Get used to your crummy shopping center

From MarketWatch.com:

If there’s a crummy shopping center in your neighborhood, it will probably only get crummier....

“How many times have you passed something in your own neighborhood and asked ‘why don’t they do something about that eyesore?’” Don Wood [chief executive officer of Federal Realty Investment Trust] said ... on Wednesday. “Why do things stay crummy year in and year out, and why will they stay crummy year in and year out?”

The nation is increasingly dotted with unsightly boxes that used to be Circuit City, Borders and Best Buy stores. Nobody has written a book called “101 Uses For A Used Blockbuster.” And there are only so many churches, tanning salons and “We Buy Gold” stores to fill these deteriorating spaces...

“Redevelopment is more likely to happen in places that don’t really need it,” said Wood. “In places that are great already.”

Nevertheless, almost every city official in the nation wants to turn their local retail blights into lovely mixed-use monoliths with fancy stores and restaurants on ground floors and pricey lofts and condos upstairs.

This simply isn’t going to work without a high density of upper-income households, Wood said, and in places where it will work, the development process takes years....

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Link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/get-used-to-your-crummy-shopping-center-2012-06-22