The Patient Option
An unfinished parking lot slowly reverts to nature, its raised medians overtaken by weeds, its light poles lonely islands in a sea of nothing worth illuminating. Photos like this proliferated in the aftermath of the 2008 stock market collapse, when the bulldozers of suburbia ground to a halt from Atlantic to Pacific. You can almost imagine a future archaeologist gesticulating as they lecture to their students: “Here lies a civilization destroyed by its hubris.“
This is actually 2018 Google imagery from Lockport, Illinois—hardly some monument to suburban ruin. You know Lockport as our 2021 Strongest Town contest winner. Lockport has passionate, involved citizens, charming neighborhoods, and a historic downtown along the Illinois & Michigan Canal that’s getting better by the day.
It's also got Lockport Square. The site, shown above, was once slated for a future as a power center, anchored by a Target and a Home Depot, and flanked by smaller chain businesses. The state of Illinois was putting in an extension of Interstate 355, and Lockport Square would have a front-row seat when it opened. Unfortunately, the site's plans took shape in 2006. To say that was not a fortuitous year to launch a major retail development is understatement. The market crashed, financing evaporated, the anchor stores pulled out of the project, and the property was acquired at a fire sale price in 2012 by another local developer. Although they have had success with a new hotel and restaurants in the spaces (called outlots or outparcels in real-estate jargon) closest to the road, this owner has yet to find any takers for the bulk of the property.
Lockport Square has utilities: water, sewer, electricity. What it doesn't have is tenants. The land has now sat fallow for a decade and a half, waiting for any sort of productive use. Hundreds, if not thousands, of American cities have a site like this. They're the impact craters of the retail apocalypse.
You might be asking, "Why did a city with a zombie power-center site next to a freeway deserve to win the Strongest Town contest?" Well, it's Lockport's response to the site that we think has something to teach you. It's about what they haven't done. Specifically, they haven't been desperate. They have not pursued a short-term strategy to get something, anything built on a challenging site, at the expense of better alternatives now or down the road. A lot of cities could take a lesson from that.
No Easy Answers
The 23-acre Lockport Square site sits just south of 159th Street and west of its interchange with Interstate 355, near the eastern edge of the city of Lockport. It's surrounded by suburban-style retailers and restaurants, a couple industrial properties to the south, and beyond that, subdivisions of single-family houses.
There hasn't been an obvious answer as to what to do with Lockport Square, or something would have happened there by now. The site was acquired in 2012 by Janko Group, a real estate development and investment firm active throughout the Chicago area. Janko has worked to market it, but prospects have been dim.
"The Power Center really died in 2008," founder and CEO Gary Janko told me. "We purchased the site with the idea that that they were going to come back [post-recession], but well, they haven't." Top-tier anchors such as Target and Home Depot show scant interest in opening new stores the way they did in the 1990s and early 2000s, and while Janko has attempted to market the Lockport Square site to what are called "junior anchors" (examples would be TJ Maxx, Marshall's, Pet Smart, or Best Buy), the developer has not found takers in this market. America simply has a glut of retail, and very little market for more, except in rapidly growing areas.
Janko did sell some of the land to a car dealer, and a Holiday Inn Express that opened in 2020 has been a startling success: even in a pandemic, it cash-flowed on its first day. There had been no hotel in Lockport, and it is now used for events as well as by travelers.
That still leaves what to do with the 23 acres of weeds and concrete set further back from the road. While markets can and do turn in surprising ways, right now, Janko says, "Retail and offices are dead." So what other use might activate the site and make use of the utility connections already present and paid for?
Is Suburban Retrofit an Option?
If the power center is dead, then maybe the site's future is not as a suburban shopping center but as an urban outpost, a replica of what we already know works about Lockport: its traditional, walkable downtown and core neighborhoods.
"Suburban retrofit," or the conversion of former mall or power-center sites into urban-style neighborhoods, is an idea a couple of decades old that has never quite lived up to the hype. In theory it's a way to jump-start new pockets of urban density, meet demand for housing, and build something that has a relatively high financial return to the city for the infrastructure invested in the site. In practice, though, these projects are often hamstrung by the constraints of their context, which is almost always an isolated pod surrounded by wide, fast roads. They take a lot of effort to plan and execute, and amount at best to C+ versions of true walkable urbanism.
This is the pitfall facing Lockport Square. Janko Group has had discussions with the City of Lockport for years about alternative uses which would require a zoning change, including residential. "Horizontal mixed use," in which retail would coexist on the 23 acres with some combination of apartments and townhouses, is an option, and Janko has worked on some site plans of this nature but not found a buyer. Putting in the public streets that would be required is costly, and any developer would likely want the city to finance it using Tax Increment Financing, effectively forgoing years of future revenue.
From the city's perspective, residential is on the table but is likewise a more challenging route. Purely residential development would likely meet skepticism from Lockport residents worried about such issues as school crowding, according to Director of Community & Economic Development Lance Thies. From the city's perspective, suburban-style residential development would also be a money loser, requiring more in new services than it generates in revenue. Mayor Steve Streit told me he is open to housing on the site and believes he can make the case to his constituents, but says he would want the city to do a fiscal analysis (like those conducted by Fate, Texas) to ensure that anything built will actually be a net positive to the city over a longer time frame of 20-plus years. It's possible that a higher-density residential use such as multi-story apartments, like a "Texas donut," would be such a financial winner, but for the property owner's part, Janko believes the rents attainable in Lockport are not high enough to justify the high cost of that type of construction.
Given the obstacles to any master-planned future for the site in the near term, I asked Janko about the prospect of subdividing the site and selling off the lots piecemeal for incremental development. His response was that such an option fails to solve the problem that "the guy in the back is still the guy in the back."
In other words, this site's value is all about access to the highway and visibility from the arterial road, 159th Street. The lots in front that have those attributes might sell quickly, while the ones buried in the back of the development remain unmarketable.
A key lesson here is that the lack of any urban context is a Catch-22 that dooms a lot of suburban retrofit in practice. Incremental development of the past was a remarkably resilient and productive way of building. But it occurred in a very different context: a city would fill out on a compact, walkable plan, making very intensive use of every square foot within its grid. Then it would gradually (or rapidly) expand at the edges, largely contiguous with the existing grid. Thus, those outlying sites enjoyed the immediate benefit of proximity and access to destinations that were already mature: if you built your house on 43rd Street next to a cornfield, it was because everything up through 42nd Street was a pretty well-established neighborhood.
This isn't the case with the suburban development pattern, which consists of "pods" unto themselves accessible only from wide, fast roads. This creates the "guy in the back" problem. To create an incremental neighborhood with enough gravity to cohere as a place when there's nothing surrounding it that you would want to, or be able to, walk to is a much taller order.
Going Nowhere Fast
And so the site sits fallow. And the city seems willing to take "the patient option," in Mayor Streit's words. Lockport could shell out tax incentives in order to get something built on an eyesore of a site; to its credit, it hasn't. Janko told me if he could, he’d sell it for industrial use in a heartbeat, but city officials don't want that future either.
Patience comes with its own risks, however. As Thies observed to me, patience as a strategy works best when the city has leverage over a property owner or developer, because that owner or developer needs something—a permit, a zoning change, utilities. Absent those points of leverage, any owner of Lockport Square or a similar property could move forward with an already-allowed development tomorrow—or sell to someone who will—and the city might not like the results. A hands-off approach from the city runs this risk: that the site simply becomes a hodge-podge of auto-oriented businesses without a coherent plan or focal point. In the worst case scenario, a business locates on part of the site that actively impedes the potential to create an inviting gateway to the rest of it in the future.
Patience, thus, doesn’t mean a hands-off approach. And it doesn’t mean not having any sort of vision. City officials have been in steady communication with Janko Group about plans for the full remaining 23 acres that do take a holistic approach to the site’s future. What patience does mean is not believing you need to be so desperate for development that you settle for something that is ultimately a net loss for the city.
"I'm not going to do something that's going to create a problem," says Streit, noting the proliferation of large distribution centers in Lockport's neighboring cities, which has resulted in large volumes of truck traffic through Lockport.
Streit told me that it's important to him to be willing to say, "Not interested" or "We don't need it" to rezoning that would accommodate a low value, auto-oriented use that might permanently limit the potential of a site, making it very hard to retrofit or improve in the future. "People are always telling you to run government like a business," he said. "But if you turn around and actually do so, what does that mean? If you're a business and you take on a bad client, one that sucks up all your time and energy dealing with them, that's a bad business decision. So when I say, 'No, thanks,' I'm running government like a business. It means being willing to say no to the bad client."
Lockport has plenty going for it without the Lockport Square site. Downtown is doing better every year and is crying out for incremental investment, and there is no shortage of low-hanging ways to invest in and improve it. The same goes for the city's established neighborhoods.
Lockport officials would like to see the Lockport Square site developed, and would like to ensure it’s developed in a way that is a net long-term gain. The question for a city with a history of embracing the suburban experiment is, "Where should your energies be expended?"
Take the patient option, focus on the places that are already your city's strength, and don’t settle.
All images via Google Maps.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.