Metro North Mall redeveloper aims for makeover by 2015

By Rob Roberts

Metro North Mall owner MD Management Inc. plans to complete redevelopment of the long-distressed retail site as a one-story, two-anchor enclosed mall by fall 2015.

Garry Hayes, MD Realty director of leasing, updated members of the Clay County Economic Development Council on the mall plans during a strategic planning meeting Wednesday at the Shoal Creek Golf Club.

Hayes said redevelopment of the mall, located at U.S. Highway 169 and Barry Road, would cost at least $200 million. It will increase to three the number of enclosed malls serving a metropolitan area once served by 11.

Though Oak Park Mall and Independence Center have been the only two survivors from that group, Hayes said extensive market research had found demand for a new enclosed mall in the Northland.

"People say the lifestyle center is the mall of the future," Hayes said. "But if you poll the public, you will hear the opposite."

The shopping public demands more climate-controlled retail experiences, he said. But the new Metro North Mall, which will get a new name due to the negative perception attached to the current one, "won't be your grandmother's mall," Hayes said.

To compete with Internet shopping, next-generation malls must include attractions that generate excitement, he said. Hayes said MD Management was still researching the types of attractions to include at Metro North but mentioned two — a courtyard for events in front of the new mall and a theater/entertainment complex behind it — during Wednesday's meeting.

He also shared PowerPoint slides of the new mall concept, which calls for 900,000 to 950,000 square feet of retail space within a curved mall layout and pad sites.

Opened in 1976 as a two-level, four-anchor enclosed mall covering 1.3 million square feet, Metro North had sunk to 17.3 percent occupancy and a single anchor, Macy's, when planning for the redevelopment effort began three years ago.

The project was delayed by the reluctance of ZR Metro LLC, a partnership affiliated with ownership of Zona Rosa, to let go of the former Dillard's site at Metro North. ZR Metro LLC acquired the site in 2008, when Dillard's moved its Metro North store five miles west to Zona Rosa, a mixed-use development that opened in 2004. But the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority of Kansas City, which granted MD Management development rights for the Metro North site in 2010, subsequently condemned the Dillard's site and prevailed in a 2012 lawsuit through which ZR Metro LLC sought to block the forced sale of the property.

Hayes declined to divulge the purchase price for the site, which includes the old Dillard's building and 14 acres. But he told the Clay County EDC that "we now have full control of the 106 acres," including the Dillard's site.

Hayes said all of the current structures on the mall site would be scrapped as part of the redevelopment. But Macy's, which has committed to a new, 140,000-square-foot space to be constructed on the east end of the new mall, will remain in its current building on the west end until the new space is completed.

Hayes, who just returned from the International Council of Shopping Centers convention in Las Vegas, said there had been a lot of interest among the department stores MD Management is courting to become the second anchor at Metro North. In response to an audience member's question, he added that the new mall also should be able to attract upscale stores such as Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel that Northtown residents currently have to drive to south Johnson County to visit.

MD Management still must clear incentive and financing hurdles, Hayes said. But he said the Metro North mall project and other redevelopment efforts along the Barry Road corridor were benefiting from the growing number of upscale homes in the area and the promise of more.

A public-private partnership involving Kansas City, the KCI Corridor Tax Increment Financing Plan, Hunt Midwest and MD Management is financing construction of sanitary sewers in the First and Second Creek Watershed north of Barry Road. The construction, which began this year, will allow development of about 15,000 acres, which will lead to the addition of 21,000 homes and 70,000 residents, Hayes said.