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202 articles

Towamencin Shopping Village: a strip mall, all dressed up for a date, but not a single suitor. (MONTAGE)

April 28, 2023 8 Comments

I’ve featured more derelict malls and shopping centers than the average reader can shake a selfie stick at. (An apt reference, since the oldest chroniclers of struggling retail—the sites DeadMalls.com and LabelScar.com—haven’t received updates since the popularization of the selfie stick. But they were great sites when I first started blogging!) As far as depressed

Excess parking in strip malls: is it necessary to build out enough space for Black Friday?

April 15, 2023 4 Comments

Urban planning, like most disciplines, endures its fair share of fads and passing fancies, many of which the advocates manage to elevate to temporary orthodoxy. And if “temporary orthodoxy” seems like an oxymoron, it shouldn’t require a great deal of introspection to realize that many orthodoxies remain doctrinaire for about a decade. And then they

Washington Walmart winnowing: why would the Waltons want to whitewash the weakness of their windowpanes?

April 7, 2023 12 Comments

I generally shy from events that are hot off the presses, not only because I’m not a good journalist for breaking news, but because I like things to simmer a bit. My work is less reporting and more empirical analysis. Forming a conclusion before the dust has settled is usually unwise, since the passage of

One-way streets downtown: are they really a revitalization dead end?

February 27, 2023 4 Comments

Among transportation planners, it is almost universally acknowledged that two-way streets are healthier for downtown vitality than one-way streets. Storefronts on two-way streets tend to command higher lease rates, indicating that demand among prospective tenants is greater than a similar storefront that fronts a one-way street. It’s not because one-way streets get less traffic; in

Corporate bookstores morph and recede: are they keeping up with the 1990s?

January 29, 2023 7 Comments

For the book-lovers among us, it’s hard to believe that Borders Books and Music has been defunct now for over ten years. It was one of the first and most obvious high-profile casualties of Amazon, the latter of which nipped away at the revenue stream of what had previously been the nation’s largest bookstore, peaking

Masking rules modified: small businesses play the UNO reverse card.

January 22, 2023 2 Comments

I’ll try not to get smug about this, but bear with me if I’m a little sententious about the ironies I’m witnessing, particularly regarding social distancing and masking rules for which we are rapidly approaching the three-year corona-versary. I’ll concede this much: few municipalities if any are still actively imposing restrictions at this point. Not

The last Sears in Maryland: a final sympathy visit while in hospice care.

January 9, 2023 16 Comments

This is probably beating a dead horse: it’s Sears article. Again. I’ve featured the declining department store many times on the blog; back in the early 2010s, it was still a ubiquitous presence in American malls. And I last covered Sears just six months ago, when I found an operating store in Francis Scott Key

Rural strip mall: why struggle for tenants, when there’s nothing else around?

December 25, 2022 3 Comments

When it comes to human-conceived implements—tools—the maxim “form follows function” usually applies. Whether it be a saw, a trowel, a baster, or a protractor, the object in question has evolved to fit the best intersection of ergonomics (most conducive to the human hand) and its capacity to achieve a desired result as a certain implement:

Family-run fiascos: small business as a coronavirus casualty deserves a post-mortem.

December 20, 2022 5 Comments

As the end of 2022 approaches, it’s essentially a truism that coronavirus-inspired closures devastated many small businesses. For a brief period, the unemployment rate was as high as 14.4% (the rate in April 2020), a condition on par with the peak of the Great Recession, but it got there much more quickly this time around.

Adult-oriented businesses in the burbs: a veritable lion’s den for innocent impalas.

November 27, 2022 35 Comments

Several years ago, a perfectly ordinary drive-thru Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in Indianapolis flourished, collecting business both from locals in the area (near the south side enclave of Southport), and, most likely, people passing through the city along Interstate 65, for which there was an exit ramp from Southport Road just a few hundred feet

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