Westminster Mall Slated For Major Infill Development

Following the successful examples of redevelopments the moribund Cinderella City mall in Englewood, the Villa Italia mall in Lakewood (now Belmar), and the Southglenn Mall (now "the Streets at SouthGlenn, a 70-acre outdoor shopping, entertainment and residential area"), the City of Westminster, a Denver, Colorado suburb, has acquired most of the property in the dying 108 acre Westminster Mall ("all but the Sears store, the Brunswick Zone and a small office building, all of which will remain open. The city also plans to keep the J.C. Penney store open.") near U.S. 36 and Sheridan Boulevard, which it plans to redevelop as a municipal downtown with "5 million square feet of offices, residences, restaurants and shops."

Westminster Mall opened in 1977 with 30 stores. Within 10 years, it became among the most popular malls in metro Denver, adding May D&F and Mervyn's in 1986, followed by J.C. Penney a year later. At its peak, the mall had about 300 stores, a far cry from the 15 that remain open today. The city and the current owner invested $10 million to renovate the mall in 2000-01.

These suburbs were frequently developed in the wake of the construction of the interstate highway system as bedroom community subdivisions, rather than as traditional municipalities with a central commercial and government downtown district, usually had strictly segregated residential and commercial zones, and saw little downside to sprawling parking lots that were distant from individual shops in retail district, a set of flaws that has left these communities without souls or character that left them vulnerable to New Urbanist land use approaches.

The transition has also been inspired by ongoing Red Queen hypothesis style conflicts between municipalities for a stronger tax base. 


The Gallagher Amendment, passed by voters in 1982 in Colorado and phased in over the next several years causes residential real estate to be taxed at a lower percentage of its value than non-residential real estate. Also, for a variety of reasons, many municipalities have tended to favor sales taxes over property taxes as a revenue source. This means that communities with predominantly residential real estate tax bases and little retail development must impose much higher property taxes to pay for the same municipal services as communities with substantial commercial, and in particular, retail development. The combination of higher property taxes and inferior municipal services, in turn, drives down housing values in these communities creating a vicious circle. Cities with office building developments can turn to head taxes and, at least, benefit from larger property tax bases, but the bedroom communities planned in the late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s have suffered in this local taxation environment.

Retail development, in contrast, through a combination of its non-residential property tax rates and the sales tax revenue that it generates typically raise far more in local taxes than the cost of the governmental services that they consume (and draw significant volumes of tax dollars from non-residents), subsidizing municipal services for residents of the municipality and making housing in those municipalities more attractive.

So, there is a strong incentive for local governments in Colorado to do everything possible in a never ending struggle to lure retail developments with robust sales from their neighbors, even if this creates excess retail capacity in the aggregate that leaves a suburban landscape littered with dead shopping malls that have failed to keep up with the competition. For example, in the case of the Westminster Mall, the City and County of Broomfield's new Flatiron Crossing Mall and thriving retail development in Boulder sucked much of the remaining life out of the older Westminister Mall.

Mixed use mall to downtown redevelopments try to mute the competition by not focusing so intensely on destination retail shops that can be picked away easily by new retail developments.  Instead, they favor of residential uses and governmental uses that are sure to stay put, and location sensitive retail options that are more likely to continue to be supported by local residents even if a new destination retail mall springs up. These developments also bet that the steady stream of traffic from residential and commercial and governmental users who are relatively wed to the location will make the area attractive to other retail uses on an ongoing basis.


These redevelopments try to boost the brand of the suburb's housing stock (and hence property values) by giving the municipality more of an identity, a more positive character and more definition.

This development joins a major new development planned for the Chatfield Reservoir area, the redevelopment of the old University Hospital complex on Colorado Boulevard, and a number of transit oriented developments along light rail lines that are heating up as the real estate industry in Denver starts to recover from the financial crisis. Insiders in the industry that I've spoken to discount these major projects as mere "dreams" until more concrete steps to implement them progress, but the planning for a wave of new real estate development in the Denver metropolitan area, much of it infill, is underway.

READ MORE - Westminster Mall Slated For Major Infill Development

Outsourcing The House

You probably don't have a cook, a butler, a live in maid, a stable boy, or a live in gardener. It isn't unlikely, however, sometimes pay someone to cook food for you and deliver it to your table, to mow your lawn, to clean your house, to plan your child's wedding, to press your shirts, or to maintain your car. The personal services industry employs many people, but today, those people are organized as independent contract small business people who provide the same service to many customers, rather than as household servants.

Suppose that you take that idea one step further. Suppose that in addition to outsourcing the work of people who work in your house, you outsource the house as well. We're already seeing this happen, and the trend is likely to continue.

Outsourcing the Workshop, Shed, Basement and Attic

One of the first instances of outsourcing household space was the safety deposit box which is a substitute for a household safe.

Many gun clubs offer safe storage of firearms intended for hunting or target shooting or as collector's items, away from your home, an increasingly relevant consideration in an area where many dorms and public housing don't permit them, and where prudence and state and local laws and ordinances require safe storage of firearms or impose liability for failure to safely store firearms. This obviously doesn't make sense for a firearm kept to defend one's home against intruders, but many firearms aren't intended for that purpose and many people have multiple firearms and don't need all of them to be in their home at once.

There is a whole industry that sells storage units to people who lack basements or sheds or attics or unused closets to hold their infrequently used stuff. These used to be limited to glorified garages (and many offer RV parking as well), but now there are climate controlled storage units and units specially designed to handle special contents like wine collections. Who hasn't seen one of the "PODS" parked in front of someone's house to be filled, taken away, and then retrieved (possible at a new and different house) later? What if there were a business that had mini-PODS that were tucked away with your out of season clothes that sent you a reminder card at a date you set when you thought you might want them again?

There are already several off site file storage companies, and "cloud computing" which stores data and computer program resources at some remote Internet accessible location is becoming commonplace, even for household users.

Down the road from my office is a place that rents workshops and studios for people who don't have their own.

Reading, Office Space and Study Space

Many new developments have community mailboxes rather than mailboxes attached to individual houses. One could imagine a neighborhood "reading room" that would be sort of a mini-library, with a full compliment of newspaper and magazine subscriptions, coffee and teapots, and a small stash of trashy reading - many campgrounds across the American West have that kind of space.

My own office, while fairly conventional, includes use of a break room, reception services, copying machines and scanners, fax machines, a lobby and conference rooms that are shared by the suite, and if I wanted to have a home office while not having real estate nice enough to meet with clients, I could arrange to have a "virtual office" with all of the services except the room devoted exclusive to me - those would be available on a reservation basis for a certain number of hours a month. Most virtual offices are oriented towards small businesses (and this also avoids some of the hassle of trying to take a home office deduction for tax purposes).

One can imagine a virtual office oriented towards students instead. More of more neighborhood library branches now have study rooms and community rooms where people might otherwise have gathered in a living room or large home office, that receive heavy use. University libraries have long had study carrels, but as studying and research become divorced from physical books, it wouldn't be too surprising to see a place that offered study carrel rentals by the semester together with a few hours a month of group study rooms time minus the library in the future. The neighborhood study rooms could have tutors on staff to help answer questions, actively encourage the formation of homework groups and writer's critique groups, have small stores that sold school supplies and snacks, and offered Internet access and affordable subscriptions to academic journal databases or virtual libraries. These kind of spaces might be particularly attractive to students in online high school or college programs, and to non-traditional students who need to get away from a chaos of a home full of children and all sorts of household activities and attention demands. Perhaps these kinds of centers could be natural outgrowths of branch college campuses, community colleges, or franchised tutoring businesses.

Entertaining

The outsourcing of the guest room and entertaining areas has probably not yet run its course.

Once upon a time, birthday party's at home were very common; now there is a whole industry built on creating usually indoor "play spaces" for children's parties complete with separate rooms for eating cake and opening presents on one hand, and racing around having fun on the other.

Coffee shops and bars aren't just places where you buy coffee and beer, they are to a great extent outsourced parlors and living rooms.

Many restaurants offer private rooms for meal gatherings.

While there have been hotels where out of town guests can be housed, and where one can rent rooms for events, this really hasn't penetrated the "house outsourcing" market yet. When I was in law school, a lived for a year in the law school dormitories called the "law club." This had, in addition to a sharing dining area, a mail room, and a shared recreation area, a suite of guest rooms where visiting friends and family could stay. This would be a natural addition to a subdivision of not so big houses, alleviating the anxiety of people who feel the need to own a house based on their peak need, rather than their usual need. For example, a senior citizen's development might be much more attractive if residents knew there were places in the complex where their children and grandchildren could stay on holiday visits. In existing neighborhoods, converting an existing property into a guest house or bed and breakfast for out of town family and household guests might offer more intimacy and walkable access to your host's home than sending guests off to a Holiday Inn or Motel 6, and thus be a more socially acceptable option for space constrained families. In fact, a number of new high rise developments combine condominiums and hotel rooms in the same building.

There is also a small but growing niche of places where one can entertain guests and hold parties that are separate from full fledged hotels oriented towards business conferences and large weddings where many guests are staying overnight, particularly as fewer people have natural and easy access to church halls, civic club halls and country clubs. Some condo complexes and apartment buildings in Denver have them. Since one of the factors that often drive people to purchase large houses is the desire to be able to hold large parties a few times a year, the availability of respectable entertaining venues, perhaps as part of a homeowner's association, perhaps as part of a "virtual office" or "time share" style subscription service, or perhaps through simple rentals, might make it more palatable for people who want to hold occasional big parties to live in smaller houses.

A Japanese style innovation that we might see is some variation on the rented karaoke room. While many American cities have karakoke bars where you can belt out your favorite tune in front of a large room full of strangers, fewer have private rooms where you and a half dozen of your friends can do that in greater privacy. And, similar sized entertainment rooms, outfitted a deluxe home theaters or multi-player deluxe videogaming rooms (with media rentals included and concession service available), for example, might also be hits.

The Yard, Workshop and Garden

Next to my children's school is a community garden where people with little or no lawn of their own can grow vegetables or flowers in a little plot down the road.

The "patio home" concept where single family homes share a communal front yard tended by a homeowner's association is also increasingly common. Some resort communities have private parks and beaches to provide residents with the benefits of a place to throw the kind of parties that one would ordinarily throw in your back yard in a single family house with a beach without the expense and waste of having one for every property when most go unused most of the time. The concept of urban residential neighborhoods like my own Washington Park is that each homeowner has a tiny lot, but in exchange the neighborhood has a premier park that everyone shares.

Rather than having a home gym, people join neighborhood health clubs or go to neighborhood recreation centers (incidentally, some even have showers that you can use when you have plumbing problems). Many homeowner's associations and condominium complexes have small community pools and exercise rooms.

What about the dog house? Lots of people in urban areas live in places that don't permit pets, but have or want pets. There are kennels, of course, but those are expensive and a lot of the cost goes into staff to provide care for the pets while their owners are absent. What if there were a kennel-like structure with a nice dog park within a short walk from a no-dogs apartment complex? Dog lovers could keep their dog there, talk their dog on daily walks, feed their dog themselves, and perhaps the structure would even have little rooms a bit like library study rooms where you could relax, watch TV, read a book, or have a coffee in the company of your dog, before or after work. It wouldn't be the same as having your dog in your own home, but it would be the next best thing. Similar arrangements already exist for people who live in the city but want to have horses.

The Sick Rooms

It isn't uncommon for someone who lives in a house without a ground floor bedroom or bathroom to experience a short term injury or illness that limits their ability to move around the house. Perhaps a broken leg, perhaps simply being very weak for a while.

Sometimes, a stay at home parent needs to recover from surgery or being sick or is pregnant and on bedrest, and doesn't need any special caretakers or hospital equipment, but does need to be genuinely relieved from the temptation to do any household chores or childcare while resting and recovering.

Sometimes, someone learns that they have an infectious disease, TB for example, and needs to stay away from a vulnerable elderly person or infant or other person with a weak immune system. Perhaps a child visiting frail grandparents comes down with the measles on Christmas vacation.

These conditions may all be ones where family members and friends and perhaps daily or less frequent nurse visits are all that one needs as caretakers, but staying at home is not a great option, and a hospital stay would be absurdly expensive for such a minor condition. It would be a shorter term alternative to an assisted living facilty or senior housing complex.

There are motels near most hospitals with a multistate draw (e.g. Mayo Clinic and National Jewish) that cater to this medically needy customers, but few closer to home that market themselves and are designed to meet this need niche.

This might be a niche for short term recovery room suites, a bit likely weekly motels but with the immobile and ill who need rooms that are accessable and antisceptic on short notice in mind. There might be room service available and a referral service for "home nursing" services.

Of course, hospices and nursing homes have already been brought into use for high intensity need cases.

Sharing Toys and Tools

The idea of outsourcing things that you need infrequently to avoid having to buy things based on "peak use" has applications in households beyond the house as well. Lots of people buy boats, ATVs, RVs, motorcycles, pickup trucks, cars with more seating capacity than most families usually need, specialty tools, snowmobiles, and the like that they may only use a few days or weeks a year. But, those things take space to store, often need to be maintained every year even if you don't use them much, and spend a lot of time sitting idle. Rental options exist, but they can be pricey because they are extracting large profit margins from people who don't regularly use those items, are in a place where their plans demand that they have them, and have only a choice between buying or renting. Rental operations also have a fairly high risk that the items will be stolen or damaged, because the renters are engaged in one time transactions and have no emotional stake in taking care of the equipment.

But, what if you were part of a "recreational toys and household tools co-op" that provided members with use of these items at cost (be offering annual rebates if there were any profits, in proportion to patronage), had a substantial deposit and credit check up front to make individual transactions for members go more quickly, trusted members a little more so that they would need less paid employee or volunteer services, and turned the relationship between the firm renting the stuff and the person renting it into a longer term, more warm and fuzzy one (what they call in the literature the "warm glow"). What if the co-op had multiple locations and you could get what you needed at one location and drop it off at another?

Denver's bike rental program is an example of the concept in practice.

Limits To The Trend

We haven't, and probably never will, go as far as some societies in this direction.

For example, public baths, while common in some parts of the world and developed at a time when many homes lacked them, are unlikely to make a comeback. The public Laundromat while still in existence is also fading away with increasing affluence and the appearance of affordable laundry machines that both wash and dry clothes further reduces the space constraints involved.

Sex hotels and capsule hotels also seem unlikely to come to a place near you anytime soon. But, the house outsourcing trend surely isn't entirely played out either.

READ MORE - Outsourcing The House

How Will We Use Vacant Public Space?

Empty Public Space Abounds

Denver is littered with grand old churches that are empty or have Congregations of a few dozen in edifices built for many hundreds.

The Denver Public Schools has far more space in schools than it has students, a few neighborhoods have overcrowding (like Green Valley Ranch and Stapleton) while other neighborhoods have a particularly great excess of empty school space. My neighborhood has the old Beyer's School (once home to Denver School of the Arts which relocated to fill part of an abandoned North Campus of the Universty of Denver, the rest of which was filled with Johnson and Wales University) looming over it and fervantly seeks to make it the home of a new Denver School of Science and Technology Charter School.

As the volume of mail sent via the postal service declines in favor of e-mail, one by one, post offices are going to sit vacant. Budget cuts have left communities like Aurora and Colorado Springs, and even Denver, unwilling or unable to keep recreation centers open, leaving more public spaces vacant. As multiplexes replace humbler theaters, the old theaters have had to find new uses. Dead malls lurch quietly. And, the declining rolls of service clubs from the Masons to the Eagles chronicled most famously by Robert Putnam continue to dwindle, their lodges and halls sit underused or empty. Converting old public spaces into private ones is a growth industry.

Taken together there is a lot of empty public space.

New Uses

Sometimes, old churches and public spaces become lofts. S. Broadway has a church converted to lofts at about 1st Street, University Boulevard has another church converted to a residence at about 5th Street, 10th Street in Congress Park features an old fire station converted to residences. There is an old school converted to residences near Old South Gaylord in Washington Park. The home can be delightful, but it is also a shame to see public space become private.

The old late night post office and mail sorting facility in LoDo was replaced by a shiny new, eco-friendly EPA building. In my home town, Oxford, Ohio, an old post office became a municipal court.

Train stations are seeing a renaissance, ironically, as train stations, mostly supporting metro area transit rather than intercity rail, although rejections of federal high speed rail funds in Ohio and Wisconsin, and indifference towards them in New Jersey and Florida, makes Colorado's hopes of securing some of these funds look like less of a pipe dream. Denver's Union Station is already well in the process to be restored to glory as a transportation hub (even as the Greyhound Station looks for a new home).

The dead malls at Cinderella City (in Englewood, Colorado) and Villa Italia (in Lakewood, Colorado) were razed and replaced with mixed use neighborhoods, in the case of Cinderella City, complete with a new city hall and library.

Movie theaters have found mixed dispositions. Some, like the Esquire and Mayan have been subdivided into multiscreen art house theaters. One at S. Colorado Boulevard and Alameda in Glendale became a gym. One on S. Broadway was converted into a climbing gym. Several have been converted into venues for live rock band performances. One on Federal Boulevard was converted into a missionary megachurch.

Libraries are beautiful public spaces, but I can't think off hand of what has become of any of them, despite the fact that I know some that have closed fairly recently, and others that are at grave risk of closing.

An old grocery store, converted to a church, near East High School, originally slated to become a new Central Denver Recreation Center, has wound up for the time being, as a community garden and dog park instead. Across the street, an old live theater has been converted into a book store, record store and restaurants, as well as a movie theater that died and since has been reborn with the Denver Film Society relocating there from Tivoloi on the Denver's Auraria campus.

Challenges To Come

This, of course, only scratches the surface of the general issue of finding new uses for no longer needed properties. Greater Denver has a variety of spaces that need repurposing.

Old Saint Luke's Hospital has now become Post Properties in the rechristened Uptown, and Old Elitch Gardens has become a residential development (which defeated efforts to have a Wal-Mart put in their neighborhood, only to have one spring up ten blocks down the road in Lakeside). The old Children's Hospital Campus is reportedly going to be the home for a new Saint Joseph's hospital, because its existing tower has fire code issues.

But, the disposition of the old University Hospital, abandoned in part of the effort to remake the old Fitzsimmon's military base and turned over to a redevelopment company, is not yet clear. In a year or two when Saint Anthony's Hospital off Colfax in Northwest Denver relocates into its under construction new facility, there will be yet another big hole for Denver to fill in a space where the impetus for new development has not been as vigorous.

A defunct public school which has passed from one speculative investor group to another in the Golden Triangle remains vacant. Ironically, the neighorhood has transformed enough that it could really use a school again, although that use for the space seems unlikely.

Denver also has its brownfields. The financial crisis stalled the redevelopment of the Old Gates Rubber Plant, but sooner or later, it will have to find a new use. I know of a couple of families who have turned old industrial buildings in North Denver into residences and art studios. Between Sante Fe and Kalamath a few blocks North of Alameda, old industrial properties have been repurposed to be a micro-distillery and a Hispanic cultural center. Another old public building near the Auraria campus off Colfax was also repurposed to be a cultural center. Perhaps this trend will continue.

The Coming Inversion Of Center And Fringe

Maybe Denver proper will be O.K.

Infill construction has continued steadily while suburban Denver construction came to a screeching halt. The rising price of gas, increased dissatisfaction with long commutes, and increasing public faith in the Denver Public Schools, represented most recently by a remarkable surge in middle school enrollments may fuel an influx of new people to the central city. For most of history from the Middle Ages until the construction of street cars, central cities were considered more desireable than the urban fringe. Street cars created street car suburbs, like Washington Park. Interstate highways pushed attractive housing even further away from the core for a generation or two. But, the trend seems to be reversing itself. It may be only a matter of time before the metro area's ghettos are in Highland's Ranch instead of already gentrifying Five Points.

READ MORE - How Will We Use Vacant Public Space?