What’s going on in Malden Center could give everyone working in the retail space some food for thought.
As Steve Adams details elsewhere in this week’s issue, its vibrant dining and gaming scene has created a built-in amenity for office developers looking to take advantage of its location on the MBTA’s Orange Line and commuter rail.
John Preotle, partner at River’s Edge master developer Preotle, Lane & Assoc., put it well when he told Adams that “it seems every ethnic restaurant you could think of is in Malden. If you’re trying to attract younger employees, it’s interesting and fun.”
When seen in light of brick-and-mortar retailers’ ongoing struggles, Malden Center makes a compelling case that landlords ought to look at storefront spaces less as profit centers and more as drivers of overall value.
The area’s rapidly increasing – 22 percent in 24 months – class A office rents come with a kind of catch 22, however. Will these same small businesses be able to last if their landlords try to cash in on the area’s sudden popularity? It’s hardly a given, and easy for an excited landowner to overshoot the mark on what a good tenant can afford to pay if they follow traditional logic.
In the quest to hit specific rent targets or find good credit tenants, however, it’s easy to create conditions in new or existing business districts that keep iconic shops like Nubian (neé Dudley) Square’s late, lamented A Nubian Notion from ever opening. These businesses, frequently family-run and limited to one or two locations but full of character, not only help define a place’s identity, they can also make people from an array of different backgrounds feel comfortable in a space that might otherwise slouch towards a Seaport-esque, featureless desert of white wealth.
The founders of at least one brokerage, restaurant-retail specialists Boston Urban Partners, are already trying to operationalize this idea in a limited sense by forming Boston Urban Places last month. In part by keeping their ears to the ground for emerging chefs and business owners with good ideas, in part by keeping a thick Rolodex of national businesses like Blue Bottle Coffee which possess a certain cachet, the affiliated firm aims to help developers assemble vibrant collections of stores and restaurants that can either act as shopping destinations or provide convenient services to neighborhood tenants.
When seen in light of brick-and-mortar retailers’ ongoing struggles, Malden Center makes a compelling case that owners of existing real estate and developers of new buildings ought to look at storefront spaces less as profit centers and more as drivers of overall value. In a world where customers demand uniqueness, diversity and walkability, but also where the upper-middle-class shopper so many retail districts crave is becoming increasingly likely to be a person of color, it borders on the essential.
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