A roughly $2 billion redevelopment of the old Chesterfield Mall is moving forward now that the old mall officially closed its doors over the weekend.
The development by The Staenberg Group dubbed “Downtown Chesterfield” looks to bring around 2,700 new residential units and millions more square feet for office, retail, grocery, restaurant or other uses on the 117-acre site.
“We don’t want to call it a suburban downtown. It’s an urban downtown in a suburban location,” said Tim Lowe, Staenberg’s senior vice president of development. “We’re trying to create something that will appeal to people that are looking for those extra amenities that come with a downtown environment.”
It’s a project that takes cues from similar ones that have been built across the country in recent years in places like Austin, Dallas, Phoenix and San Jose, Lowe explained. The Chesterfield area already has a long retail strip center in the Commons, an outlet mall and an entertainment center in the District, he added.
“The logical complimentary use was a high-end urban mix(ed) use downtown,” Lowe said.
Earlier this year in February, Chesterfield formally entered an agreement with The Staenberg Group to redevelop the mall, which will include tax increment financing up to $352 million for improvements to public infrastructure, including roads, sidewalks, utilities and parking. The rest of the multi-billion dollar project will be privately financed, Lowe said.
Other parts of the country are also contending with malls of the past in suburban areas that aren’t performing as well as they once did, said June Williamson, a professor at the City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture, who studies suburban retrofitting.
“We overbuilt, so there’s an inevitable process of a certain number of these developments failing,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity to retool and refit so that the mall property is maturing along with its neighboring areas.”
Williamson points out that most of the population in North America has lived and continues to live in city suburbs and that high density developments shouldn’t exclusively exist in central urban cores.
“It’s not a zero-sum game,” she said. “The suburbs are not a homogeneous kind of environment. You find smaller cities, walkable pockets and mixed-use areas that are highly desirable for folks.”
And some people want urban living but don’t want to live in the central part of a region, Williamson said.
That represents a key opportunity Lowe sees with this new development in Chesterfield, he said.
“In our market, we don’t really have living opportunities for people who might be empty nesters or people who don’t want to own a single-family home anymore but don’t just want a suburban apartment complex,” he said.
Assistant Chesterfield City Manager Elliot Brown explained The Staenberg Group has prior experience with development in the city and has a pulse on what the community wants.
“As they were developing their redevelopment plan, they did a lot of community feedback and outreach,” he said. “So they feel they’ve brought a proposal to the city that is going to benefit the current residents.”
While the mall’s closure is bittersweet, a multi-billion dollar development to replace it brings excitement, Brown said.
“I know a lot of residents were sad when it was initially announced, but I think everybody now is hopeful that the redevelopment project that is planned is going to be taking off,” he said.
It’s a project already years in the making as The Staenberg Group started acquiring property at the mall about five years ago, he said. The group started with the old Sears building, then amassed the mall itself, the Macy’s building and some of the outer parcels, Lowe said.
“As we saw them all continue to fail we realized that there would be a redevelopment opportunity,” he said.
The development project kicks into its next phase on October 15 when the mall demolition begins.
After that six-month process, the developer will spend another year preparing the site for new construction before developers who want to build residential spaces can start, Lowe said.
“What we (would) like to do is get a nice offering, maybe 1000 residential units open in that 2028-2029 timeframe,” he said. “Truly create a community and then organically continue to add residential, office, retail as demand dictates.”
There will also be bicycle and walking paths that connect to the nearby amphitheater, library, YMCA and Clayco’s $1 billion Wildhorse Village development, Lowe said. The entire build-out of Downtown Chesterfield is expected to take about 10 to 15 years as demand for more residential, retail, entertainment or other uses drives what eventually is built, he added.
“The worst thing you can do is build for nobody,” he said. “Once we get that first phase in and create that nice community it will organically grow over time.”
