Not Quite on Target

The downside of "mixed-use development" urbanism

Back in March, Target announced the impending closure of two D.C.-area stores. There are a lot of Targets scattered around the D.C. suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. A couple of them are older, so when I saw the headline I thought Target might be paring down its oldest strip-retail locations—to focus, perhaps, on expanding its emerging small-format stores in more urban locations.

But I read the article, and that is not the case. In fact, these two Targets are among the metro area’s newest locations. One opened in 2015; the other opened in late 2016 or early 2017.

And would you look at them. First, in College Park, Maryland:

And second, in Falls Church, Virginia:

Not only are they newer stores; they anchor large new apartment buildings, turning them into mixed-use developments. The one in College Park is right in the middle of the main drag, a boon for carless students in particular. It was met with excitement, given the city’s relative lack of walkable everyday shopping, and seen as part of a larger urban transformation of the area. “More high-end student apartments are going up on Route 1, and last week Target announced plans to open one of the nation’s first Target Express stores inside one of them,” wrote Maryland urbanist Dan Reed in early 2015.

The Washington Post article Reed cites identifies the College Park mini-Target as only 14,617 square feet, roughly the size of a CVS or Walgreens. These stores include a fresh and frozen grocery section and a smattering of offerings from most of the expected departments, albeit with greatly reduced selection. The Post also noted that at the time, there were only three other small-format Targets in the nation.

Target itself, in 2019, boasted that it had opened nearly 100 of these mini-Targets, heavily skewed toward college towns, and that it was still opening them across the country. As far a I can tell, that hasn’t changed overall; plenty of these stores do survive.

Here’s what they look like inside:

But, sadly:

The fact is, most non-students, and many students with a car, probably were hopping in the car and driving to the Hyattsville, or slightly further Greenbelt, locations all along, neither of which is terribly convenient to visit without a car. And while the small-format Targets—sometimes affectionately called “baby Targets”—are useful, they’re not the true one-stop-shop emporiums that traditional Target stores are.

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The immediate reason for these closures is probably poor store performance. Despite all of the people living nearby, it’s just not enough. But this particular challenge underscores the broader issue with mixed use as a developer-driven concept, where you try to reverse engineer something like an urban neighborhood by getting one or a few chain stores on board.

The fundamental problem is that the economics of a Target, or a modern supermarket, are very different from the economics of a genuine neighborhood store. They just aren’t scaled for this kind of local neighborhood setting. Everybody in a new apartment building would probably appreciate a discount department store or a supermarket on the ground floor, or right next door.

But the business model of discount department stores and supermarkets precludes that. In the old days, when every small town had its own economic ecosystem, all those towns had their own hardware stores, butchers, bakeries, grocery stores, bookstores, etc. Those businesses were scaled to serve perhaps no more than a few hundred people, and rarely more than a few thousand. So were their supply chains.

But the “trade areas” of modern stores are larger, and simply shrinking the physical footprint doesn’t quite turn a Target into a neighborhood general store.

Take a look at these photos I took in Gainesville, Virginia, an exurban Northern Virginia community:

These are two different vacant supermarkets, both adjacent to relatively recent dense housing, and both intended to create mixed-use developments. They’re about two miles apart. A Wegmans opened up nearby, and drove them out of business. Now two “mixed-use developments” have no supermarket, and like everybody else, their residents have to drive to Wegmans whether they want to or not.

You cannot—or you can, only with difficulty and luck—build traditional urbanism out of suburban, car-oriented building blocks. Target, perhaps, is learning this. Those erstwhile supermarkets learned it.

I hope that this isn’t the beginning of a collapse or oversaturation of the mixed-use development model, because it’s better than the alternative. But I do hope it gets us thinking more deeply and seriously about how to spur genuine mixed-use development, more than attempting to reverse-engineer mixed-use developments.

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Related Reading:

There’s a Small Hotel

Urbanist Sprawl

It’s the Scale (Is it?)

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