Everywhere I turn these days I read about retailers and developers ‘discovering’ urban markets. ["Developers, Retailers Focusing on Infill Areas," The Arizona Republic]. For those of us working in these communities for over a decade now, the opportunities were always there. We called these placed ‘underserved’, or in the case of grocery stores, ‘food deserts’. So it’s exciting to see communities with higher densities now seeing interest from retailers and developers who frequently overlooked these neighborhoods, citing safety concerns, too few customers, lack of purchasing power and high construction costs as impediments to development. What those of us in the field always knew is that density equaled buying power, and while national retailers often eschewed these locations, regional chains were often gobbling up real estate and doing very well – albeit under the radar. Now that the big guys are interested…I wonder how the dust will settle.
