a marketing company.
Most important, though, it is a residential success. Belmar opted for a different strategy than Stapleton; it never really went after families. There is no school located on the property. But it has been able to attract singles, young couples, and empty nesters, the demographic that a retrofitted suburbia is going to have to attract. Its dwelling places are two-thirds apartments; they are 95 percent rented, most of them at a premium of roughly 20 percent over market prices in nearby areas.
Actually, it is easier to combine work, play, and commerce in Belmar than it is in downtown Denver. From an apartment overlooking the town square, with its playground and wintertime ice rink, one can walk a quarter mile and find a Whole Foods grocery, a Target department store, a Nordstrom clothing store, and a wide variety of chain and local restaurants. The project’s Italian Fest, a carryover from the Villa Italia days, draws one hundred thousand people in a week during the summer. There is a bocce court that was preserved intact from a spot inside the old mall. “It didn’t take long for people to embrace it,” the current mayor boasts. “It’s now the core of our identity as a city.”
Belmar may come as close to the model of retrofitted suburbia as anything that has been completed so far. There is only one component that it lacks: It has no transit system, and it is unlikely ever to get one.
OF THE NEARLY DOZEN SUBURBAN RETROFITS designed or planned in the metropolitan Denver area, only one really qualifies as a transit-oriented development, and that is CityCenter Englewood, on the east side of metropolitan Denver, not too far from Stapleton. One can ride a light-rail train right to the entrance of the town center, cross over a pedestrian bridge with impressive metal trusses, and stand in a civic courtyard in which the town hall has taken the place of an old department store in the middle of Cinderella City, an enclosed mall built in 1968 and dead by the last of the 1990s. CityCenter Englewood is the oldest completed retrofit in the Denver area; its opening in 2001 predated even the major elements of Stapleton. Promotional literature calls it “the first project in Colorado—and among a handful nationally—to replace a suburban shopping mall with a living, breathing, mixed-use downtown.”
The pedestrian-scale development at Belmar, built over the remains of a failed shopping mall in Lakewood, Colorado, is an experiment in creating an urban experience in a classic Denver suburb. (photo credit 9.2)
Some of the right elements for pedestrian scale are present: Surrounding the town hall is a small park dotted with sculptures and other modern art structures aimed at convincing the visitor that Englewood is an arts-minded community. There is a small, pedestrian-oriented street just beyond the park that suggests human scale.
But by most standards of suburban retrofit and pedestrian use, CityCenter Englewood is no triumph. The light-rail station is one of the busier ones within the metropolitan Denver system, but most of the people who come to shop or work there do not ride the train; they drive and park in one of two enormous open lots at either side of the project. The amount of pedestrian-oriented retail shopping is very small, about seven thousand square feet in all. A few hundred yards beyond the impressive civic building is a power center with Walmart and the usual giant big-box tenants. This center is an enormous help in paying the taxes of a community of about thirty-two thousand people, but it turns its back on the light-rail station and on transit-oriented development in general. Walking from the station to the Walmart is not only a difficult experience, it is barely a feasible one. CityCenter Englewood is essentially a small, pleasant enclave masking oceans of asphalt.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the project is that a few blocks beyond all of it, beyond the town green and the town hall, the power center with the big-box stores, there is an old, slightly seedy, but interesting prewar downtown, with locally owned businesses still open. Unless you are driving, you have to take a shuttle bus from the front entrance of the town hall even to discover that it is there. Instead of sprucing up the historic center that already existed, the town planners and developers razed the development of the 1960s and built on top of that.
In this respect, CityCenter Englewood is an entirely different creature from Belmar. In Belmar, there was no center, despite the fact that Lakewood was Colorado’s fourth-largest city. There was no downtown to save. In Englewood there was one, but it was ignored. And this is a criticism that has been applied to the fledgling suburban retrofit craze and the New Urbanist design philosophy from which it has generally emerged. In spite of a commitment to infill projects and to saving what is most precious about the urban past, the most ambitious projects have been built on empty land.
And it is so hard to get all the elements working together. At least one of the major pieces of the puzzle—residential, retail, or office development—is nearly always missing. Belmar has never been able to attract the offices or multifamily housing that its planners envisioned at the start. Stapleton has the residential scale to be a meaningful part of the Denver housing scene, but like Belmar, it has no transit, and even when the commuter rail begins stopping at its northern end in a few years, the majority of residents will not be able to take advantage of it. CityCenter Englewood is a model of transportation efficiency, but the convenience of transit to the development seems almost irrelevant to most of those who use it. Each of the projects, even Stapleton, feels like a small oasis squeezed between multilane highways deemed necessary to attract the customers upon which retail success depends. Walk down the main shopping street of Belmar, and you can easily imagine yourself standing in the middle of a twenty-first-century urban experiment. But to venture outside the twenty-three gridded blocks of Belmar, even to cross the street at the edge of the project, is to be reminded that one is, for all the efforts at urban innovation, reentering the incomparably larger expanse of car-dependent suburbia.
And perhaps that is the most important point to make about Denver and its sincere interest in retrofitting the suburbs. The projects built so far, and even the ones in the planning stages, are drops in the bucket. Belmar, when it is fully built out, will have a population of about 3,000. Lakewood, the suburb that houses it, has a population of about 140,0
00. It would literally take a dozen Belmars to make an appreciable dent in the character of what has for virtually its entire existence been a suburb with precious little character at all.
The lesson is that if retrofitted suburbia is to meet the demands for classic urbanism that today’s millennial generation tells so many polltakers it wants, suburban retrofits will have to become much, much denser. They will need to move beyond sidewalk cafés and nighttime street life and build buildings with enough tenants and home owners to support the retail on the ground floor, without a six-lane highway whizzing by just a couple of blocks away. They will need to have transit stations integrated into the very fabric of the developments. Whether this is possible, I don’t know. The suburban retrofits are, despite the number of examples that multiply every year, in only the earliest stages.
But if urbanized suburbia is going to be the answer for this generation, or even a large part of it, density—somewhere—is the only real choice.
DENSITY HAS BEEN, in many ways, the principal theme of New Urbanism, the movement that is now two decades old and has had a profound if not quite revolutionary impact on the shape of cities all over the Western world. In 1990, the New Urbanists were a small, close-knit coterie of architects and planners with a simple and heretical message: The automobile, and four decades of building homes, streets, and suburbs for the automobile’s convenience, had drained American places of the community and intimacy that human beings naturally desire. Recapturing the attractiveness and livability of the traditional American city would require an effort to convince millions of suburbanites and a rising millennial generation that density was nothing to be afraid of. It was the way to live a life of sociability that placed walking at the center of the urban experience.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 22