Why "Lifestyle Centers"?

Why are “Lifestyle Centers”- shopping centers with typical mall stores facing a fake main street with parking behind being built as opposed to any other format? Is there really a desire by consumers to park behind the store and then have to walk to the front as opposed to a typical strip mall, where you’d be able to park right in front of a Forever 21? Or an indoor mall without anchors (since they’re all out of business or circling the drain) where you could go from Forever 21 to Abercombie and Finch without going out into the cold and rain?

[Moderating]

I can’t see that there’s any factual answer to this. Moving to IMHO.
[Not moderating]

I think it’s driven by nostalgia for the “old America” with a thriving Main Street downtown lined with small, independent shops, and so the developers are trying to recreate the illusion of that.

I think they are being made in preference to old school malls due to less maintenance and taxes due to less enclosed space. So even if consumers preferred an old-school mall (which I would, all else being equal,) they don’t have the choice because the retailers can save money on the janitors, maintenance workers, and lighting and cooling systems needed to pay for a traditional mall.

I’d prefer a lifestyle center to a strip mall if I had to pick up multiple things and the center’s streets were pedestrian-only. The only ones I’ve been to had cars going down the center which defeats the purpose IMO.

I’d rather walk between stores even in the heat and rain than have to drive between multiple strip malls, but not if you throw dodging cars into the mix.

This one-page PDF document from the International Council of Shopping Centers describes the concept as including “upscale national-chain specialty stores with dining and entertainment in an outdoor setting.” Compare that to regional malls, described as including “general merchandise or fashion-oriented offerings. Typically, enclosed with inward-facing stores connected by a common walkway. Parking surrounds the outside perimeter.”

At least when the first ones were being built, they were touted as “mixed use developments” with shops on the ground floor and condos on the upper floors, and they claimed they were supposed to promote more walking and less car use. The first one I recall claimed to be modeled after an English village. Which might have worked if they’d filled the storefronts with the sorts of shops people need to go to on a regular basis, grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, and the like. But is there really an advantage to living above an Forever 21 or H&M? It seems like most of the people shopping there drove there from somewhere else, and the people who live in the condos still have to drive elsewhere to do their day to day shopping.

At least around here, many of the older indoor malls have been trying to reinvent themselves as more entertainment destinations rather than merely shopping destinations, as more brick and mortar stores die out.

We had one by us built around 2009. It was like a small city street comprised of 6 blocks. The center two blocks facing each other had an open pedestrian only space between them. The blocks on the ends facing each other had streets and street parking between them.
Now after 10 years finding that the center blocks retail spaces were very hard to rent due to their proximity to parking especially during the winter they are re-modeling the pedestrian space with a street and on-street parking.

Most of the “lifestyle centers” I’ve been to were designed by weasels. The basic formula seems to be:

Remove all curbside parking. Move parking behind the shops in very piecemeal fashion with access via skinny driveways between the stores. Place no more than ten parking spaces behind any store, forcing shoppers to guess where they can park, wait for pedestrian traffic to stop so they can cross the sidewalk, drive behind a store, circle the mini lot, find no spaces, go back to the street, wait for walkers to pause, drive 20 yards to the next parking entrance, try again, get sufficiently enraged that you decide to shop elsewhere and leave.

If they put in normal “daily” sorts of stores it might make sense as a neighborhood, but who needs to shop at Jeri’s Precocious Pastries and Gullible’s Candles more than once a year?

The best one of these I’ve seen is Belmar in Denver. They’ve got a whole foods, various restaurants and a movie theater. In the winter they set up an ice skating rink and there are several decent bars there. If you like the urban thing but can’t actually live downtown I can see the benefits.

We also shop there since they have several destination stores including doing grocery shopping and going to see movies. I will go to the traditional mall that is closer to my house mainly for the movie theater or their target but the shopping experience is better in Belmar.

What you describe sounds a lot like City Place on the Promenade in Edgewater, NJ.

It’s a sort of mixed-use New Urbanist design. Condos, plus a “Main Street” of stores, restaurants and whatnot. The bulk of the parking is actually underground. It’s sort of like a “Fake Soho” or “Fake Hoboken”.
I’m guessing the design is an attempt to strike a balance between the dense walkable neighborhoods of places like Manhattan or Hoboken and the car-centric design of the traditional indoor megamall or strip mall.
For example, the city of Hoboken, NJ where I live consists of 50,000 people crammed into one square mile of brownstones, walk-ups and mix-used apartment buildings. Sort of like someone taking a core sample of Manhattan. Most of the stores, bars and restaurants are clustered along Washington Street, which runs north to south the length of the city. It’s great for not needing a car because everything is scaled to human-size. Lots of store fronts, outdoor café seating, streetlights that look like old timey gas lamps, those clock things, trees, etc. But the main downside is parking. Generally speaking, it’s a pain in the ass to frequent the various shops and stores unless you already live there.

In contrast, the soon to open American Dream Mall in the Meadowlands occupies roughly the same footprint as Hoboken, but 90% of it is parking lot.
The “Lifestyle Center” seems to be a mix of the two that’s more interesting than your standard Secaucus strip mall. Not as grand as the traditional mega-mall, but more economical. Let’s people drive in from further away, but then enjoy the experience of being able to walk from store to store, grab a coffee, sit down for a meal, and so on in a human-scale mini-neighborhood. You don’t need to circle the block for an hour waiting for a spot to open up and you don’t have to walk half a mile to a giant white box in the middle of a sea of cars.

These places only seem to work when the tenants business comes mainly from touristy foot traffic. Places like Disney Springs or City Walk or a number of similar places where people are going to be spending some time checking out all the shops while wandering through.
Where it doesn’t work is the typical suburban retail scene that relies on the repeat business of locals. People who are more interested in making a single destination purchase as efficiently as possible.