If Detroit Got a Mall, Where Would You Put It?

[royce]

So first, I agree that there is room in Detroit for chains and homegrown shops.

But enclosed malls tend to perform poorly in urban centers. A perfect example of this is Manhattan Mall, which for everything it has going for it -- high foot traffic in the vicinity, adjacent location to transit hubs -- has historically performed very poorly compared to its department store and street level retail competitors. Lately MM's prospects have improved but that's essentially because the entire mall has been transformed into a JC Penney store.

From my own personal observations from visiting/living in different cities, I think there are basically a handful of situations that make an urban mall successful: 1) large numbers of tourists, 2) unique retail offerings and/or lack of retail options in the area, 3) being integrated into a high traffic transit hub like Union Station in DC or Grand Central in New York.

Situation three makes me think that if you put the Rosa Parks Transit Center on the old Hudson's site and then build a Target store on the site, you might get the shopping traffic needed to make the store successful. Also, bus riders/shoppers taking busses from the major arterial streets, would be dropped off and picked up right next to the store. With all of the people waiting for busses, they would most certainly go into Target from time to time and then realize that they could satisfy most of their shopping needs at that point instead of taking another trip later on in the week to go to a Target store in the suburbs. Build residences above the Target store and you might have a slam dunk development.

BTW, I'll admit that I like Target stores and think that it would be a bit of irony if a store that was an off-shoot of Hudson's returned to the site where it all began.