Columbus is not the only city with plans to develop a struggling shopping mall, entering the same uncharted territory that several government entities across the nation are already exploring.
The city, along with its partners Columbus Regional Health and the Heritage Fund — The Community Foundation of Bartholomew County, is preparing to complete a $5.9 million purchase of FairOaks Mall in December, with the guidance of retired Cummins Inc. executive Tom Brosey, hired as a consultant to help the buyers through the purchase and planning process.
The projected new use for the property would be as a community recreational and sports tourism complex, with an indoor recreation center, health-related instructional spaces, indoor walking opportunities and city park department offices. Also proposed on the mall site is an air-supported dome facility that would create a location for indoor soccer, softball, volleyball and other sports.
Examples of other communities that are ahead of Columbus in redeveloping a struggling mall can be found in Ohio and Tennessee.
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Springfield, Ohio
In an small-world coincidence, as Brosey works on the first steps of FairOaks redevelopment in Columbus, a similar process is occurring in his hometown of Springfield, Ohio. There, county officials are near to closing a deal to sell the struggling Upper Valley Mall to a developer who has a similar idea to what is happening in Columbus — developing a sports tourism and recreational facility that will have a mix of some retail and possibly housing.
Tom Hale, Clark County (Ohio) director of community and economic development, explained that county officials worked to buy several property tracts on the mall acreage sequentially after two anchors, JC Penney and Macy’s, left in 2015, leaving only Sears and Foot Locker as large retail operations in the 1970s-era facility.
The county and the developer interested in buying the entire mall property is currently in discussions about purchasing the Sears property, Hale said.
Located northwest of downtown Springfield, Ohio, the Upper Valley Mall had been steadily declining when the county decided to step in and try to find a new use, Hale said. Since the closing on the sale with the developer is set to happen in the next few weeks, Hale said the county has kept details quiet about the transaction and the Springfield community is somewhat unsure of what the property might become in the future.
But Hale said he is confident that redevelopment of the property will enhance what he described as Springfield’s tremendous park system, recreational opportunities on nearby rivers and a wide array of activities in the area.
Clark County this year used its land bank to arrange a loan to purchase 40 acres at the mall site for slightly more than $3 million, after earlier purchasing the Macy’s property on the site for $200,000, bringing all the acreage except for the Sears property under county control.
One thing Hale made clear is that the mall is and will be an opening, functioning mall as the redevelopment moves forward. However, the county, and its redevelopment arm, have no interest in running a mall and decided instead to sell the property to a redeveloper, who already has an offer on the table.
“It is not easy to run a mall,” Hale said of what the county has learned so far as the sale prepares to close.
Hale anticipates the work to redevelop the facility will take 16 to 18 months, as the mall structure is in good shape but needs cosmetic updates that have been neglected over the years.
“The previous owners refused to reinvest in the property,” Hale said.
Among the possible uses for the property is a $44 million youth sports complex, suggested by the Springfield Chamber of Commerce after it released a study about the property in 2017.
Describing the beginning of the redevelopment process for the Upper Valley Mall as an eye-opening experience, Hale said county officials just felt that the mall needed to be rescued.
“It was not something we jumped into lightly,” he said of the work to get to the sale to the redeveloper. “This is by no means a done deal. I’m not sleeping well at night right now.”
But Hale is optimistic that once the sale closes, the mall property will have a new purpose and become a place the community can use and enjoy.
“We’re all in this together and it doesn’t do anyone any good if we let these malls fail,” he said.
Nashville, Tennessee
While Springfield, Ohio is in the beginning stages, the 1960s-era 100 Oaks Mall three miles south of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, has been transformed after several full closures in the 1980s and decades of decline. The two-story facility closed in 1983, reopening briefly in 1989 before closing again, and then was used as an outlet mall in the 1990s.
The mall was one of Nashville, Tennessee’s first air-conditioned, enclosed shopping centers, with original tenants including JC Penney, Woolco and Harvey’s.
Developers out of Texas who specialized in distressed retail recovery contacted Nashville, Tennessee architectural and design firm Gresham Smith about 13 years ago to investigate the quality of the mall buildings, zoning restrictions and general observations of the neighborhood, before purchasing the 60-acre property for about $50 million.
After the purchase, they returned to Gresham Smith for help in master planning and designing the facility, said Steve Johnson, Gresham Smith executive vice president for corporate and urban design. Several different visions emerged in that process, from tearing down the 900,000-square-foot facility to renovating all or it or only sections.
“In many cases, it make more sense to tear pieces of it down and reconfigure the space,” Johnson said. “These mall buildings are not architectural gems. They’re ugly as hell — gruesome warehouses for shopping,” he said, describing them as people-unfriendly buildings.
Options that were explored included an office park and converting the former anchor spaces to office spaces or reinventing the entire structure for retail. Target and Walmart had expressed interest in the idea of having multi-floor stores in the facility, he said.
But as Johnson put it, serendipity intervened in the form of Vanderbilt University and its medical center, just three miles away from the mall, which found itself overcrowded and needing more space for its medical clinics.
Real estate brokers were dispatched around Nashville to determine who was interested in the mall property, and for what purpose. Several uses quickly emerged, including corporations wanting space for back-of-house operations or for a regional operations center. Target and Walmart remained in the mix of possible tenants.
And then, Vanderbilt slowly stepped forward with an idea, Johnson said.
It would be to have Vanderbilt’s hospital system move all its clinics from a nearby medical center to the mall property, solving its overcrowding problems and offering an opportunity to upgrade patient experience and convenience.
Since Vanderbilt was also the first entity to sign a letter of intent for the project, the clinic idea moved to the head of the redevelopment line.
“From that point, the first phone call, to the first patient at 100 Oaks Mall, was three years,” Johnson said.
Gresham Smith was hired by the developers and by Vanderbilt to design the space, Johnson said, and delivered a design that was a blend of the medical offices with the retail currently in place. The idea was to make the clinic experience similar to checking into a hotel — with opportunities to shop for needed items or pick up a meal on site.
But first, everything in the mall was demolished, right down to the steel studs, Johnson said.
“And then we put a mall back in,” Johnson said, with a separate entrance for the clinics and room for retail surrounding the entryway into the medical space, along with retail lining the first floor where it was currently located. All the stairs and elevators were kept, but everything was brought up to code, and some new access points were added, he said.
“We wanted to be smart about using what we have,” Johnson said, adding that one thing the facility didn’t have, and needed, was windows.
New windows were installed throughout and skylights were refurbished, modernizing and freshening the build’s look.
A lot of money was spent on site work, including realigning intersections that no longer matched up, adding new sidewalks, bioswales and other environmental upgrades to manage stormwater.
The developers worked to bring in quality restaurants for outlying mall lots for more food service options, Johnson said. And every single retailer who was there before the project started, with the exception of stores such as JC Penney and HH Gregg which went out of business, ended up staying, and now are among the top 10 producers in their respective chains, he said.
Many of the first-floor retail, similar to a strip mall from the outside, upgraded their stores, from exterior to interior, to fit with the new look.
About 900 employees work at the clinics at the former mall, seeing 1,000 to 2,000 patients a day, he said. The developers have since sold the mall property to another operator — Vanderbilt has elected to keep a long-term lease on its 300,000 square feet of space — and they made a significant profit, Johnson said.
Janice Smith, vice president of Adult Ambulatory Services for Vanderbilt, described the project as tremendously successful.
There are now more than 20 medical clinics in the mall facility, with five more coming soon to bring the total closer to 30, she said.
Initially, some medical center employees hesitated when learning about the project, as the area where the 100 Oaks Mall was located had become less than desirable — and a little scary for employees, Smith said. But with the transformation, the entire area has been revitalized, including five new restaurants moving into the area, a new bank located in a former gas station property and a Walmart has also come to the area, she said.
“We took an area that was in a downward spiral, and didn’t just bring it to a level playing field, but we brought it higher,” she said.
Although the project is about a decade old, Johnson gets a call or two a week about the project as more communities start looking at their decaying mall and what the possibilities could be.
“Everybody wants to replicate it, but no one can do it on the scale of 100 Oaks,” Johnson said. “The more typical model is to parcel up the building and it’s usually a slower process, broken up over time.”
Johnson laughed when asked if what happened with 100 Oaks was sort of an episode of “Mall Flippers,” the idea of developers coming in to revamp hundreds of thousands of square footage with a big reveal at the end.
“Yes, it sort of is ‘Mall Flippers,’ only with a lot more zeros and a lot more risk,” he said.
Johnson credited Vanderbilt, the developers, Nashville officials and the retailers for working together and agreeing to hammer out any disagreements constructively to find solutions.
“The cooperative spirit and a desire to make it work is critical,” Johnson said of attempting a mall revamp. “You have to apply creativity and determine what is the best use for the facility.”
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- To learn more about the Clark County Land Reutilization Corp. and its Upper Valley Mall project, visit: clarkcountyohio.gov/Directory.aspx?did=33
- To learn more about the 100 Oaks Mall, visit the Gresham Smith website at: greshamsmith.com/project/vanderbilt-medical-center-one-hundred-oaks-mall/
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