CAN SUBURBIA DEVELOP REAL URBAN CENTERS? Neal Peirce A suburb that builds a high-quality town center, with a full mix of urban services, should find that its cash register starts ringing--and keeps on ringing--long after stand-alone shopping malls become obsolete and turn unprofitable. As sensible as the idea seems, no one ever proved it until Charles Lockwood, a California-based author of highly regarded books on cities and architecture, produced his latest research, due to be published by the Urban Land Institute this month. Lockwood looked at a nationwide cross-section of truly mixed-use town centers--new Main Streets, town squares or transit villages that offer a full range of services, ranging from retail and housing to offices, entertainment, hotels, medical offices, libraries, even post offices. To make his list, he insisted all the services be integrated into friendly pedestrian-oriented environments. Among the town centers on Lockwood's list were Reston Town Center outside of Washington; Miami Lakes Town Center 18 miles northwest of Miami; Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Fla., and Town Center Drive in the new town of Valencia, Calif., 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. In virtually every case, Lockwood discovered, the new town centers are outperforming standard, stand-alone suburban developments. They capture higher office and retail lease rates. They get higher prices for apartments or townhouses. They register higher retail sales and sales tax revenues. They record higher hotel room and occupancy rates. Plus, there's a "halo effect" of fast-rising nearby property values. Take Valencia (whose developer, Newhall Land, commissioned Lockwood's study). Valencia's top office buildings have a 98.5 percent occupancy rate, compared with 80.3 percent in the surrounding Santa Clarita Valley. Retail leases range from $32 to $42 a square foot, compared with $16 to $27 nearby. Apartment units draw much higher rents. The Hyatt Valencia outperforms the room rates and occupancy rates of its regional competitors. Why the advantage? Marlee Lauffer, Newhall's vice president, explains: "We've taken pains to have a bustling, mixed-use area--office, retail, apartments, a town green, a mini-park, a hotel-conference center and public uses all close to each other. Plus a mix of national chains with regional or unique stores." Most of Lockwood's constellation of examples are "high-end" developments. But not CityCenter Englewood outside Denver, a transit-oriented village--complete with retail, apartments and a cultural performance center--that was constructed on the site of the failed and then demolished Cinderella City mall. CityCenter's office space and apartments demand higher rents--and register higher occupancy rates--than the rest of Englewood, or Denver metro averages. So if mixed-use developments are so terrific, why isn't one being built in every suburb of America? Lots of reasons, reports Lockwood. First, most tradition-bound lenders are used to financing one single-use building or complex at a time. To them, an apartment house with ground-floor retail looks risky. Suggest melding multiple retail, office, housing and civic uses into an integrated town center, and you blow their mind. Second, town centers are large, complex projects that easily collide with the narrow strictures of zoning statutes. Reston's Town Center is now wildly successful, but "in the beginning, it was illegal," notes Thomas D'Alesandro, vice president of Terrabrook, Reston's current developer. Special zoning had to be obtained from Fairfax County, Virginia--adding, of course, costs and delays that would scare off most developers. A companion roadblock, says Lockwood, are "traffic engineers who seemingly only want to move cars at fast speeds, so they oppose narrower, more pedestrian-friendly streets and developments." Yet given a choice, most of us would prefer mixed-use centers. "They bring together everything people want in one attractive place, often generating two to three times the draw of a traditional shopping center," says Newhall Land CEO Gary Cusumano. Many people like to live in the centers because they make it easy to walk to stores, restaurants, entertainment, even work. Employers like them because the amenities make it easier to recruit quality workers. So how do the barriers get overcome? Lockwood would have local governments stop supporting standard malls--hundreds are now close to folding across the United States anyway. Instead, localities should offer incentives for mixed use retail-office-residential centers, complete with civic and educational and cultural functions--"true hubs for community" that will have dramatically enhanced staying power. But Lockwood offers another twist: look to older malls as places to construct new town centers. "Let the mall meet Main Street"--let it continue as a typical mall, but devote a chunk of its untold acres of surplus parking to create a true mixed-use, pedestrian-scale shopping street. A couple decades ago, the shopping standard was 10 cars per 1,000 square feet of shopping. Now it's 4 cars. So malls are a land bank--all cleared, the environmental damage long since done. Use malls to remake suburbia for human mixed uses? What a grand idea! Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com. More Neal Peirce columns