By RICHARD F. MUHLEBACH Kennedy-Wilson Properties

Prior to the malling of America, people shopped downtown and in their neighborhood.

Each neighborhood had a retail section several blocks long lined with a five-and-dime store, junior department stores, millinery stores, furniture and appliance stores, soft goods retailers and a couple of single screen theatres. Corner grocery stores, often adjacent to a meat market, were scattered through the neighborhood for daily shopping needs. The neighborhood provided most of the shopping needs of the residents and downtown shopping was for special occasions.

The advent of the comfortable, exciting climate controlled malls, multi-screen theatres, the supermarket anchored strip centers and the bankruptcy of many of the old-time retailers, along with the closing of the small neighborhood JC Penney, Sears and Montgomery Wards stores, combined "to kill off" much of the traditional neighborhood retailing.

But today urban and neighborhood retailing is making a comeback. People are rediscovering urban living and the benefits of being part of a neighborhood. New multilevel urban retail projects are replacing older, obsolete neighborhood buildings. These developments are a major neighborhood customer draw and help revitalize street front retailing.

Community benefits

Multilevel urban retail projects provide several benefits to the community. They provide hundreds of neighborhood jobs. They significantly increase the real estate and sales taxes the communities collect on these sites. Possibly the biggest benefit is they recreate a time past when neighborhoods were part of a person’s life.

Recently in Seattle three multilevel urban projects have been developed, each anchored with a supermarket. A fourth multilevel retail project that will be a power center, anchored by Target and Best Buy, is under construction. The first two projects were developed in the Queen Anne and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. The most recent multilevel urban retail projects, Roosevelt Square and Northgate North, provide an interesting contrast between the rehab of a tired and obsolete retail building into a multilevel urban retail project anchored by a Whole Foods and a ground up four-level power center anchored by Target with eight levels of parking.

Developing the neighborhood site

The urban neighborhood site presents design and construction challenges not encountered developing the typical suburban shopping center site. Since urban land is expensive and the site has design and construction constraints, the cost of the development will be higher, thus the developer’s risk is greater than developing the typical suburban anchored strip center.

The construction challenges and the multilevel building with below- and above-grade parking add to the cost of the project, increasing the rental rates necessary to economically justify the development and the timeline to building the project. Prospective tenants must be flexible in designing their stores to fit the smaller sites and the project’s development constraints.

Parking, a critical component of all shopping centers, needs to include multi-parking decks.

Roosevelt Square

Roosevelt Square, developed by TRF Pacific, is a three-level urban retail redevelopment in the heart of an older and well-established neighborhood in Seattle. Retailers are on the ground floor and the second level while the parking is in three areas: one level below grade, surface parking on a lot across the street and on the second level. Access to the parking is from two streets.

Roosevelt Square is anchored by the first Whole Foods in the Northwest, Bartell Drugs, a local, 100-year-old chain operated by the grandson of the founder, and Dania Furniture store. The project is a rehab of an 80-year-old, two-level corner building once occupied by Sears and the development of two new adjacent structures. An unusual construction challenge was keeping the furniture store in the older building open during the redevelopment of the building.

A retailer occupying a building that is being renovated is a challenge, but a furniture store with deliveries and customer pick up of large items presents additional challenges. Keeping the furniture store open during construction required cutting a hole in the floor and installing a temporary lift to move furniture in and out of the store for customer pick up since its delivery and pick up area was eliminated.

The project from concept to complete lease-up will take approximately five years. During the design phase it was decided not to add several levels of residential units on top of the garage. Later, the developer had second thoughts, but the project was too far along to change the design and add a residential component.

Often the slope of the site plays an integral role in the design of the project. Roosevelt Square’s site slopes from west to east creating a grade change that provides easy access to the second-level shops and parking area.

Supermarkets have extensive mechanical and electrical requirements to service their refrigeration equipment. In a typical on-grade strip center, a hole is dug to run these lines, but when parking is below the store adequate clearance must be provided for the vehicles while running the lines along the ceiling of the parking garage.

Parking for supermarkets in a typical strip center is in front of the store. In a multilevel urban retail project, parking is below grade and at least one level above grade. At Roosevelt Square, Whole Foods transports groceries free of charge to the trunks of the shoppers’ cars by a conveyor belt to the underground parking level with an attendant placing the groceries in the customer’s automobile.

Touchstone Corporation of Seattle and Orix are developing Northgate North, a 324,000 square foot steel and concrete four-story retail power center with eight levels of parking. This multilevel power center is directly across the street from Northgate Mall, the first mall in America. These two retail developments are just a block from Interstate 5 in a high-density and established neighborhood.

Northgate North is anchored by Target and Best Buy, while Northgate Mall is the typical multi-department store anchored enclosed mall. The development alternatives for this site included a power center, an entertainment center, and an office building. When Target, which had been looking for a site in the area for several years, committed to the project, it validated and shaped the project into a power center.

There were two primary challenges to developing a multilevel power center in this area. The first was to assemble a site of sufficient size to develop a center anchored by a 148,000 square foot Target.

It took Touchstone one and a half years to assemble the seven contiguous lots totaling four acres. Four of the lots were occupied by residential or commercial buildings. The tenants in the buildings were kept in place while the project went through the entitlement process and obtained all the required permits. The developer would not close on the lots until all the permits were obtained. Since the land was expensive it was not economically feasible to develop a typical 40,000 square foot retail building with surface parking.

The second challenge was meeting the standards of the Design and Review Board and the Northgate Comprehensive Plan. During three meetings with the city and meetings with neighborhood groups, the design and shape of the building was adjusted. The city and community groups helped shape the project, which included ground floor display windows, a glass stair tower at the corner of Northgate Way and Fifth, a ribbon of retailing along the east and south edges of the referenced corner, a plaza, extra-large sidewalks 19 feet wide along Northgate Way and a "green street" with additional landscaping to buffer the project on one side from the residents across the street. These additions to the project made it more neighborhood friendly and encourage pedestrian traffic to the project.

Anchor tenants in a multilevel urban project must be flexible with their store design to adjust to the site, layout and design of the project. They are accustomed to having their store on one level on grade in the middle of a sea of asphalt providing convenient parking and direct access into their store. Target officials made the site work for them by developing a two-level store.

The project has four levels of retailing with eight levels of parking. The retail building has 19-foot ceiling heights while the garage has 9 1/2-foot ceiling heights. This allows for every retail level to enter a parking level and every other parking level to enter a retail level.

One of the unique and necessary features of the eight-level garage, which was a requirement of Target, is two speed ramps that go directly from the ground floor to the top of the parking garage. This eliminates the need to wind, floor by floor, all the way up to the top of the garage and then back down.

Signage is an integral part of retailing and was designed to be a part of Northgate North, not an uncoordinated collection of non-matching tenants’ signs.

Neighborhood involvement

Each of these projects, Roosevelt Square and Northgate North, required the scrutiny and cooperation of the city of Seattle and neighborhood groups. These groups did not lower their standards but were understanding of the need to be flexible to ensure that the neighborhoods received the benefits these unique retail developments create by allowing these projects to have the opportunity to be economically viable.

One of the critical elements of a successful multilevel urban retail project is everyone working toward a common goal along with the acceptance by the neighborhood and the cooperation of the city. The Roosevelt Square development team of TRF Pacific, Kidder, Mathews & Segner, Abbott Construction, Lance Mueller & Associates, Whole Foods and Bartell, and the Northgate North team of Orix, Touchstone Corporation, NBBJ, Lease Crutcher Lewis, Seattle Pacific Realty, Target and Best Buy, along with the city of Seattle and many neighborhood groups, have designed and shaped two modern retail developments that are redefining neighborhood retailing.

Many of the future projects will include a residential component on top of the parking decks. The residential units will appeal to those who prefer the hustle and bustle of urban living where life is focused on neighborhood activities that were common a generation ago. Though many of these neighborhoods do not have the corner grocery stores and five-and-dime stores of the 50s, they have neighborhood retailing with state-of-the-art retail developments and modern stores.

Urban developers and retailers are taking us back to the future, a time when people knew their neighbors and lived in their neighborhoods.