Occasionally, one of our readers will ask us questions concerning the services we provide. In brief, we are marketplace crafters in the sense that we define a market opportunity and then craft a built environment to answer the needs of merchants, restaurants, entertainment venues and most importantly the consumer. On the surface, it may appear to the more casual reader that we are something between architects and real estate developers. While we posses many of the same skills, our core competency is our ability to interpret trends both current and future in contemporary culture and translate those into the marketplace. As such, we do extensive market research, create multi retail marketplace concepts, direct the design execution and recruit merchants.

In the next several months, we will begin to share more of the innovations we are bringing to the marketplace. As such, our primary clients obviously include shopping center and mall owners but the depth of our knowledge really comes from pioneering work in resort hotels, urban districts, national parks, tourist destinations and mixed-use developments. We are excited about these diverse laboratories and will share with our community the grass roots trends we see developing around the world.
We are currently working on a project in Seoul Korea, another in Hanoi Vietnam, two projects in southern India, a 5,000 acre new town on the US Atlantic Coast, redevelopment of Atlanta’s Peachtree Center, and the revitalization of Louisville’s East Market district. From this base we are researching and exploring the introduction of dynamic new markets for the 21st century. Examples include a movable marketplace that travels from city to city and a dynamic new direct to the consumer fashion initiative. Certain aspects of these new efforts will be tested and explored in expanded versions of MyVillageSolution.com next spring. Ideally, the real genesis of these new marketplaces will come from an international community of visitors to our site who freely share ideas for the creation of the next marketplace, which may just as easily show up in Hyderabad or Tianjin as in Miami or Los Angeles.

Concept plan of how the Service Tanks block could one day be redeveloped

Faced with the uncertain future of its current location in the path of the planned Spaghetti Junction expansion and looking for room to expand, Creation Gardens, a local distributor of wholesale produce and gourmet foods, plans to relocate its facilities into the heart of the East Market Street – Nulu corridor.

Creation Gardens owners Ron and Mollie Turnier have placed three parcels on East Market between Clay and Shelby Streets under contract and plan to build a state-of-the-art retail and commercial distribution center on the corner of Market and Shelby Streets. The land is currently occupied by the Neurath & Underwood Funeral Home and a gravel lot used to store tanks for the adjacent Service Welding and Machine business which will to continue to operate at its current location.

Plans call for a new 27,000 square foot facility that will offer fresh produce, gourmet food products, baked goods, meats, seafood, and chicken. The market will be open to wholesale buyers and the general public. About 17,000 square feet will house a “fresh-to-the-chef” distribution center and the remaining 10,000 square feet will contain a market open to the public. Also planned is a chef member’s lounge and resource library and a new restaurant could also be located at the facility.

The site of Creation Gardens’ expansion was once a food market years ago. First Link Supermarket, now located on East Liberty Street at Jackson Street, once operated a grocery store on the corner.  Now, the corner and surrounding region are gaining a reputation as a food hot-spot in Louisville again.

Besides the Creation Gardens announcement, Gill Holland and a group of investors plan a public market across the street stretching to Jefferson Street and a restaurant row is already well established. Ron Turnier tells us that he hopes to create a “forward looking” building that respects the neighborhood’s existing cityscape. He has brought K. Norman Berry Architects of West Main Street to assist with the design.  Turnier says he’s been meeting with the architects frequently to work out the final design challenges such as loading dock access to the facility.

Creation Gardens will have a booth at this weekend’s Nulu East Market Festival to share his ideas with the public and display new renderings of the facility.

Creation Gardens is working with Village Solutions, a real estate consulting firm based in Anchorage, to help with the success of the project. President of Village Solutions Rick Hill says he has worked with Service Welding and Machine Company owners Carl and Earl Greer to develop a concept plan demonstrating how their entire site, nearly three-quarters of the block, could one day be redeveloped. (See Village Solutions’ rendering above.)

Rick Hill explains that while Service Tanks will continue to operate at its current site for now, some day the property will be redeveloped into a thriving pedestrian environment. The rendering isn’t meant to suggest what will eventually be built, but is “a long-term vision of what could happen one day.” Hill says the Greer’s have an excellent urban sensibility and want to see the site used to its fullest potential including preservation of existing historic structures and the Billy Goat Strut alley corridor. There’s currently no timeline for redeveloping the rest of the block.

Ron Turnier expects to attract over 200 chefs a week to the new Creation Gardens facility and anticipates that to draw the public as well. ”Our new facility will be the shop where the chef’s shop and will be unlike any other market in the region,” Turnier explains. Creation Gardens will certainly help to anchor the East Market corridor as a center for food and art all the while providing for a grander long-term vision that could spread waves of redevelopment into surrounding properties and blocks. (Be sure to check out their booth at the Nulu Festival Saturday.)

Bellegrove Executive Campus Rendering

There’s more development activity set for downtown Anchorage, which has been slowly transforming itself over the last couple of years. This time, Village Solutions plans to convert two historic structures and build several new buildings in an effort to create a unique office development centered around a formal English courtyard. The property once belonged to Belleview Home, but was recently sold for redevelopment.

Village Solutions plans to eventually build three new Jeffersonian-style structures to match the historic architecture, anchored by Boone Hall, the original girl’s dormitory at Bellwood. The development, dubbed Bellegrove strives to preserve and protect the environment and create an abundance of green space and gardens. Developer Rick Hill envisions 5 buildings in a botanical garden setting with groves of 100 year old trees all around. Already, a creative center is finishing up construction and a reproduction facility for large-format graphics and printing is planned.

Plans call for leaving much of the 4.5 acre site open. A large “outdoor living room” will link the new structures, that, when complete, could encompass around 22,000 square feet. The site could have supported more than double the space under conventional development standards, but Hill wanted to create a special project for the historic neighborhood. He studied the original layout of the buildings to maintain a perceived master plan following Olmsted principles.
Boone Hall, built in the 1930s, has an elaborate Greek-revival facade, and a twin two-story building will be built to its side to create formal symmetry on site and reinforce a perspective toward the original Bellewood laundry facility which is also being renovated. Bellegrove will feature high-quality materials in its renovation and new construction including copper gutters and slate roofs. Rick Hill noted that the new construction will not mimick the old, but be held to the same high standards.

Bellegrove Executive Campus Site Plan

The project aims to be a model in handling rainwater runoff. Throughout the site, pervious brick paving will allow water to seep back into the ground, away from storm sewers. The remaining water runoff will be channeled into a wildflower and prairie grass garden with a gazebo. Hill speculates that this garden will be the largest prototype rain garden in the region and plans teaching classes where rainwater design issues will be discussed.

The initial phases of the project are expected to open by Derby this year, and a series of community events are planned around its opening. New construction will take place over time as the markets allow and office suites are for sale and lease. Spaces range from large suites to small “craftsmen cottages.” Rick Hill sees other development in Anchorage, most notably the new commercial district build by John Schnatter’s Evergreen Real Estate, as reinforcing a greater whole. The nearby walking trails and cafes will only benefit his project.

We’re glad the project reuses the historic structures and offers the potential for neighbors to work close to home. Combined with other development in the area, Anchorage is quickly becoming a walkable neighborhood, even with its park-like, rural nature. Emphasis of the formal English garden and rain gardens as a project focal point should also help highlight small scale methods of diverting rainwater runoff from our overwhelmed sewer system.

The owners of Creation Gardens, a distributor of produce to restaurants and the food-service industry, plans to move to a new site and expand their business.

Ron and Mollie Turnier have signed contracts to purchase about two acres of property on the northwest corner of Market and Shelby streets, including the Neurath & Underwood Funeral Home.

They plan to build a retail and commercial distribution center, featuring a 27,000 square foot building. It would include a 17,000-square-foot, regional fresh-food and produce distribution center primarily for commercial customers and a 10,000-square-foot market open to the public.

In an interview, Ron Turnier said that he hopes to have the new Creation Gardens open in about a year. He declined to say how much he expects to spend to acquire the land, or to invest in the development. He said that the design of the project is not final.

Turnier, who is president of Creation Gardens, projected that the facility will attract over 200 chefs a week, many of whom regularly shop at his current location at 609 E. Main. The new location will include a lounge for member chefs and a resource library.

The land that the Turniers have under contract includes a large vacant lot fronting on Market owned by Service Welding & Machine Co., which will continue to operate its present site on East Main.

Rick Hill, who heads Village Solutions Co., a real-estate strategies and consulting firm working with the Turniers, said the Neurath & Underwood Funeral Home and its carriage house will be renovated and redeveloped with new uses, perhaps as one or more restaurants or other food-related businesses.

The staff of the funeral home referred questions to owner John Bruington. He said in a phone interview that he isn’t sure whether the funeral home will close, or relocate. He said it opened in 1904; he bought it in 2001.

The Turniers, who bought Creation Gardens in 1997, said the Main Street property is targeted for acquisition by the state in connection with the Ohio River Bridges Project and the planned reconstruction of Spaghetti Junction.

The Creation Gardens plans are being unveiled in conjunction with the NuLu Festival this weekend, which uses a new name being promoted by some developers for the area generally bounded by Jefferson, Washington and Campbell streets and I-65.

The proliferation of this myth falls right into the lap of an uninformed media which appears to want to take a position of supporting growth or showing that an area is over stored with retail space.  This is because of the rapid expansion of power centers in the 1990s; lifestyle centers after 2000; and free standing mega stores in recent years have all contributed to a crowded retail landscape.  Therefore, in an attempt by the media to quantify the amount of retail space and to compare the density of retail in one market to another, retail space per capita has been used as a common indicator.  However, our analysis concludes that these types of numbers are among the most misquoted and misunderstood data points in the analysis of retail real estate.  The problem is like the old joke – “one lies and the other swears to it”.  In this case, retail space per capita is the number that is often, if not almost always, reported inaccurately and then the next article repeats it all over again and before you know it, you have a fact that everyone relies on.  But, when comparing vastly different markets and using so called national averages one may end up with nothing more than a comparison of apples to oranges.

The most commonly used database on retail space comes from The National Research Bureau (NRB); however, they only include shopping centers and not the total of all retail space. Consequently, shopping center data has often been incorrectly used as a total for all retail space and then compared to the local population to generate a per capita number.  In brief, the retail space per capita that is often quoted is actually shopping center space and not retail space.

This type of comparison works well as a barometer across the United States, but it is highly inconsistent when using it as a source of retail density in major urban areas that have a large amount of retail not located in shopping centers.

According to many, NRB[1] is the premier provider of retail real estate information in the U.S.  Its database of information contains information on over 40,500 shopping centers which is the most comprehensive and detailed information source on U.S. retail properties available. Likewise, NRB has prepared the Shopping Center Census for the past 20 years, which is published by the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and by the U.S. Department of Commerce / U.S. Census Bureau in Statistical Abstracts of the United States.  The NRB census is widely considered the authoritative source to calculate the retail area per capita.  While the NRB is an excellent source for shopping center gross leasable areas (GLA), it is insufficient when analyzing per capita GLA for urban areas for a number of reasons.

The retail GLA per capita of the United States is estimated to be in the 22 to 25 square feet of retail space for every man, woman and child. However as mentioned previously, the data only includes shopping centers above a minimum threshold.  In this context a shopping center is defined as single develop which has been planned and built as a dedicated unit with its own parking.  Conversely, the all free standing stores, small shopping centers and urban sidewalk facing retail is generally excluded in the NRB statistics.  Therefore, in highly concentrated urban areas where a large portion of the retail is free standing, the GLA per capita is significantly understated. For example, New York City has one of the lowest GLA per capita rates in the nation at approximately 8.

Another source used to cite total GLA is the Retail Tenant Directory.  Although this includes free standing retail, it only considers the 5,400 largest chains[2].  Therefore, it also leaves out a large amount of retail which skews the GLA per capita.  Therefore, when total “Retail Space” is calculated the numbers jump dramatically.  As an example the total US Retail Space per capita in 2008 was 41.5.  Similarly, when you consider the total retail space in major metro areas (shopping centers and free standing stores) the real per capita calculations for retail space is much more consistent with the national average.

For example, as of 2003, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach region had 42.9 sq ft per capital of total retail vs. a national average 39.8[3].  Based on this information, Miami’s Retail Space exceeds that of the national average.  Therefore, retail GLA per capita grossly misrepresents the market since most reports cite the NRB as their source which only includes shopping center retail.

It should be noted that Florida is widely considered to have one of the highest GLAs per capita in the nation with Fort Meyers, Fort Walton Beach, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm, Orlando and Melbourne all  being ranked in the top 25 and having a GLA per capita in excess of 25.  But again you cannot take these numbers at face value.  As we all know Florida is one of the fastest growing states in the US.  Outside of Miami, the largest percentage of retail in the state is located in strip centers built over the last 35 years and not in downtown’s.

To get a better handle on the subject, we spoke with ICSC who confirmed that the retail GLA per capita for the U.S. is 20, but it only takes into account shopping centers. As stated early this massively understates the retail GLA per capita of urban areas where the majority of retail is NOT in shopping centers. For instance, as outlined above New York City’s reported GLA of 8 per capital, implies that it is one of the most underdeveloped markets for retail in the U.S. The researcher at the ICSC also confirmed that Miami doesn’t pick up the majority of their retail for the same reason. The point is that while retail GLA is a good starting point for most markets in the U.S., it is NOT reliable for the major urban markets.

To prove the above points, let’s look at two recent studies in recent years.  In 2003 CoStar calculated the total retail space per capita (shopping centers and everything else) for the top 50 U.S. markets. Those 50 markets had an estimated average of 43.71 square feet of retail space. Portland had the third lowest retail space per capita at 27.95 square feet, trailing Long Island and Charlotte. The market with the most retail space per capita was Southwest Florida at 74 square feet, followed by Richmond, Winston-Salem, Greenville, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Toledo, San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Birmingham.

[2] “The Retail Tenant Directory is a publication containing in-depth profiles of over 5,400 retail chains across the U.S. and Canada.”    http://www.retailtenants.com/faq.shtml

[3] Information provided by ICSC Research Department based upon our request.  They complete national research about every year, but only research major metro areas every several years.