Breathing new life into dead retail zones

Vacant strip malls are the acne scars left on the suburban landscape from disposable retail development. In metro Atlanta, they’re everywhere. When you get excited to hear a new Wal-Mart might replace one of them, you know it’s really bad.

It’s even worse when Wal-Mart changes its mind and leaves you and your neighbors more time to drive past the acres of pock-marked asphalt, rusting light stands and the darkened signs of stores long-since departed.

MIKE KING
MY OPINION

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So it was with genuine rapture that those of us who live on the southwest side of Marietta greeted the news this week that Cobb County government is spending $6.25 million to buy a mostly-vacant strip mall on Powder Springs Road and turn it into a senior citizens center and government offices. The county also plans a $3.6 million makeover of the site, including changing the exterior design of the place.

No doubt, the Wal-Mart would have generated needed property tax revenue for the city and county. But in today’s economy, no private investor seems willing to take a chance on the place. A senior citizens center and county offices will be a darn sight better than what’s there now. And, fortunately, Cobb County has a history — albeit a short one — of salvaging some of these commercial wastelands.

A few years ago it purchased a vacant Kroger building and shopping plaza on Whitlock Avenue in Marietta and turned it into county offices. The biggest tenant in the West Park Government Center is the county board of elections, where early voting has been taking place in recent weeks. The revitalized office space no doubt helped another aging shopping plaza across the street recently to spruce up its appearance.

Before the Whitlock redevelopment, the county put up a $1 million Community Development Block Grant to secure the deed for a former Sears store on Roswell Street near U.S. 41. The building was remade into a home for nonprofit groups and a day-care center, including the Center for Family Resources and the United Way of Cobb County.

Besides breathing new life into a blighted and depressed zone, the county will save money compared to what it would have cost to find property and build a new senior citizens center from the ground up.

But the larger issue that city and county planners face is how to control the proliferation of strip malls in the first place. Unfortunately, they haven’t solved that problem. The vacant mall where the new center will locate is a classic example of how retail development runs amok around metro Atlanta.

When it was built 20 years ago on Powder Springs Road, it included a large grocery store chain, a movie video chain, several restaurants, a drug store, pet store, dry cleaners and the other usual retail suspects that went into such places. A 10-screen movie theater was built next to it.

But from the moment bulldozers commenced clearing the site, a similarly outfitted shopping strip — closer to the square a couple of miles away that had been built 15 years earlier — started to decline.

That place still exists, but barely. Now its decline has spread to the street in front of it, which is littered with closed businesses and a cleaned-up junkyard with a used clothing and furniture store and a used tire store.

About 10 years after the new center was built, another one just like it went up about five miles further west on Powder Springs Road. That coincided with the beginning of the end of the strip mall that is being replaced now.

The grocery store lasted the longest, but it gave up the ghost three years ago. The video store went down fast, the restaurants switched hands every two or three years and then went vacant. The drug store chain built a stand-alone building a few miles away. (That store is vacant now, too.) The movie theater closed and erected a lovely chain-link fence around the building.

Two of the three fast-food places in the parking lot have survived, as has the tire and car-repair store. But that’s about it. Businesses come and go in it, but nothing that gives it any real life. A senior citizens center and government offices will do that.

Meanwhile, as Powder Springs Road moves further west, a half-dozen or more smaller strip malls have popped up over the last two years, close to the new subdivisions being developed between Macland Road and the East-West Connector. They have beauty and nail salons, cellphone stores, carry-out pizza joints and Chinese and Mexican restaurants.

They’ll be vacant too in 10 years, maybe sooner.

Unless county government grows exponentially — which isn’t likely to happen in a tight-fisted county like Cobb — there will never be enough senior citizens centers to reclaim them.

— Mike King is a member of the editorial board.