“We cannot support all the new developments without hurting some others,” said Thomas Traynor, chairman of the economics department and professor of economics at Wright State University. It won’t be a direct dollar-for-dollar loss, in part because the new projects will draw some consumer spending from outside the immediate region, but other retail centers such as shopping malls and strip shopping centers will feel the pinch, Traynor said.
Cornerstone, Austin Landing and Liberty Center are multi-use developments that include residential and office buildings as well as retail, making their concepts more similar to The Greene Town Center in Beavercreek than to traditional enclosed shopping malls such as the Dayton Mall and the Mall at Fairfield Commons.
The office and residential components a part of these new commercial and entertainment centers generate a ready-made pool of potential customers for the restaurants, pubs, grocery stores, outdoor stores and other retailers that are flocking to the three new projects south and southeast of Dayton.
Dave Dickerson, president and principal broker for Miller-Valentine GEM real estate and property management company, said developers are following population shifts and demographics in their focus on multi-use projects south and southeast of Dayton.
Retailers, Dickerson said, “follow rooftops and economics,” and residential growth in Warren and Butler counties and in some parts of southern Montgomery County have attracted their interest.
Warren County’s population grew by more than 34 percent from 2000 and 2010, to 212,693, and continued that growth the first part of this decade, adding another 3 percent from 2010 through 2013, according to census data. Butler County’s growth exceeded 10 percent last decade and another 1 percent from 2010-13. The growth has triggered talk of a Dayton-Cincinnati “metroplex” along the I-75 corridor.
In contrast, Montgomery and Clark counties both lost more than 4 percent of their residents last decade, and those losses have continued through 2013.
That population shift and the emergence of the multi-use retail developments along the I-75 corridor are “definitely having an impact on urban and more mature inner-ring suburban communities” and their retail markets, Dickerson said. He cited the former Hills and Dales retail shopping center in Kettering, now mostly professional offices, and the former Van Buren shopping center, also in Kettering, which was redeveloped with a mix of retail and residential.
Dickerson said existing retail stores that have a regional target market “will find themselves in a very competitive environment over the next few years” as new shops and restaurants open in Cornerstone, Austin Landing and Liberty Center.
But those three developments are not simply poaching retailers from other shopping centers. They have succeeded in attracting several new-to-the-local-market retailers — some of which have already opened, others that are in the works.
Cornerstone of Centerville landed the first Dayton-area Costco Warehouse, and also has inked deals with Cabela’s outdoor store, also first in the Dayton area, and the first Bagger Dave’s Burger Tavern in Ohio. Its third anchor store will be Kroger, although it’s not yet clear what impact the new store will have on nearby Kroger stores in Centerville and Sugarcreek Twp.
Austin Landing is the site of a Field & Stream outdoor store, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill and Another Broken Egg restaurant, and in April, a new Chuy’s Tex-Mex Restaurant – each one the retailers’ first locations in the Dayton area. Liberty Center, which has attracted Dillard’s department store and Dick’s Sporting Goods as anchor tenants, has signed leases with Kona Grill and Flip Side burgers, two restaurant chains new to the Dayton and Cincinnati markets.
It’s not clear whether those new-to-the-market retailers would have come to this region anyway. But existing retail centers in the Dayton area are not standing pat in the face of the intensified competition.
The Dayton Mall has added several new tenants in recent years, including two that left free-standing stores nearby to join the mall’s roster. Dick’s Sporting Goods moved into the Dayton Mall in 2012 after the mall built a 19,000-square-foot addition to accommodate the 50,000-square-foot mall anchor store. In 2013, an hh gregg electronics store followed suit. In 2014, former Dayton Mall cinema space that had been vacant for about two decades was filled by popular clothing retailer H&M.
Serdar Durmusoglu, associate professor of marketing at the University of Dayton, said he believes enclosed shopping malls such as the Dayton Mall and Middletown’s Towne Mall Galleria will be impacted most, over the long run, by the opening of the region’s three multi-use developments.
The Dayton Mall “is putting up a very good fight right now,” Durmusoglu said, noting that its owners built the “Villages of Dayton Mall” consisting of free-standing buildings in front of the enclosed retail center to give that area more of an open-air atmosphere.
The economic recovery and the corresponding rise in consumer confidence and spending will likely help buoy all of the region’s retail centers, new and existing, the UD faculty member said. Strip shopping centers, he said, will face tougher competition, “but I think there will be enough mom-and-pop stores, convenience stores and local shops to keep those smaller retail centers open.”
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