Sedona strip mall: a business incubator can’t count its chicks before they hatch.

Vacation and resort towns exist—and thrive—usually in response to a market demand to visit, to experience, and (to some extent at least) to linger in a specific location.  Whether a beach, a mountain, a landmark, an insanely agreeable climate, or some other locus of beauty or distinction, the resort town owes its prosperity to its proximity to whatever it is people find so attractive.  So why are these destinations so difficult for markets to understand?  Migrating from macro to micro, why is it often difficult to judge the business climate in a resort town, which in turn makes these specialty sites tricky for sustaining a business?  Is it because of fierce competition—because everyone wants to be there?  Possibly.  But that doesn’t explain why a niche beachfront or mountain retreat might struggle to support a basic supermarket.  After all, everyone still eats while on vacation.  But resort towns often benefit (and suffer) from seasonal spikes in visitorship; sometimes the off-season isn’t just sleepy, it’s difficult to survive due to climatic variability or compromised road conditions.  But even if the weather is comfy for twelve months a year, vacation towns can’t always muster a holistic array of businesses, because they don’t attract a similarly holistic cross section of the market.  And the fickle nature of humans in general, when distilled to a tiny demographic subset, gets amplified sevenfold.  Few places demonstrate this challenge more readily than the (mostly) comfy year-round resort town of Sedona, Arizona.  And what better microcosm of the challenges of free enterprise than a Sedona strip mall.

The southwestern motifs notwithstanding (which are already pretty common in Arizona), this looks like a run-of-the-mill strip mall in most respects.  Neither upscale nor recently upgraded, the comparative absence of aesthetic landscaping in the worn, forlorn parking lot is a dead giveaway.  The only striking aspect of Sedona Village Shopping Center is, of course, the backdrop—those remarkable red rocks that serve as the primary allurement to Sedona.  Situated in the middle of the Coconino National Forest, Sedona represents a striking change in topography from the small city of Cottonwood just fifteen miles to the south.  Here’s the entrance view coming from Cottonwood:

The massive sandstone formations that loom over Sedona’s formless settlement have captivated people for decades, and it has prompted both vacationers, time-share rentals, and some year-round residents—enough that the area warrants a fair amount of utilitarian, automobile-oriented shopping.  This Sedona strip mall is one among several in the town.

Yes, Sedona has captivated people for decades.  But only decades.  Not even one century.  Unlike many resort communities in the Rocky Mountain West, Sedona is not a town that centered itself around a long-decommissioned mine.  Prospectors did not cluster, pitch tents, then prompt an overnight village in the area in the late nineteenth century for resource extraction.  Sedona (like most of Arizona in the late 1800s) was empty at that time.  Loosely organized and named after the wife of the first postmaster in 1902, the arid region supported ranchers and some farmers that cultivated fruit orchards.  But it remained sparsely populated even after World War II, at the onset of the Baby Boom, when working-class households first achieved widespread homeownership.  In 1950, a drilling speculator tapped into a vital resource, but it wasn’t oil or any other fossil fuel; it was an aquifer.  With the availability of water, the ease and appeal of forging a community in this uncharacteristically picturesque niche escalated almost overnight.

Sedona grew into a lucrative, moderately obscure vacation destination in the 1950s, but it didn’t explode as a place for year-round residences until the 1970s, when it nearly tripled from 2,000 to 5,500 people.  It has essentially doubled again since then, but, after incorporation in 1988, largely stabilized.  Though it remains profoundly popular for vacationers, new housing starts in the environmentally sensitive area are rare today, and the last two censuses have reported a decline in population, to a bit below 10,000 people.  It’s far easier to attribute this decline to shrinking household sizes, as the escalating real estate prices reflect an increasingly elite zip code.

The historic chronicles of Sedona indisputably reveal the biggest surge during that decade when auto-oriented, suburban development reigned supreme and virtually nobody with homeownership aspirations considered anything else.  Consequently, all the development in the west side of Sedona, along the State Route 89A corridor, is minimally walkable.  The Sedona strip mall is the commercial archetype as one enters the city from Cottonwood to the southwest. 

Sedona Village Shopping Center is one of several very ordinary strip malls in this geographically extraordinary region.  I’ll concede that it could be much worse: the maintenance is good, the color scheme befits the locale, and the parking lot at least has some rudimentary landscaping.  It appears to have strong occupancy.  But it remains a Sedona strip mall, competing against others for a business (mostly retail) base that is undoubtedly difficult to assess when a relatively small percentage of the target demographic consists of year-round residents.

As a result, this Sedona strip mall hosts some tenants that, in most respects, suggest the shopping center cannot be choosy.  It features, as anchors, a location of Bashas’, a middle-market grocer almost exclusively in Arizona; a Goodwill store and donation center; and department store chan Bealls, most prevalent in small markets across the South.  Nothing fancy, especially considering the high incomes of many of Sedona’s vacationers.  Meanwhile, a pivot to the right reveals the most interesting case study, as far as this Sedona strip mall is concerned.

This outparcel structure, which rests in the southwest corner of the commercial lot where the majority of the “strip” wraps around the northern and eastern perimeter, is mostly occupied, but it doesn’t attract any chain businesses of regional or national prominence—nor does it appeal to the lucrative mom-and-pop boutiques one might expect in an upscale resort town like Sedona. 

This corner of Sedona Village Shopping Center offers one of the obligatory nail salons, which in 2026 compete with smoke shops for ubiquity.  Since both business types are virtually everywhere, they face stiff competition with identical neighbors a mile down the road; as a result, they typically must seek cheaper-than-average leases.  Next to Empire Nails is a use that is only half-surprising: a Chabad (Lubavitch), indicating enough of a consistent Jewish community in Sedona to support regular Shabbat services.  I have reported routinely on the phenomenon of the storefront church, where a religious center leases space typically reserved for conventional retail: the first floor of an old main street building, a space in a mall, or a portion of a strip mall.  Normally these churches are small and relatively new, not yet established enough to place a downpayment on mortgaged property.  And, from my perspective, they’re nearly always Christian.  But there’s no reason that one of the other Abrahamic faiths can’t plant a seed in a Class B strip mall.  It’s probably the wisest option, in fact.  Places like Sedona need consistency to sustain the fellowship that would allow a church to thrive, but the very ephemerality of most people’s relationship to Sedona means almost all businesses—from grocers to fashion to microbreweries to tax preparation—must cater to that capricious short-term clientele.  

I’m sure the region has at least a few other church plants—maybe another synagogue or even a mosque—tucked away in a sleepy Sedona strip mall.  Sedona’s biggest and most famous church is a spectacle of engineering, but not due to its size:

The Catholic Chapel of the Holy Cross is one of the oldest buildings since Sedona’s “discovery”, operating at this perch since 1956.  Architecturally impressive though it may be (and experts in the discipline agree), it opened its doors when Sedona’s population barely passed 2,000, and even today, it doesn’t need to accommodate many parishioners: it is but a chapel that likely feels cramped with more than 75 people at Sunday mass.  It may very well sustain itself through the voluntary donations of its many tourist visitors.  Like the average Sedona strip mall, though, Chapel of the Holy Cross is entirely dependent on the automobile to fill its pews; it sits removed from the rest of Sedona’s decentralized growth pattern and is utterly unwalkable.

The challenges of a sustaining a business in a town of 90% visiting strangers extends to the physical space where these businesses operate.  When commercial real estate fails to align with a market, the results are often both unsightly and devastating to the municipal tax base.  Vacant or blighted buildings still look bad among those sublime sandstone views.  Sedona Village Shopping Center isn’t blighted, but it definitely exposes the weakness of a building typology that was normative in the 1970s, yet hasn’t aged comfortably into 2026’s visitor tastes for walkable, recreational upscale shopping.  A mile east of the Sedona strip mall corridor, where AZ-179 intersects AZ-89A as it wends northward, another developer (or two or three) built a multi-block retail corridor right along the sidewalk, where most parking is on-street.  This  area, christened “Uptown Sedona”, more closely aspires to the facsimile of an old western main street.  Yes, it’s primarily squat, aestheticized strip malls placed along a traffic-calmed highway, but it clearly offers the boutiques and upscale restaurants that the Sedona tourist demographic most craves after a day of hiking among the red rocks.  If Uptown ever hosts multiple nail salons and storefront churches, I’d have reason to worry that Sedona is faltering as a premier resort destination.  Then again, maybe it would mean the market base has gone back to embracing the Sedona strip mall.  Stranger things have happened.  Just ask the good folks of aspiring vacation town Roswell, New Mexico.