When Science Class is in a former Macy’s
In the early morning of November, while it is still cold, three lines of cars crawl across the open, cracked parking lot at the Sumter Mall in Sumter, SC
It will be hours before the doors open at Belk, a department store with roots in the Southeast and the mall’s last remaining tenant. The mall, which is about 60 percent vacant, has a mix of other tenants. Call center employees park or are dropped off for their shifts. People head to a nearby Planet Fitness.
But across the parking lot, dozens of young children are running out of cars and through the entrance to a shopping center. They don’t play hooky; they go to school in a former JC Penney store. And if all goes according to plan, they will live there for years to come as the school adds more grades every year and takes over more of the mall.
Developers across the country are putting new schools in struggling malls, a growing trend that serves several purposes: expanding educational opportunities, revitalizing communities and reimagining the thousands of vacant retail spaces that are turning once-vibrant malls into blights .
“We’ve certainly seen all kinds of alternative uses for shopping centers — to redevelop them, repurpose them and reimagine them,” said Thomas Dobrowski, vice chairman of the capital markets group at Newmark, a real estate services company.
Mr. Dobrowski added that more mall owners were coming around to the idea of adding schools as retail tenants dropped out. “I remember shopping centers where 10,000 to 15,000 square feet were devoted to schools,” he said. “Now more higher education and schools want to put vacant anchor boxes into full educational use. That could be 80,000 square meters and more.”
Nationally, the vacancy rate in shopping centers was about 10.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, compared to 10.2 percent during the pandemic. according to a report from Moody’s Analytics.
Community shopping centers like the one in Sumter have been hit even harder as consumer tastes change. “Retailers traditionally located in malls have closed underperforming stores and are now looking to smaller open-air centers in the suburbs for expansion,” said commercial real estate services firm CBRE. recent report.
But at Sumter Mall, a combination of community initiative, philanthropic interest and pragmatism on the part of the mall’s owner, Hull Property Group, has led to the creation of a new tenant, Liberty STEAM Charter School.
The school was founded five years ago by Greg A. Thompson, a local businessman and philanthropist, who was looking for a way to boost his hometown’s fortunes and help him attract employees. Liberty STEAM plans to add a grade each year, with a fourth grade coming in the fall.
“Our mission is to prove that we can provide world-class education to everyone, especially our underprivileged children,” he said. In Sumter, only 30 percent of students can read, write or do math at their grade level.
Liberty STEAM didn’t start in a mall. Initially, classes were held in an unused elementary school in an underserved part of Sumter, but the school quickly outgrew the space (although the building still houses kindergarten and first grade).
After looking for a larger space, Mr. Thompson, the founder and chief executive of Thompson Construction Group, chose the huge, mostly empty mall after failing to close deals on more traditional school buildings in the city , which has approximately 43,000 inhabitants. . It gives Liberty STEAM room to add grades over the next decade, as well as other services for children.
“We want to focus on the whole child,” Mr. Thompson said. “As we grew the school, we had conversations about having a doctor there. We also want to have a small clinic and an ophthalmologist there.”
Mr Dobrowski said the scheme offered many benefits for schools and landlords. Shopping centers are generally located in high traffic areas, so they are easy to get to. And they can be a blank canvas for a school to reimagine what the inside should look like.
For owners, selling or leasing the site of a former school anchor tenant brings life to what was once a dark, empty part of a major shopping center, revitalizing 400,000 square feet or more of unused space. The conversions are also a great driver of goodwill in the community.
“You don’t get the same rent as a retail tenant or a medical office tenant,” Mr. Dobrowski said. “It should be used more as, ‘How can I improve the community and ingratiate myself here?’”
In Sumter, Liberty STEAM executive director Trevor T. Ivey said the move to the mall was in line with the school’s revitalization mission. “It’s important that people understand that the mall is part of the approach of revitalizing our community and renovating the buildings,” he said.
High Point Academy in Spartanburg, SC, is an example of how a school is part of a larger redesign. It occupies a space in an outlet mall that once housed a Waccamaw Pottery store and was home to a church before the academy moved in. The mall now has a volleyball center and a medical office to complement the school.
James M. Hull, founder of the Hull Property Group, which owns and manages the Sumter Mall and another three dozen malls in 18 states, said Liberty STEAM was the third school in one of the company’s malls. The other two are in Greenwood, SC, and Augusta, Georgia.
When he considered putting schools in his shopping centers, he did so with an eye to the overall return on investment. “I’m not doing any of this for philanthropic reasons,” he said. “I do this because it is in my financial interest to be a good property manager.”
But for Mr. Thompson, who serves on Sumter’s Development Board, the investment in Liberty STEAM and the mall is part of an initiative to revitalize the city and ensure his companies can attract workers to the area and retain.
“If we want to have sustainable success, we need educational success to create the workforce of the future,” he said.
KIPP, the operator of national charter schools, has about a half-dozen schools in shopping centers, and a high school is being built in a former Macy’s store in Nashville.
“We left the four walls and mixed up the inside,” said Marc Gauthier, founder and principal of KIPP Antioch Global Middle and High Schools, which will run the middle school in the Macy’s shell. “Where the men’s division was will be our weight room. Where the escalators once were, we now get some natural light. The bottom floor will be our science laboratory.”
Reworking the Macy’s was cheaper than building a high school on farmland, which was all that was available. “After building buildings from the ground up and knowing how expensive that is, it was attractive to already have the shell, the utilities, the zoning and the parking lots,” said Daniel Gennaoui, chief financial officer of KIPP Schools in Nashville .
The renovation cost about $200 to $250 per square foot, while new construction would have cost more than $300 per square foot. “We are very cost conscious,” he says. “Every dollar we spend on a school building is a dollar we don’t spend on a teacher or a program.”
Mr Thompson said he wanted the school to serve as a model for improving education in the South East.
“More money doesn’t solve the problem,” he said. “The right vision, the right leaders and the right followers solve the problem.”