Urban recycling: not a bad (unironic) beer in the box.

-->A recycling station housed in an old factory building might not seem like a novel concept, particularly in a city with a plethora of underutilized or vacant industrial space.  Like Detroit.

And even the appearance of it—a pastiche of industrial chic, street artistry, found objects, and, yes, even a pretty extensive panoply of bins of reusable materials, all monitored by reliably bearded and tattooed staffers—is probably closer to the mental image of what community recycling could, or should, look like.  “Taking out the trash” isn’t just utilitarian and mundane; it’s fashionable, eye-catching and even sorta fun.

Despite my evocation of hipster clichés, Recycle Here! feels like a novelty, at least in part because it’s among the few ways that residents of the Detroit can divert their discarded objects from landfills.  Long notorious as the largest city in the country without a municipal recycling system (both elective and compulsory), Detroit has also striven to find creative ways to curtail the illegal dumping that took place on its copious vacant lots—much of it recyclable material. A group of Wayne State University students founded Recycle Here! in 2005 as a response to the obvious dearth of options serving Midtown, then as today an emerging neighborhood with visible signs of homespun reinvestment.

As smart as the initiative was, it couldn’t easily both fund itself and support a demand that clearly stretched well beyond Midtown.  By 2007, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program (GDRPP) began funding Recycle Here! as the City’s de facto recycling center, all while expanding its outreach by offering additional drop-off days, a broader array of recyclable materials, and satellite locations elsewhere in the city.  In addition, the partnership has allowed curbside recycling pilot programs in three neighborhoods: Rosedale Park, East English Village and Palmer Woods/University District—with intention to grow throughout the city in the long-term.  The Michigan Municipal League website points out some of the other accomplishments: a growth of over 50% each year since opening; a non-profit spin-off called Green Living Science that has educated Detroit Public Schools on recycling initiatives; a for-profit arm called GreenSafe that sells recycled products to major consumption events, like Detroit Lions games. 

Even if it’s essentially an arm of city government, the Recycle Here! facility never for a moment feels like one.  The loudspeakers churn out tunes from a diverse array of genres, no doubt reflective of the eclectic taste of whoever is in charge at that moment.  On the busiest days of operation (typically Saturdays), a local vendor offers cheap French press coffee, and various food trucks tote their comestibles in the outside parking lot.  Another staffer sells screen printed t-shirts, virtually all of them featuring the ingenious and ubiquitous Recycle Here! bumblebee logo, designed by local artist Carl Oxley III:

And the bumblebee receives its share of competition from the other sculptures and murals that form a consistent backdrop to the more utilitarian goings-on up front:

If it isn’t already obvious, Recycle Here! has achieved what it ostensibly needed to do in order to ensure survivability: it evolved into a smartly-branded community gathering place.  And it’s a good thing it works so well: the process of recycling here is far from hassle-free.

Yes, the bins separate Styrofoam peanuts from other types of Styrofoam.  Visitors also have to hold all their plastics up to the light to see if the etching indicates a #1 or #2 (one bin) or #3 through #7 (a separate series of bins).  And cardboard gets separated from office paper, which in turn has a separate bin from newspaper, as well as glossy paper.

And less common materials need separating too.

Clear glass could contain a lot of items: salad dressings, pasta sauce, artichoke hearts, pickled pigs’ lips.  But colored glass usually captures a discrete family of consumable products.

Booze.  These days, varietals of wine do not delineate social strata that easily; even a few highbrow wines might reach the dinner table in a cardboard box.  But it’s very easily to distinguish consumers by the type of beer they drink.  And the beer bottles at Recycle Here! overwhelmingly fit a certain category: the non-corporate.

Whether it’s a microbrew from the Upper Peninsula or a Singaporean IPA, the beers being recycled here are the opposite of what about 85% of America drinks.  No watered-down Coors, Michelob, Budweiser.  The only beers found in the bins that would pass as mainstream working-class Americana are Pabst Blue Ribbon or this Miller High Life, like the one strangely perched, unopened, on the rim of the Clear Glass bin.

In other words, hipster beers.

Probably I’m going out on a limb by making inferences about cultures by the type of beers they consume, but not really, or at least not enough.  I don’t think we witness a dearth of Budweiser bottles because Detroiters simply don’t drink cheap beer.  I think the beers we see in these bins broadly reflects the ethos of people who go out of their way to recycle, and in Detroit, “going out of the way is” precisely what most people have to do.  In short, the act of recycling not only requires the active involvement of driving to the facility (at least for everyone outside those three affluent pilot neighborhoods), it also requires extensive separation once you get there.  If you have two boxes to deposit, it could take you over an hour to get it all done.   The staff at Recycle Here! makes the compelling argument that their approach not only ensures more material gets successfully recycled than if it all gets lumped together, but it also encourages the population to become more invested in the process.  While this may be true, it almost undoubtedly also scares off a huge contingent who simply doesn’t want to be bothered.

Thus, Recycle Here! succeeds because there are enough Detroiters, favorably disposed toward urban living, educated enough to have some disposable income, and predominantly left-of-center, all of whom at least value the idea of sustainability in its various incarnations: locally sourced food, fair trade or free-range growing practices, and non-corporate brews with higher alcohol content (and higher prices).  It fits like a hand in glove, and the fact that quality French press coffee gets served on Saturdays makes as much sense as the absence of a vendor selling McDonald’s, no matter how much Mickey Dee’s coffee has improved in recent years.  Through Recycle Here! and the pilot programs in those selective, higher-income, stable neighborhoods, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program has found the right niche to plant a seed.  It offers a confident start to set the trajectory for a city-wide recycling system.

Now if only they could figure out where all those bottles of Bud Lite are going.

Vesuvius erupts in the prairie.

In the world’s most overbuilt nation for retail space, any outside influence can induce an infinitesimal change that nonetheless completely transforms the landscape for commerce.  The retailers who continue to succeed in this economy—particularly impressive given the growing portent of online shopping’s eventual dominance—help shed light on what type of structures/milieus they are seeking to house the goods that they sell.  White-collar workers are broadly familiar with the Class A/B/C ranking of office space, but what if we applied this system to retail?  My suspicion is that, based on occupancy levels and the tenant mix, the average American metro area has about 10% at class A, 40% at class B, and a whopping 50% at Class C—the low-end structures that desperately snatch up any tenant they can get.  In relation to the demand, the supply of retail in this country is outrageous, and there’s no sign of this supply flagging, since developers continue to build new strip malls on raw land.

At any rate, retailers enjoy the privilege of calling the shots in a national market that suffers from this plethora of supply.  And it allows for an anthropological study of commercial epochs, by exhuming the remains from within shopping sarcophagi from yesteryear.  Take this one, for example:

 

The name “Venture” and its black-and-white logo are unlikely to be familiar to anyone outside of the Lower Midwest, or anyone who has not yet graduated high school.  But for the rest of us, it was a prominent name in the mid-1990s.  Based out of O’Fallon, Missouri (a suburb of St. Louis), Venture was a discount all-purpose store trying to gain a national foothold at the same time that Wal-Marts and Targets were proliferating wildly.  Needless to say, Venture lost to those two giants and filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 1998, then closed all its stores later that year.

My memory of Venture depends on its fiercely confident advertising campaign launched on Indianapolis a few years prior; I can still remember the jingle to the radio/TV commercials.  While it positioned itself as the new challenger to Target (much more than Wal-Mart), I never got the feeling it inspired a lot of confidence.  I’m pretty certain it choked in Indy a few years before it folded completely.  If it survived even four years in my hometown’s market, I’d be surprised.

The sign from the above photo comes from an old shopping center in Fairmont City, Illinois, a small, incorporated stretch of land between two larger and more prominent St. Louis suburbs of East St. Louis and Collinsville.  By this point, many Americans know of the formidable struggles East St. Louis has endured over the years.  Burgeoning in population through industrial and railroad growth after the Civil War, the city achieved its population peak (like so many in the Rust Belt) of 82,000 at around 1950.  It even earned All-American City recognition in 1959.  But de-industrialization and the diminishing importance of freight rail hit the city hard, instigating a precipitous population loss that continues to this day.

As of 2010, the city had 27,000 inhabitants—less than 1/3 its rate from sixty years prior.  Racial tensions undoubtedly amplified problems in East St. Louis; the city suffered a serious racially motivated riot in 1917.  In the ensuing decades, the white flight that took place in older industrial cities across the country across the country managed to culminate in the almost complete desertion of East St. Louis, which today this day is nearly 98% black.  Needless to say, people of all races with enough wherewithal have striven to get out of East St. Louis for quite some time.  It typically ranks near the top small cities in America for percentage of population in poverty.  As is typically the case, these people evacuating East St. Louis, few of whom have a great deal of assets to begin with (housing equity in ESL is next to nothing), quite logically move to the next tranche of housing affordability, which are typically the (slightly) more economically healthy communities nearby.  The migration pattern around East Saint Louis is obvious: abutting municipalities such as Washington Park, Centreville, and Cahokia now suffer similar conditions.  These three communities, originally early 20^th century bedroom communities that swelled from the white flight after 1950, now have profiles similar to the core city from where the flight began: poverty is above 20% in each, and the African American population ranges from 55% to 95% (despite the fact that St. Clair County as a whole is only 29% black).  Those with more continue to flee from those with less.

The aforementioned village of Fairmont City also sits in close proximity to East Saint Louis, but its ethnic shift falls under different contours.  Originally settled by Central European immigrants, the non-Hispanic white population plunged asLatino settlers moved in, pushing the Hispanic population above 55%.  Fairmont City’s population hasn’t dropped like the other communities listed; in fact, it grew from about 2400 to 2600 over the last ten years.  But the newcomers, often non-English speaking, lack the same purchasing power as their long established white predecessors.  How does this shape the commercial landscape?

It’s not so much that Venture went out of business in 1998; it’s that nothing has come to replace it, or at least nothing with enough capital and staying power to justify removing that sign with the old logo.  A cruddy photograph below suggests that the shopping center might still claim some marginal tenants:

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get a good image of the store as I zipped by, but it appears that it still might host (or has recently hosted) some sort of showroom for racing cars.  But it’s obviously not an establishment with enough capital to replace the “Venture” sign along the road, and it doesn’t appear the owners could conceal all of the old logo on the sign attached to the building.  Perhaps it didn’t matter enough: the checkered flag and the diagonal stripes still use the same black-and-white motif.

For Fairmont City, with a poverty rate now hovering around 15%, economic disinvestment has induced retail stagnancy, forcing a chronological deep freeze on basic advertising and signage.  Or, to use the metaphor in this essay’s title, a volcano suddenly erupted and halted economic advancement in its tracks.  Apparently as recently as 1995—when Venture stores were at their peak—the Fairmount City area could economically support this competitor of Target.  Not anymore.  The middle class fled that quickly.  This aging big box may eventually find a new tenant, though the demographic shift doesn’t suggest that a widely known national chain is itching to move in.  But it could be just the right size—and location—for a supermercado.

MONTAGE: Stratification across the river.

Late last year I featured an article on the unusual Oxford Valley Mall in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a mostly upper-middle income suburban region of Philadelphia.  It’s a distinctive mall because it’s simultaneously both low-rent and affluent: it has such high-end tenants as Williams Sonoma or Swarovski, but it also has Five Below, Dollar Hut, and a number of mom-and-pop establishments that you’d typically only see in struggling or dying malls.  This is unusual, since most malls either assume a uniformly upward trajectory, or they manifest their gradual decline.  Meanwhile, Oxford Valley has a higher vacancy rate than it probably should, especially since one of the four department stores has been empty for several years.  But it’s still attracting new tenants, both fancy and downmarket: Sephora (the former) and H&R Block (the latter) are opening in the mall over the upcoming weeks.  So what’s the verdict on Oxford Valley?  Is it on the fritz or will it persevere?

I’m not from Bucks County and haven’t gotten to witness it over the years, so it’s hard for me to form much of a judgment.  But it’s not the only mall in the area that suffers from this strange split personality.  Just across the river, in Windsor Township, New Jersey, the Quaker Bridge Mall must grapple with an equally uncertain future. 

It’s not far at all: less than 15 miles from Oxford Valley.  Like the Pennsylvania mall, Simon Property Group manages the space.  In fact, the story here is so similar to its predecessor, I’m going to intervene minimally with text and let the pictures tell most of the story.

Quaker Bridge Mall opened in 1975, just two years after Oxford Valley.  Like its Pennsylvania counterpart, Quaker Bridge sits in a mostly affluent suburban area, just a stone’s throw away from Route 1.  It, too, contains over one million square feet across two floors, though Oxford Valley has it beat in size by about a quarter million.  (Quaker Bridge just barely passes the one million mark.)  Both malls feature four department stores, though only Quaker Bridge can claim occupancy in all of them.  The ubiquitous J.C. Penney, Sears, and Macy’s take three of the spaces, while Quaker Bridge’s most prestigious department store is the Lord and Taylor, featured above.

In addition, if one were to judge the affluence of a mall by its interior aesthetics, Quaker Bridge would probably come out ahead.

The shiny, white faux-marble floors and the relative lack of ornamentation evoke contemporary notions of privileged consumption a bit more precisely than the dowdy, middlebrow appearance of Oxford Valley.  To top it off, Simon Property Group (50% owner as well as manager) was investing in a full renovation at the end of 2012.

Apparently, until recently, Simon had bolder ambitions for this property: the company hoped to inject a distinctively upscale vibe through a 600,000 square foot expansion that would include Nordstrom, Nieman Marcus, and about 100 new inline stores and restaurants.  The recession a few years later put the kibosh on those plans, and these days the renovations are a bit more modest: new flooring, ceilings, lighting, signage, hand railings, and landscaping.  And apparently within the past year, Simon leased a newly constructed space to The Cheesecake Factory attached to the mall and widely visible from the parking lot.

The presence of a recognized restaurant chain at Quaker Bridge further enhances its advantage over Oxford Valley; while the Bucks County mall can claim a few outparcel restaurants, none are physically connected to the mall.  A drive around the perimeter of Oxford Valley reveals nothing more than a blank wall; the mall orients itself completely inward.  Simon also has made no announcements regarding any upgrades at Oxford Valley.  Regardless of the scaled-down ambitions at Quaker Bridge, the fact that Simon Property Group has invested in both renovation and new restaurant construction suggests the company’s confidence in the long-term viability in the mall.

All of the above conditions indicate that Quaker Bridge enjoys more auspicious economic forecasts than its counterpart across the Delaware River.  But does it?   To the right of The Cheesecake Factory in the photo above is an entrance to the mall, and as soon as a visitor walks through the doors, this is what he or she sees:

The checkerboard motif coupled with intermittent yellow accents suggests California Pizza Kitchen to me, though if Quaker Bridge hosted a branch of this popular restaurant in the past, it must have folded a long time ago; I can find no online evidence that it existed here.  Across from the old CPK?

The photo featured earlier, with the renovation explanations, also shrouds a huge vacant in-line storefront.  This entire minor entrance corridor is vacant.  Proceeding through this passageway to the mall’s main commercial spine, the vacancies are glaring:

Quite a few on the upper floor as well.  It has reliable tenants, like New York and Company:

And a Hallmark store, which seems to be more prevalent in the Northeast than it does in the Midwest.

The typically commodious Forever 21 seems to be taking a major space in the near future:

But much of the floor is patchy.

That Wendy’s is a real oddity.  It’s all by itself on the second floor—no other restaurants nearby.  In mall milieus, one usually finds a Wendy’s in either the food court or an outparcel in the vast parking lot.  The fact that the Wendy’s is isolated reveals two other leasing hurdles the mall is trying to overcome.  The first of these hurdles is that the mall currently lacks any real food court.

Apparently one is on the way, but, in the meantime, the management has crammed remaining fast-food eateries in an unpleasant passageway leading to another mall exit.

Not much to look at, and the eatery options are meager.  Despite the thick crowds, this hallway cannot attract better tenants than a locally owned convenience store:

One typically only sees the likes of QB Express in seriously struggling malls.  The second of the two hurdles that explains the oddly located Wendy’s is that the mall didn’t need an appropriate tenant at this space; it just needed any tenant.  To put it frankly, Quaker Bridge will take whatever tenant it can get to put a dent in its approximately 20% in-line vacancy rate.

So maybe Quaker Bridge is floundering?  The Star-Ledger article that I cited earlier acknowledged that the mall recently ushered in a slew of new upscale online tenants, such as Michael Kors, Sephora, Teavana, and Sur la Table.  It also can claim the following choosy tenants:

And a few other specialty retailers are on their way:

But the current retail mix does not seem like the type that could usher in a Neiman Marcus.  I was quite surprised to see cash-for-gold store at this mall—a service that spouted like mushrooms about the time of the Great Recession.

And just take a look at the mall’s deadest wing, over by J.C. Penney:

The notion that J.C. Penney would be the least active section of a mall surprised me; after all, most of my mall tours of the past have proven that Sears is the typical Achilles’ heel.  (I blogged about it a while ago.)  But the general profile of the J.C Penney wing at Quaker Bridge is emptiness or unknown mom-and-pop stores.

As far as I can tell, this is the only location in the nation for Pelle and Company.  It doesn’t seem to have a website.  Just a few yards away, Belgium Jewelers reminds me of the sort of retailer one might see in a second or third-tier mall in Dubai:

Peering over the balcony to the floor below, witness another unknown:

The only other location for this mom-and-pop called Rubee?  None other than Oxford Valley Mall.  Rubee doesn’t have its own domain, but at least it has a Facebook page.  Elsewhere on the lower floor are a few more obscurities:

The Grand Fragrances store again looks like exactly something from Dubai of the 1990s.  Another little-known vendor along the J.C. Penney wing seems to have folded.

Meanwhile, Arthur Murray Dance Studio may be a national name, but its reduced hours and relative lack of impromptu visitors makes it an undesirable fit for a major mall.

After all, it was already closing down on the busy weekend night that I took these photos.  Simon Property wouldn’t even consider a dance studio if this mall commanded top-dollar leases.  The bleakest part of the J.C. Penney wing, however, is the cluster of inline stores directly abutting the entrance to J.C. Penney’s itself.

A Payless Shoes in a mall with upscale aspirations?  Not likely.  But J.C. Penney has suffered meager revenues these past few years, and, despite all the renovations taking place at the Quaker Bridge Mall, the management at J.C. Penney’s has apparently postponed updating this particular branch to the new “jcp” logo that is becoming more commonplace.  Then again, since it’s the third logoin as many years, it’s probably understandable that a floundering department store isn’t willing to hedge its bets at a conspicuously transitional mall.

As mentioned earlier, demographics around Quaker Bridge loosely echo those of Oxford Valley: both are mostly upper-middle class suburban areas with large foreign-born populations, which lean poorer in the older urban sections and wealthier in the newer exurbs.  This New Jersey side may be more extreme though: just a few miles away down Route 1 from Quaker Bridge sits the state capital, Trenton, a swatch of intensely concentrated poverty.  Conversely, the neighboring suburbs of Princeton and West Windsor Township far surpass anything in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in terms of affluence.  But Quaker Bridge also hosts a more intensive concentration of retail within a mile radius, because several newish “power centers” (inward turning strip malls) stretch along this same segment of Route 1: Mercer Mall, Nassau Park Mall, Windsor Green, and the Square at West Windsor.  The purlieus of Quaker Bridge Mall offer a ton of shopping options, all of them competitors of Simon Property Group with discrete goals of skimming away some of the choicier tenants at the forty-year-old enclosed mall.

Quaker Bridge might be more worthy than Oxford Valley of a follow-up blog in a year or two; it is, after all, under renovation (albeit a modest one), and it would be interesting to see if Simon’s original vision ever materializes.  At present, though, all the judgments I made in my Oxford Valley article—income disparities, the over representation of malls, and the increasingly diverse consumer base—still apply at Quaker Bridge.  The economic fortunes of these two populous, culturally dissimilar states may ultimately prove the stronger determining factor regarding which (if any) mall prevails.