Regional Retail Study Produces Significant Findings

On September 8, 2000 NOACA and the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission released an analysis of existing and proposed retail development in Cuyahoga and surrounding counties.  Co-sponsored by NOACA and the Cleveland, Gund, and Nord Foundations the study is intended to help communities deal with the issues and impacts of retail development. Both the Executive Summary and the complete Regional Retail Study are available in Acrobat.    (Questions concerning this study's content should be directed to the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission (CPC).  You can also visit the CPC site which has this report in HTML.)

The study finds that while the region has had a slight loss of population over the past 30 years, it is over-saturated with retail and continuing to add new developments in outlying suburbs and rural areas.  A large amount of vacant land in the seven counties is zoned commercial.  If it were all developed, more than three times the amount of existing retail could be built in an already over-saturated market.

Overbuilding has impacts:  new retail development competes with established centers for market share, often leading to lower rents, more marginal businesses and increased vacancies in older commercial areas.  Increased competition from new retail centers can significantly depreciate property values in existing commercial areas, thereby reducing property tax revenues for schools and communities.  In the longer term, tax revenue generated by new retail in outlying areas can be diminished by the costs of additional infrastructure and public safety services, the impact on existing businesses, and environmental mitigation efforts.

There is a mismatch between the locations of most proposed new developments and the central areas indicated as underserved in the study's analysis of trade areas.  Many of these central areas have the traffic volumes, access, infrastructure and population densities to support additional retail but are bypassed in favor of more easily developable locations.

Retail overbuilding takes place within an ever-changing national environment for selling goods to consumers.  As it evolves beyond growing pains, electronic commerce will significantly increase its share of retail sales, thereby posing a sales tax revenue problem for localities as well as questions about the need for more commercial buildings.  Retail facilities are also in a constant state of change.  Currently, the number of traditional covered malls is declining, big box power centers are pre-eminent, and new urbanist "village centers" loom on the horizon.  Communities with out-dated retail venues can suffer not only tax losses but major difficulty in re-using obsolete structures.

The study's authors believe communities facing retail decisions can help themselves by using this information in preparing land use regulations and development standards based upon updated community comprehensive land use plans.