Inner city shopping centers : national development trends and local community impacts

Abstract

Within the past ten years, there has been increasing interest in bringing retail back into inner-city neighborhoods as a commercial revitalization and economic development strategy. In this thesis, a large data set of all US shopping centers is analyzed to examine general trends in shopping center development, as well as trends in inner-city shopping center development over time. This research showed that inner-city centers are fairly similar to those in other parts of the MSA, although they are smaller, denser, and house a slightly different profile of retailers. During the 1980s, shopping center development in the inner city increased along with development in the rest of the metro area. As the overall market for shopping center development declined in the 1990s, inner-city development has declined even more sharply. And, while there is a major trend in the rest of the metropolitan area toward increasing renovation, expansion, and redevelopment of older centers, shopping centers in the inner city are not experiencing this surge of re-investment.

(cont.) This thesis also examines the case for economic development through shopping center development, and explores the local community impacts of shopping center development through brief case studies of three inner-city shopping center projects in Houston, Boston, and Baltimore, with the goal of presenting how successful projects came about, why they were attractive to potential tenants, and what their impact was on the neighborhood.