Small malls in era of big retail — handy, yes, but sustainable?
Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: June 21, 2016 | Last Updated: June 21, 2016 4:45 PM EDT
There is a pall over the small mall, the evidence growing, east to west.
On Monday evening, a modest crowd gathered at the Best Western on Carling Avenue for an open house on the future of Westgate Shopping Centre.
It is, for argument’s sake, the canary in the mine. Opened in 1955, it is the city’s oldest mall and now has 45 stores — but no big “anchor,” like a grocery chain or department store (though the giant Shoppers Drug Mart comes close.)
If mall owner RioCan completes its multi-year plan, the current mall — so old it once had a Freiman’s and Steinberg’s — will disappear in stages. Phase 1 is a 22-storey residential building on the site of what is now Monkey Joe’s restaurant, on the Carling and Merivale Road corner.
Phase 2 will sit on the footprint of what is now the Shoppers. Phases 3 and 4 will take up the rest of the land closer to the Queensway, with each building having its own parking capacity, with commercial on the ground floor. In total — and it could take 20 years — there will be five towers and more than 1,100 new residential units.
And RioCan is planning a similar transformation at the Elmvale Acres Shopping Centre, where there is early talk of four apartment buildings and 800 units.
It won’t end there, whispered a planner at the meeting. Keep an eye on Lincoln Fields, also a RioCan property, where there were already vacant storefronts before Walmart moved out of its 117,000-square-foot location in January.
So, on the one hand, these are important transformations in the city’s urban fabric, malls and food courts being part of the public realm. On the other hand, small malls are neither glitzy, nor day-long shopping “get-aways.” They’re just warm, or cool, useful, even essential.
This was a point brought up by residents Monday. Westgate has places to get your hair cut and shoes repaired. It has an optician, a physiotherapist, a dental office, a post office, a Service Ontario outlet. In other words, it serves the neighbourhood in a city captive to winter weather, with lots of free parking and easy road access.
Lincoln Fields has the Pinecrest-Queensway Community Health Centre, with an employment services section, a Service Canada location, dry cleaners and tailors. It will never have a Tiffany’s. But it does sit beside a key transit crossing and supports a socially-mixed neighbourhood.
Barry Nabatian, a market researcher with Shore Tanner & Associates, is not surprised by this retail shakeup.
“Basically, we have too much retail within the Greenbelt and not enough in the outlying communities, like Orléans, Barrhaven and Kanata,” he said Tuesday.
A couple of major shifts are at play, he explained. For one thing, the neighbourhoods around Westgate or Elmvale have matured, and tend to be filled with empty nesters or those about to be. Either way, the populations — the customer bases — are growing slowly, he said.
More importantly, the retail landscape has changed. Medium-sized shopping centres conceived in the 1960s or ’70s are being battered by new so-called power centres, the Tanger Outlets, expansions at regional shopping centres, like Bayshore, Rideau Centre and St. Laurent.
In one year alone, said Nabatian, the city added more than one million square feet of retail space.
And, so, the future for small malls?
“Not very good,” he answered. “The community-type shopping centres, a lot of those have been suffering the most in the last 20 years or so.”
Think, too, of the traditional mall, he said. The landlord generally bears the expense of common areas — heating, cooling, cleaning and maintaining public spaces that really generate no direct revenue. All that expense is gone with a different retail configuration, like adjacent storefronts.
RioCan, which owns 340 shopping centres across Canada, knows all this, and its strategy appears to squarely take on the demographic problem: bring the customers to retail by having them live right on the site, one well endowed with services and transit links. The models did look awfully dense, leading some to wonder if — car and pedestrian-wise — it will really work.
Hanging over the meeting, too, was a proposal to shut the eastbound Queensway on-ramp that borders the western edge of the property. Would it not be essential to keep, in light of the plan for another 1,100 housing units?
There are many approvals yet to be had from the city. The first building on the Westgate site could be underway in 2018, the biggest change to the small mall in 60 years.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email
[email protected].
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
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