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18 Planning May 1992 • Park and Shop: Some Guidelines P L A N N I N G P R By Ruth Eckdish Knack Design standards for strip malls in suburbs and cities. To their critics, strip shop- ping centers are the quin- tessential symbol of suburban sprawl, to be eliminated wher- everpossible. Yet to many car- dependent residents of metro- politanareas, the small centers are the closest thing in modern life to the old-fashioned corner store, the place to stop for a quart of milk-or to pick up a videotape for an evening's entertainment. For residents of the Cleve- ~nd Park neighborhood in ashington, D.C., however, the Park and Shop center on Connecticut Avenue was more-a remnant of the early auto age that deserved to be declared a historic landmark. The residents pressured the city to turn down a developer's re- quest to build a higher density complex on the L-shaped site, which is adjacent to a Metro subway station. The 62-year- oldmall has now been restored by developers Douglas Jemal and Paul Millstein and its eight storefronts almost all leased. Nevertheless, there's no doubt that strip centers cause problems. APA senior researcher Marva Morris reports an in- creasing number of inquiries to the Planning Advisory Ser- vice from public agency plan- ners seeking appropriate ways to improve access, circulation, signage, lighting, and-particu- larly-landscaping. "The two or four curb cuts needed to accommodate the malls offer unlimited potential for acci- dents," she notes. But Franklin Raeon, AICP, a consultant with the firm of A C T McGill Smith Punshon in Cin- cinnati,warns that regulations can backfire if those who write them don't understand the par- ticular needs of shopping cen- terdevelopers. "Unreasonable requirements may doom a mall to failure," he says. The result could be an empty shopping center-a community eyesore- and aloss of taxes. Parking lot landscaping is a particular bone of contention. Planners are al- ways asking for more trees, he notes, but retailers are con- cerned about blocking store windows. Raeon's firm has de- veloped alist of some 50 vari- ables that affect a shopping center's viability. Topping the list are visibility and access. Raeon argues for gentle per- suasion-the carrot not the stick. That's the approach the Chi- cago suburb of Skokie used for mall-lined Dempster Street. The results have been good. In 1985 the village committed $2.5 million for a variety of im- provements-including a fa- cade-rebate program for mer- chants-along a six-block d Y a v 9 a a 0 a y 9 R I C E portion of the street. At the same time, a new sign ordi- nancewas adopted. But rather than imposing design guide- lines, says Skokie planning su- pervisorPeter Peyer, AICP, the village simply hired an archi- tect to show what could be done. The architect did pre- liminarydrawings for two strip centers, and that, says Peyer, "set the tone for future im- provements." For years, says Michael Beyard, a planner with the Ur- ban Land Institute in Wash- ington, D.C., the number of strip centers has been grow- ing. "But from what we hear from our numbers, the trend has peaked," he says, especially in southern California, where there has been strong opposi- tion. "And in parts of Texas and Arizona, we see lots of vacancies in strip malls." Beyard has spotted a new trend, the "theming" of strip malls to focus on a particular type of product (housewares, for instance) or service (auto care, office, medical, or even Housing above the stores: a strip mall innovation along El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego. Rob Quigley was the architect. Right: architectural guidelines for the Plaza and North Cedros districts of Solana Beach.