As suburban shopping centers continue losing consumers due to internet shopping and changing lifestyle preferences, a generational opportunity for new retail is emerging for towns and cities. Millennials, families and seniors are seeking to live, work and shop in walkable urban centers.

Crain's Forum
For those who seek more social experiences as opposed to the enclosed mall experience of their youth, Main Street experiences in their towns and cities are the perfect fit for their way of life. While the larger portion of their income will go to experiences such as travel or outdoor adventures, closer to home visits to a local brewpub or coffee shop in their town center makes perfect sense.

Medium-sized cities such as Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Marquette and Traverse City are especially growing from this trend. Detroit’s 2000’s shopping resurgence with Nike, H&M, Shinola, Whole Foods and others was a pioneering urban bellwether. East Lansing’s small newer Target store serves as a prototype for the return of downtown department stores.  


Robert Gibbs is president of the Gibbs Planning Group.
Resort towns such as Harbor Springs, Petoskey and Saugatuck are booming while small walkable towns and cities with well-managed business districts, convenient parking and architectural design standards, such as Brighton, Birmingham, Grosse Pointe, Holland and Northville, have become bustling downtown shopping districts that reflect the recent urban retail movement.

Birmingham’s 300 upscale specialty stores, restaurants, offices and luxury hotels, combined with their dozens of blue chip national brands, has established itself as one of the country’s most sought after downtowns. The city’s progressive policies and its Shopping District’s initiatives are largely responsible for making Birmingham a top destination for dining, fashion and home furnishings.

Birmingham’s retailers are reportedly among their chain’s most successful. Top national brands including Allen Edmonds, Anthropologie, Crate & Barrel, Elm Street, Ethan Allen and Lululemon line its downtown streets, with Warby Parker and RH home and others opening soon. These brand retailers attract thousands of shoppers and complement Birmingham’s many fine specialty shops and restaurants such as Petite Cabane, Caruso Caruso, Dick O’Dow’s, Roots, Sundance, Tender and Streetside.

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Birmingham’s approach to welcoming popular brands is unique. When a national store brand relocates from a shopping center to downtown, it may initially receive a cold shoulder from city leaders and the community, who fear popular brands will end up ruining their beloved Main Street’s unique charm. Unfortunately, many cities artificially suppress their demand for name brand stores, turning their main streets into recreational theme parks and driving retail spending to shopping malls.

Looking back at history, though, this thinking is misguided.  

During the peak commercial era of American cities, commonly acknowledged as the 1950s and 1960s, banks, cinemas, department stores, supermarkets and even automobile dealerships thrived as anchors in central business districts with national chains such as JC Penney, SS Kresge, Sears and Woolworth filling downtowns.

The luxury store Sak’s Fifth Avenue even once had boutique stores in Ann Arbor and Petoskey. For scale, Detroit’s beloved 10-story historic JL Hudson department store would equate to 10 modern Walmart superstores.

City halls, courthouses, libraries and post offices served as noncommercial anchors for communities, bringing considerable pedestrian and vehicular traffic downtown. Public and private anchors continue to be as essential to urban shopping districts as they are to new mixed-use centers.

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During the most successful commercial period for cities, people were drawn downtown for a variety of reasons, such as to pick up packages at the post office and then purchase groceries for the evening. Churches, courthouses and government office buildings created a demand for retailers, offices and hotels.

As an alternative to downtowns, new town centers are opening as walkable mixed-use communities. These new towns cluster residential, office, civic, restaurants and stores around new main streets and parks. The Village of Rochester, built on the site of a former shopping mall, was Michigan’s first new main street. The city of Warren is designing a new town center near city hall and others are planned in Novi and Commerce.

As we look to the future, all signs point to the re-emergence of Main Street as the place people will want to do their retail shopping and dining. For local and regional sustainability, downtowns should offer the brands, goods and services both desired and needed by their communities.

Downtown shopping is back.

Robert Gibbs is president of Gibbs Planning Group in Birmingham.

By Robert Gibbs