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The Big Boxes Look North: Bad News for US?
Retail Traffic reports that, from Nordstrom to Big Lots, big box retailers are increasingly looking to Canada for new investment opportunities. The rationale should raise a big red flag for US policy...
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Good news: Downtowns are Winning!
Do you remember when it seemed inevitable that shopping malls were going to completely destroy downtown shopping districts? Well, it looks like the malls have lost: For more than 50 years, retailers...
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The Mauling of Enclosed Malls
We’ve mentioned this before. Enclosed shopping malls, those retail juggernauts of the 20th Century, are dropping like flies. Over at Greater Greater Washington, Dan Malouf has the latest from the...
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America’s Greatest Main Streets?
Travel and Leisure magazine has put together a list of what they consider to be America’s greatest main streets. The work of such activists and preservationists is acknowledged each year by the...
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Will Technology be the Death of Commercial Real Estate?
OK, maybe the death of commercial real estate is an exaggeration, but Kevin Drum has pointed out an interesting piece from Salon.com on Amazon’s new effort to create same day delivery for its goods:...
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Fairweather Consulting &“Successful Main Streets”
Tonight we are presenting our work on creating main street strategies for the hamlets of Phoenicia, Pine Hill and Shokan in the Catskills Mountains of New York. The Watershed Post has the story: The...
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Experience-based Retail: It’s Everywhere
We are big believers in the importance of “experience-based” retail in age of on-line shopping. Downtowns can’t just sell goods and services anymore. In order to attract shoppers, they have to...
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“Walkable” cities are more economically competitive
So says Jeff Speck, author of The Walkable City. According to Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, at a recent CEOs for Cities conference, he made the following argument about the economic...
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Bringing Dead Malls Back to Life
In previous posts we’ve discussed the fact that many enclosed shopping malls built in the ’70s and ’80s are now shuttered. Increasingly communities are faced with the issue of what to do with these...
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E-commerce is Going Analog
At least a little bit, according to a recent piece in the New York Times. On-line retailers are moving into bricks-and-mortar locations: After years of criticizing physical stores as relics, even...
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Are Apps Killing Jobs?
That’s the issue recently raised in the Wall Street Journal: Personal computing and the Internet have been pecking away at the labor landscape for decades, undermining demand for everyone from travel...
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Main Streets are Obsolete
Over at the blog for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Kaid Benfield asserts that we may have a sentimental attachment to an urban form that doesn’t work any more: traditional main streets. This...
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Trends in Online Retail: Shoppable Content and Curated Commerce
E-commerce continues to increase in its sophistication and reach. strategy+business recently highlighted some new developments that include a four-part romantic comedy, Falling for You, launched by...
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Nashville Study: Walkable Neighborhoods are the Best Fiscal Investment
A study released by Smart Growth America indicates that, not only is walkable development good for you, it is good for goverment tax coffers also. The study looked at three developments in Nashville:...
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Why do we have all those restaurants downtown?
We see this more and more in downtowns in affluent areas: the old central business district dominated by a plethora of restaurants. Over at Architect, Aaron Betsky has some thoughts about why this is...
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Gen Y still shops downtown
Some “bricks-and-mortar” retailers have been apprehensive about the coming of age of Generation Y. Would this tech-savvy cohort accelerate the shift to on-line shopping and abandon Main Street?...
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New App Lets Shoppers Know When Local Store has Stuff They Want
The world of on-line retail is often seen as an existential threat to Main Street. But sometimes, digital technology is Main Street’s best friend. Springwise has the story: The fashion industry and...
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ULI Highlights Makeovers for 10 Retail Centers
Over at Urban Land, Ron Nyren, a freelance architecture, urban design, and real estate writer discusses the ways retail centers are remaking themselves for the 21st Century. As Nyren notes, “The . . ....
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Are We Over-Estimating the Shift from Suburbs to Center Cities?
The New Geography website has made this claim for quite a while. Here is their latest evidence: Exaggerating Core Population Increases: The rise of population in urban cores has been important, but it...
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Changes in On-Line Retail May be Good News for Downtowns
Kevin Drum has this take on how the changing world of e-commerce may be good news for your local downtown: The Wall Street Journal reports that foot traffic in retail outlets plummeted this holiday...
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