America is Over-Retailed - Too Many Stores

[kevike]

Originally Posted by Chico Loco

Over-retailed? Says who? If there were too many stores and not enough customers those stores would close.

It's self-regulating.

That's crazy talk!

[M II A II R II K]

Urban Retailers Call For More Transit, Less Parking


December 7, 2011

By Jacqueline Hlavenka

Read More: http://www.globest.com/news/12_238/n...l/-316347.html

As retailers continue to weave suburban concepts into the urban fabric, more brands—and big-boxes—are going vertical. But as the pendulum swings in favor of transit-oriented development, the nation’s top retailers agreed that the need for mass transportation is beginning to outweigh the need for traditional parking design, according to speakers during day two of the International Council of Shopping Centers’ 2011 New York National Conference & Deal Making event. The convention closed out at the Sheraton New York and Hilton New York Hotels on Tuesday afternoon, where total attendance exceeded 6,000 each day.

During the general session, much of the discussion revolved around the challenges retailers face, running the gamut from site selection, obtaining local approvals, expansion concerns and store formats. The panelists also addressed the paradigm shift of retailers like wholesale clubs and supermarkets—two concepts borne out of the suburbs—that are finding equal strength in cities, especially near subway and bus lines.

“If we could be close to mass transit, it could be absolutely critical,” said Patrick Smith, vice president of real estate at BJ’s Wholesale Club, an operator of 192 clubs and 107 gas stations across 15 states. Smith explained that despite the bulk-quality of BJs merchandise, more city customers are taking the train to its stores. “More people are using mass transit and some people walk,” he said, noting that its parking garage at Bronx Terminal Market is vastly underutilized. “For a BJ’s customer, you may think that is absolutely ridiculous. We never expected people to use mass transit to shop at a wholesale club.”

The same goes for Michael J. Shanahan, vice president of real estate at Burlington Coat Factory, who said mass transit is “absolutely a requirement” when selecting an urban location. “When we opened at Rego Park I this last September, we are right off the subway stop,” he said, explaining that while the store opening started off slow, momentum began to build as foot traffic increased by the E, M and R trains. “We got the word on the street to get people up to the third floor.”

And while mass transit is reducing the need for the amount of parking, Daniel Shallit, director of real estate for the Northeast Region at the Sports Authority, said parking cannot be totally eliminated from the retail model. “Looking at the Philadelphias of the world or the Bostons or other large urban markets, we still need it,” he said, noting that parking changes would affect store sizes. “The logic is, if you buy a treadmill at a Sports Authority, you can’t take that on a bus or a train. You need a car or you need some way to access a car to get that product home.”

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[M II A II R II K]

Urban Retail Continues its Evolution


Dec 7, 2011

By Susan Piperato

Read More: http://nreionline.com/property/retai...tion_12072011/

Cities like New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. have been successful at integrating retail into the urban mix by embracing the vertical integration of traditional shopping center retailers. But is the market oversaturated? A panel of eight national retailers and developers speaking at the International Council of Shopping Centers’ (ICSC) New York National Conference and Deal Making, held on December 5-6, agreed that, for a wide variety of reasons, urban retail “is not the last frontier, but an evolving and continuing one,” in the words of moderator Ken Narva, co-founder and managing partner of Street Works, a White Plains, N.Y.-based development and planning consultancy.

The challenges urban retail presents for developers and retailers depend on the location of the stores, the availability of mass transportation, trade area population and store product. It’s important to remember that New York City is “the ultimate urban location, it isn’t American and the rules of Manhattan don’t apply to the rest of the U.S.,” said Peter Ripka, partner at Ripco Real Estate. “No place else has 30 million people all living within 50 miles.” For urban retail to be successful, there must not be any disparity between function and urban space, said G. Lamont Blackstone, principal of G.L. Blackstone & Associates LLC, a Mount Vernon, N.Y.-based real estate development company. He noted that he often finds an “intrinsic tension” between a community’s desire for parking and the operator’s ideas.

Daniel Shallit, Sports Authority’s director or real estate for the northeast region, said that regardless of a store’s location—whether in a suburban mall or an urban vertical location—Sports Authority needs parking because “you can’t buy a treadmill and take it on the bus or train.” The company has tackled the challenge by offering more soft goods in urban locations and focusing on equipment sales in suburban stores. However, Shallit added, Sports Authority does best when located near transit hubs so that commuters taking mass transportation can notice the stores and return on weekends. Even when a store is accessible by public transportation, having a few parking spaces can’t hurt.

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East River Plaza stacks traditional power center tenants in a vertical format.

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Urbanism: When it bends the rules and breaks the law.


December 23, 2011

By Hazel Borys

Read More: http://placeshakers.wordpress.com/20...reaks-the-law/

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The US has 20 SF of retail per person. That’s massive in comparison to other countries; the next closest are Sweden at 3.3 and the UK at 2.5 SF of retail per person. So if you’re going to build more, it’s gotta be good.

- Until the mid 60′s, downtowns captured about 80% of the trade area, which was typically the county. Most downtowns declined not for market reasons, but for ill-conceived planning reasons. Now the average American downtown only captures about 2% of the retail market share of its community. The rest is sold in malls, strip centers, and online. This is defining downtown as the central business district. However, an ideal goal is a 50% capture of retail needs in each neighbourhood, including downtown.

- Retail character must change significantly along the rural-to-urban Transect in order to be successful. Two SmartCode Retail Modules lay out goals and methods for bringing retail back downtown. Retail: Sustainable Commerce by Seth Harry (4.3mb .zip) and Retail Markets by Bob Gibbs. Very important to both of these, as with the model form-based SmartCode, is that they must be calibrated locally.

- Corner Stores generally need 1,000 housetops to be successful. While this rule of thumb has many corollaries including housetop reductions for selling gas, or for when construction workers are present or for resort communities, this was one of those argued points on the tweetchat.

- 70% of all sales are after 5 pm. A downtown that closes at 5 is immediately giving up the market share. People are spending more money in less time – today’s woman will spend more money in 20 minutes than her mom did in 2 hours.

- Parking is one of the most important determinants in sustainable retail. Convenient centers need convenient parking; Main Streets must offer on-street parking. Nationally, required parking quantities have been cut in half to 4-5 cars per 1000 SF of building by most retailers. More parking is required for stand-alone stores than mixed-use centers.

- Post recession shopping centers are becoming one level, in a main street walkable format. They are surface parked with various land uses mixed horizontally rather than vertically. Pier Park Town Center in Panama City sports 1-story buildings, strip center priced construction, and tenants in a main street, walkable format. We’re often told full sized department stores don’t belong in walkable urbanism, but history shows they are appropriate and necessary.

- In 2010, average sales were $80/SF for independent retailers, $275/SF for malls, and $575/SF for the highest performing centers. Typically rents are 8-10% of gross sales. Downtowns that get the retail rules right can outperform the best malls: tenant mix, anchor, hours, parking policy, private frontage, and costs. Urban centers, to be sustainable, need to be more than employment and residential centers.

- Lifestyle centers cost $350-400/SF to build, while simple landscaping and architectural details can make a good main street cost about as much, and outperform the lifestyle center. Central to our urban retail goals is to make walkable urbanism more profitable than auto-centric sprawling patterns.

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Another corollary: if you're as good as Charleston's King Street, you don't need on-street parking out front in T5 after all. Image credit: Gibbs Planning Group.

[mhays]

I read the 20/sf figure a while back. Turns out it's misquoted here and in many places...it only counts malls. For a more complete count, others report 40 and even 50 for the US.

The foreign numbers are probably even worse. Malls are a smaller percentage of total retail space in Europe, where main streets are mainstream in most areas. Anecdotally stores tend to be smaller and denser (more stuff and people per square foot) in Europe, but I'd be surprised if the number was much less than 20 there. The 3.3 and 2.5 figures are the writer's lack of a BS detector, which is important when writing this sort of thing.

[rapid_business]

Originally Posted by mhays

I read the 20/sf figure a while back. Turns out it's misquoted here and in many places...it only counts malls. For a more complete count, others report 40 and even 50 for the US.

The foreign numbers are probably even worse. Malls are a smaller percentage of total retail space in Europe, where main streets are mainstream in most areas. Anecdotally stores tend to be smaller and denser (more stuff and people per square foot) in Europe, but I'd be surprised if the number was much less than 20 there. The 3.3 and 2.5 figures are the writer's lack of a BS detector, which is important when writing this sort of thing.

Yup, as I mentioned a couple posts earlier:

Originally Posted by rapid_business

So I've looked into this a bit more, and here is what I've found. ICSC's figures are correct at 23.8 sq.ft. per person. However, this only represents total shopping centre gross leasable area (GLA), which in 2010 was only 45.5% of the total GLA for all retail space. All figures can be found in the 2011 US fact sheet on ICSC's eData page.

Therefore, the correct figure for total retail per capita in the US as of 2010, is 52.3 sq.ft./person.

As for your European suggestion, here is a document from ICSC that talks about shopping centre growth in Europe dated from 2007. Although it doesn't show what percentage of total retail GLA is shopping centres, looking at table 5.1 in the appendix does give an estimation to work with when comparing total shopping centre employees as a percentage of the retail market in the respective countries.

As the average shows 0.226 sq. meters per capita (or 2.4 sq. ft.) of shopping centre space, that is a number we can work with. It then says in table 5.1 that the European average is 21% of all retail workers are in shopping centres. Figuring out what sq. footage would equal approx. 100% of full employment, we can roughly argue then that a rough estimate of total retail is around 11.4 sq. ft. per capita in Europe.

[mhays]

I bet workers per square foot are higher outside of malls. Maybe closer to 15?

[J. Will]

Long Island is the most underretailed market in the United States at 22sf/capita. So the 20sf/capita is obviously wrong.

[hammersklavier]

Uh wha...?

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How About Gardening or Golfing at the Mall?


February 5, 2012

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/bu...pagewanted=all

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association. So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden. “I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

- Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip. The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110.

- Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts. Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls.

- Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over. “Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

- The efforts reflect a shift in how Americans want to shop today: rather than going to big, overwhelming malls, many prefer places where stores can be entered from the street, featuring restaurants, entertainment and other Main Street mainstays. Also, as commuters in urban areas shift to public transportation, the giant parking lots are no longer needed. The Simon Property Group, a large mall operator, is remodeling 15 to 20 malls a year, said its chief operating officer, Richard Sokolov. It is adding amenities like electric-car charging stations and stadium-seating theaters, and scheduling 20,000 events a year, like cooking demonstrations.

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Gardens at the Galleria mall in Cleveland, which has branched out from standard retail fare in hopes of attracting visitors.

[1Boston]

I think towns need to start having a organized farmers markets. In my town in the summer we have a weekly farmers market in the center of town, i think its a good way to help the local economy and de-retail america a little. I know they do this in a lot of European countries, specifically france.

[M II A II R II K]

What Dollar Store Locations Reveal About America


Feb 07, 2012

By Richard Florida

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/job...-america/1115/

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Long popular among the poor, the Great Recession has been a boon to dollar stores, bringing in a whole new wave of customers. "Same-store sales, a key measure of a retailer’s health, spiked at the three large, publicly traded chains in this year’s first quarter - all were up by at least 5 percent," the Times article noted. Dollar stores have been proliferating in cities in recent years. A couple of weeks ago, Dollar General announced plans to create 6,000 new jobs and build 625 new stores; Family Dollar will open 300 new branches.

- It's not poverty that's driving the boom, but anxiety. Though 42 percent of the stores' customer base earns less than $30,000 per year, Dollar General notes that 22 percent earn $70,000 or more. Much has been written about how post-crash consumers are dialing back their spending, paying down their debts and increasing their savings - a "new normal" in which conspicuous frugality replaces conspicuous consumption. But what of the geography of dollar stores: What does their location tell us about the evolving economic geography and the geographic disparities at work across America?

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Why In-Town Big Box Stores Might Not Be As Awful As You Think


Feb 10, 2012

By Emily Badger

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/nei...ou-think/1191/

City-dwellers love to rag on big box stores. They’re large and ugly and kind of dehumanizing. They require vast seas of surface parking. They sell the antithesis of the idealized urban shopping experience, in which a shopper on foot might hit multiple locally owned specialty shops for her hardware, her art supplies and her bubble bath. What’s there to possibly like about the big-box alternative? Well, here is one factor urban critics may not have considered: What if in-town big box stores encourage people to drive less? That is, after all, a major policy objective of smart growth. Plenty of people who don’t want a big box store in their midst still drive 20 miles to get to one. Why not cut out those unnecessary emissions? And if you could go to a Sam’s Club once a month instead of a Safeway every week, wouldn’t that get people out of their cars more, too?

- In 2006, Davis residents voted on a ballot measure to amend the zoning code for a particular parcel of land off Interstate 80 in the eastern part of town. “But everyone knew it was this Target that was going to be opening at this specific site,” says Kristin Lovejoy, a UC-Davis Ph.D. student who studied what happened next. “It was totally controversial, everyone was talking about it, and there was a lot of anti-Target discussion because Davis is this sort of progressive town, where it would be counter to our aesthetics and our culture. Are we going to allow this big box store in to our idealistic town where we all go to the farmer’s market?” In fact, people did. The measure passed by 51.5 percent of the vote, and the Target opened in October of 2009.

- Lovejoy and four other researchers at the university’s Institute of Transportation Studies took the opportunity to study how the new store would change residents’ shopping and travel patterns. And it turned out, for one thing, that people in Davis were already shopping at big-box stores – they were just driving long distances to get to them. Lovejoy and her colleagues surveyed residents both before and after the store opened about where they shopped for items commonly found in a Target (bedding, electronics, garden supplies, etc.). They also asked people about their most recent shopping excursions, where exactly they went, how they got there and whether they were already on their way to somewhere else. Before the Target was built, people in Davis were traveling on average about 18 miles one-way from their homes to shopping destinations outside of town.

- The study wasn’t able to measure shopping efficiency – whether people also drove less because one trip to Target can replace multiple trips to other locations. But if you've ever walked through a Target (and you probably have, as it turned out 90 percent of the people in this study did once one opened in Davis), you know the joy of suddenly realizing “now I don’t have to go to drug store, too!” Even hard-core buy-local advocates are not immune to this epiphany. This research doesn’t mean that all big box stores will reduce VMT everywhere. There are certainly places where the opposite would be true. But to the extent that in-town shoppers are currently driving out of town to find these places – and this study tells us lots of people do this – the potential social good of reduced driving should weigh against the impulse that big box stores are just awful.

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[lakegz]

Whoever thinks America is over-retailed needs to visit some cities in China. Lots of creepy empty malls here in my city with new giant ones under construction.

[M II A II R II K]

Building Mixed-Use in tough times


February 20, 2012

By Hazel Borys

Read More: http://placeshakers.wordpress.com/20...il-on-my-mind/

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We’ve long valued mixed use as a social condenser. And those gathering places that grow naturally out of mixing uses produce the highest dollars per square foot in the surrounding neighbourhood – for developers, owners, and cities. Keeping mixed use viable in tough times makes for economic resilience, yet it’s harder than ever to finance. Necessity is coming up with all sorts of interesting inventions, often with smaller-scale, organic results.

- The first, most essential tool to enabling incremental development is the lot. Mixed use developed on a lot-by-lot basis can expand, contract, and repurpose, providing the zoning is character-based, instead of use-based. This also allows us to repurpose heritage buildings, as well as enabling small-scale infill. An incremental layering up by risk takers is then possible, and sweat-equity of entrepreneurs becomes a viable source of funds.

- We’re seeing many suburban retrofits engaging horizontal mixed use instead of vertical. The bankers relax to only contemplate one use at a time — the other day a Wells Fargo senior analyst told me to stop talking about vertical mixed use in the US until the European credit crisis calms in the spring. A few weeks before that, a California developer suggested not saying the words mixed use to bankers, but to focus on individual components.

- Not everyone’s so bearish, but the truth is local markets often don’t support more than 1-story retail right now, so a mixture of horizontal uses within a 5-minute walk still makes for a great place and is easier to finance. And it allows for smaller developers to take on a few blocks — or a few lots — which is how most great old urbanism was built. More bullish markets are building 1-story structures strong enough to carry additional stories later.

- Subdivision of lots — instead of large parcel development — was historically one of the greatest generators of wealth. Savvy cities are subdividing small lots again, and removing other zoning barriers like suburban parking requirements. Small, light, easy to implement, and easy to reverse has always been the most viable retail formats in recessionary times. To do that, not only do we need to resurrect the tradition of lots, but also enable pop-up retail.

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Just off NYC's High Line, traditional urban development on a lot by lot basis. Photo credit: Victor Dover






Mixed use development at this scale is not currently viable and lacks the intricacy and flexibility of the traditional urban lot. Photo credit: Victor Dover






Built from shipping containers. Dekalb Market, Brooklyn, NY. Photo credit: Victor Dover






Food trucks create a spontaneous piazza. Photo credit: Victor Dover






"Pop-up retail," like this in Seaside, Florida, maintains low overhead. Photo credit: Victor Dover

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The Era of Big Box Retail Dominance Is Coming to an End


Mar 30, 2012

By David Welch, Chris Burritt and Lauren Coleman-Lochner

Read More: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...to-an-end.html

When Best Buy Co. (BBY) said yesterday it was closing 50 big stores and opening 100 smaller ones, the world’s largest electronics retailer was adjusting to reality: The era of big-box retail dominance is coming to an end. The new mantra is small box. While Best Buy, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and Target Corp. (TGT) are still opening large stores, all are putting increasing emphasis on smaller ones. Best Buy plans to double the number of its smaller Best Buy Mobile stores by 2016. Wal-Mart is building as many as 100 small-format stores this year, while Target is opening five CityTarget locations.

- Since the recession, big-box retailers have struggled. Until its third fiscal quarter last year, Wal-Mart had posted eight consecutive quarters of declining sales at stores open more than 12 months. Best Buy posted five straight quarters of profit decline before reporting a $2.6 billion loss on March 29, while analysts forecast declining same-store sales and profit for Target this year. Since June 2009, when the recession officially ended, Wal- Mart shares have advanced 26 percent and Best Buy has dropped 28 percent, both trailing the 39 percent gain for the 32-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Retailing Index. Target shares gained 48 percent in that time. Big-box retail was born in 1962. That’s the year that Wal- Mart, K-Mart and Target all opened their first large discount stores. As they grew, the new big boxes began offering broad selection and low prices to a growing population of suburbanites who had left the cities in their new cars, searching for their piece of the American Dream.

- Other forces are conspiring against the big-box model. Baby Boomers no longer have kids at home and don’t need to stock up on food and packaged goods. Their kids are marrying later and delaying having their own children, meaning fewer are buying houses that need to be updated and furnished. “Right now you have a trough in the need for big-box retail,” said Bryan Gildenberg, an analyst with the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research firm Kantar Retail. Hence the rush to open smaller stores. By 2016, Richfield, Minnesota-based Best Buy plans to have as many as 800 Mobile Stores, up from 305 now. It’s part of Chief Executive Officer Brian Dunn’s plan to generate revenue from warranties, accessories and connections between phones, tablets and other electronics. The increasing emphasis on smaller stores still leaves room for big stores, according to Dunn.

- “We see those stores as an important part of a network in conjunction with our small-box stores, our online capabilities and our on-phone capabilities that allow customers to reach us anytime, anywhere, anyhow they choose,” he said in a telephone interview. “While I don’t see this as a decline of the big boxes, the multi-channel approach that we are taking will require less square footage.” Wal-Mart, which is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, is also sticking with big stores. While the company aims to add at least three times as many Neighborhood Markets as in 2011, it plans to add up to 150 supercenters, compared with 122 last year. “The supercenter is still what works best for us,” said Deisha Galberth Barnett, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. “We will continue to work to grow the presence of supercenters.” Shoppers’ stampede online is also hurting big-box chains. The biggest beneficiary of that shift is Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), which is grabbing market share from Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target.

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[M II A II R II K]

Designing Regional Urban Retail Centers: Lessons from the Mall and Beyond


April 5, 2012

Read More: http://placeshakers.wordpress.com/20...ll-and-beyond/

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This week we’re going to take a look at some of the design lessons that can be learned from the mall, and lessons that we’ve learned since then:

You Need a Critical Mass of Retail: To start with, we are talking about a sub-regional market with enough activity to attract a critical mass of shops — in size and diversity — similar to what you might find in a mall. This is NOT about trying to transform a neighborhood commercial center into a main street format. That’s another set of challenges for another time.

Anchors are Critical: Fundamental to the mall are large users placed at either end of your commercial area to draw shoppers through and give them a clear destination. While traditionally these are the department stores, theaters and even restaurant/entertainment clusters make for good anchors as well.

Create a Clear Shopping Stroll: Many shoppers aren’t there just to buy something, they are there for the experience of shopping. Once you have good anchors, make a clear path for them to stroll.

Multiple Store Entries are Possible: When creating street oriented retail, there is sometime push-back from large retailers who don’t want to have to manage two entries to their store. From the perspective of a strip center they are right. From the perspective of a mall, you should point out that they have been doing it for years: Entries to the parking lot, and one into the pedestrian realm of the mall.

The Parking Walk-Around: Similar to the concerns of having multiple entries is the fear that customers are not willing to park behind the store, and then walk around to the front door. Again, from a strip mall perspective this is a challenge (though not unsolvable). From a mall perspective, for decades shoppers have been parking in vast lots facing blank walls and are happy to locate the interior of the mall. With a compelling shopping street, shoppers will not only find the front of the store, but you have the added advantage of limited on-street parking right in front.

Create a Center: Most malls have an identifiable center to host events and activities (you know, where Santa sits.) Your main street shopping experience should have a central public space for gathering and hosting events.

Group Food and Entertainment Together: The food court is a destination that allows for choice and a consolidated eating area. Grouping food and entertainment stores near a well thought out public space adds activity to your main street and an identifiable destination. As the demand increases for embedding our regional urban retail centers in walkable, mixed use, complete neighborhoods, we have learned many lessons beyond the mall. Here are a few:

Terminated Views: Utilize the view toward the end of the street to increase visibility for key shops, anchors, and signage. This visibility has value.

Get Beyond the Lifestyle Center: The lifestyle center was an innovation that simply took the mall, and turned the interior halls into main-street-like shopping streets. The problem is that this format is still isolated within a donut of parking (just like a mall) and really solves very little in terms of creating real walkable places. While a full urban experience is the eventual goal, consider surrendering only one side to the car (with visibility to a highway or arterial), while integrating the other side directly with a high density neighborhood. Birkdale Village and Denver’s Belmar offer good examples.

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[mhays]

I'd guess it would be cheaper to tear down and rebuild in nearly all cases, vs. putting roads through an existing structure as the renderings seem to suggest.

If you're trying to integrate with an existing neighborhood, hopefully there's a second phase of stacking that parking and filling the excess land with more stuff.

[rapid_business]

Originally Posted by mhays

I'd guess it would be cheaper to tear down and rebuild in nearly all cases, vs. putting roads through an existing structure as the renderings seem to suggest.

Not necessarily. Several examples of this approach (Two examples that come to mind are Belmar in Lakewood, CO and Don Mills in Toronto) have retained varying portions of the existing structure as they did exactly this.

[mhays]

Were they built as independent or semi-detached buildings?