‘Lifestyle’ center melds residential and main street in Detroit

The evolution of what was once a shopping mall may be finding itself in an “everything old is new again” development like Five & Main.

Located in exurban Detroit’s affluent Commerce Township, the “lifestyle” community is incorporating traditional mall stores and restaurants into an old-fashioned village with a main street surrounded by residential housing.

Michigan-based R.B. Aikens & Associates developer Bruce Aikens said construction of enclosed shopping malls came to a halt in the 1990s.

“Mall development stopped and so all the smaller retailers like the Gap and The Limited and American Eagle said, ‘How are we going to keep growing?’ And they came up with, ‘Well, if we all get together like 10 or 15 of us, and we locate in a center, that would be powerful enough to draw people.’”

That’s the concept of Five & Main.

In the U.S., lifestyle centers, which are both walkable and drivable, have taken hold with dozens across the country. Not so much in Canada.

“In Canada there’s been none,” Aikens said.

And with zilch new mall development and a growing population “there are tremendous areas – holes – where you can do this kind of thing.”

He added with a chuckle, he is “dying” to do such a development north of the border.

Aikens’s first such effort was more than 20 years ago with The Village of Rochester Hills, about 20 miles east. He knows about malls. His company tore down its Meadowbrook Village Mall to build The Village.

The new 45 acre Five & Main is so named because it’s a “main street development” on the Michigan 5 highway, an eight lane north-south commuter route connecting to the junction of I-275 and I-696.

This will have a bigger footprint than The Village with multifamily residential and a hotel.

Aikens said the geography is “great” in a region of northwest Detroit where there are numerous small lakes with nearby connections to tech and auto research corridors and Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan.

It’s also a half hour drive to Detroit Metro Airport or downtown Detroit.

But, unlike traditionally built communities this sprawling region has had no central focus or downtown.

“There’s nothing like that for us (Aikens lives nearby), a place where you can go and walk and park your car, go to the park and go to restaurants, get your hair done, go shopping and have entertainment.”

Some urban theorists propose “15-minute” communities where residents can walk to services with minimal car use. 

That’s not the case here, where motor vehicles are as welcome as pedestrians.

“There’s parallel parking,” Aikens said. “So, it’s laid out just like a street in a downtown.”

However, as befits a lifestyle community there will be parks, ponds and woodlots.

The first phase will be 300 residential units, then the commercial downtown and then 20 acres for more retail and residential. Aikens declined to name retailers already signed. But his Rochester development contains stores like Barnes & Noble, Williams Sonoma, Eddie Bauer and Loft.

He also envisions as many as eight restaurants. There will be 230,000 square feet of retail, 30 to 40 tenants, altogether.

Multi-storey housing will be constructed by Wisconsin-based Continental Properties, its first collaboration with Aikens with its “Springs” concept, simulating single-family houses with private entrances, not communal hallways, gated and in a “dog-friendly” environment.

Aikens said rental housing was chosen because the idea is to attract younger families.  

Esthetically, retail buildings will have articulated storefronts with various architectural styles – “so not like a typical strip center” – and feature natural materials like wood, rock and brick to mimic the surroundings of Commerce Township, long a place where Detroiters have had cottages and escaped from the city.