HATTIESBURG, Miss. (AP) - Traveling around Hattiesburg, it’s hard not to notice the extreme differences in occupancy among Hattiesburg’s strip malls.
Some of the shopping centers around town - especially in West Hattiesburg - appear to be full and vibrant, while others resemble tiny ghost towns.
For the most part, it’s all about location - high visibility and continuous traffic - are essential to the success of any shopping center, said Robbie Griffin of Pierce Realty in Hattiesburg.
“Retailers look at the traffic count, and that’s where they want to go,” said Griffin, whose company manages Liberty Center in Oak Grove. “When you’ve got six lanes of traffic and well over 30,000 cars a day passing on any one road, that’s going to bring most of your growth.”
With the vacant status of some Hattiesburg strip malls, it may not make sense why building newer shopping centers - like Newpointe Shopping Center and Liberty Junction on U.S. Highway 98 - seems to warrant a higher priority than filling the empty ones. But Griffin said customers and retailers simply want - and sometimes actually need - new and improved spaces.
“It’s no different than a new car - people want the newest, state-of-the-art retail spaces,” he said. “Also, building regulations are different than they were just 20 years ago. An older shopping center may have been built to where you didn’t have the amount of parking that you would need nowadays for a particular business, so parking isn’t adequate in some places.”
Shopping centers in certain other areas just aren’t as coveted by developers and retailers, said Comics & Stuff owner Justin Adcock.
After 10 years of setting up shop, Adcock decided to move his store to the more heavily traveled Hardy Street area.
“Basically, the only people that traveled on that section (of Lincoln Road) were just going from one side of town to the other,” he said. “There’s just really not a whole lot to get you over there, whereas in other areas there are little shopping places and things that tend to attract people.”
There are certain things that boost the desirability of strip malls. Housing well-known retailers, such as grocery stores and department stores, helps to keep shopping centers full by attracting smaller businesses.
“Any big-box stores are going to bring a lot of traffic in,” Griffin said. “Whenever you have big anchor tenants like Corner Market (in Liberty Center) and Gander Mountain, other places are going to want to build around that.”
But that may not hold true for every situation - and may in fact work against certain shopping centers.
For example, Turtle Bend - the Cross Creek Parkway shopping center that used to house Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant - remains mostly empty despite being located near Turtle Creek Mall.
“That center thrives on what comes around that part of the mall, and there’s just not that much that comes through there anymore,” said Stephen Stetelman of London and Stetelman Realtors in Hattiesburg, the company that formerly managed Turtle Bend.
“Garden Ridge isn’t going to help it because it faces the other way, and there’s not a Garden Ridge entrance on that side (facing the shopping center).”
Craig Dearman, city of Hattiesburg’s engineering technician, said cost also factors in when considering business locations. Some builders just don’t want to invest in certain areas, whether it be a bad location or unsuitable land for construction.
“A lot of that part (of Lincoln Road) is in a flood zone because there’s a creek behind it,” he said. “So you’ve got to meet certain base flood elevation requirements, and that means jacking your building up, and that’s extra money.
“And some of the ground there is so low that you’d have to bring so much dirt in to get it up to a certain area, and that’s just not cost-effective for a lot of people.”
But a shopping center doesn’t always have to be brand new to be successful. Griffin said The Village on Weathersby Road - which houses Grand China Buffet and Del Sol Mexican Restaurant - is one of his company’s top performers, even though it was built more than 15 years ago.
“That center generally stays 100 percent full all the time,” he said. “It’s one of the older centers, but the location is still good. Because it’s right there in the city, it’s got a lot of appeal, and you’re going to have a larger customer base to pull from.”
And in some cases, a few of the older centers have taken on new tenants after being vacant for a short while. Chad Newell, president of the Area Development Partnership, said new growth will inevitably occur, but Hattiesburg has done a good job in back-filling some of the former retail space.
“A good example of that is when Stein Mart (previously located in Cloverleaf Center) relocated to Turtle Creek Mall,” he said. “General Dynamics came in and took up 85,000 square feet of office space, which completely filled up the old Stein Mart location.”
For the locations that are still vacant, only time will tell if they are ever returned to their former luster.
“I’m sure everybody would love if those places filled back up, but it’s not up the city - it’s up to the developers because they’re the ones that are building things,” Dearman said. “But it would sure be nice to see them come back.”
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Information from: The Hattiesburg American, https://www.hattiesburgamerican.com
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