The Market for Commercial Development in Lansdowne
Lansdowne’s Retail Competition
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Lansdowne is located six miles west of downtown Philadelphia and several miles east of Springfield Township, where one major regional mall (Springfield Mall with 595,000 gross leasable square feet) and any number of freestanding, road oriented retail stores line Baltimore Pike. Partly for this reason, and partly because the Borough’s fabric does not offer large vacant sites of five or more acres that are appropriate for shopping center development, it is likely that Lansdowne will have the character of a neighborhood or community center. According to the Urban Land Institute, a neighborhood retail center carries convenience retail goods and services that are necessary for the every day life of local residents, such as food, drugs, laundry, dry cleaning, hair, and shoe repair services. Its anchor is usually a supermarket, and it has an average gross leasable area of 60,000 square feet, although it can have as few as 30,000 or as many as 100,000 square feet.
A community center is somewhat larger, and offers both convenience shopping and general merchandise in 100,000 to 350,000 square feet of retail space. Anchors or major tenants are likely to be a supermarket, a discount department store, or a junior department store. Lansdowne, with about 125,000 total square feet of commercial and light industrial space, falls somewhere at the high end of the neighborhood center definition and just below the community center definition. As noted earlier, however, the central commercial area of Lansdowne, at the intersection of Lansdowne Avenue and Baltimore Pike, has a few stores with an almost regional draw. In addition, Lansdowne is an older commercial area and does not fit the mold of a newly developed strip shopping center.
The primary market area for shopping in Lansdowne was designated as the Borough itself, and the secondary market area as the boroughs of East Lansdowne, Upper Darby, Millbourne Borough, Yeadon, and Clifton Heights. However, the biggest retail draw in this area of Delaware County is Springfield Township. The number of stores is so great there that it is unlikely that a Springfield resident would come to Lansdowne for most retail needs. Conversely, it is almost certain that Lansdowne residents travel to Springfield Township and to Clifton Heights for most of their retail purchases.
As part of the retail analysis, a field survey of retailing in the market area and in Springfield Township was taken. Results of the field trip can be found in Appendix D. Within the secondary market area, we found:
- Yeadon: the Parkview Shopping Center, MacDade Boulevard and Cedar Avenue, approximately 29,000 square feet of convenience shopping 1.5 miles from Lansdowne. Parkview is about 20% occupied.
- Upper Darby/Drexel Hill: We identified seven shopping centers with about 946,000 square feet of retail space, plus the 69th Street retail area in Upper Darby. Drexeline is the largest (625,000 square feet), but is an older center that functions more like a community center than a regional center. The other centers are much smaller (under 100,000 square feet), and appear to have been built 20 or more years ago. Between them, there is everything except a major department store, although Kohl’s is represented on Township Line Road.
- Clifton Heights/Aldan: The Home Depot Plaza has approximately 300,000 square feet of retail space, and Penn Pines Shopping Center, Springfield and Providence Road, has another 20,000 or so.
Springfield Township lies three and a half miles to the west, and is the major retail draw for this part of the County. Springfield Mall alone has 600,000 square feet of retail space, including two major department stores. Another 1,440,000 square feet can be found at six shopping centers that are host to almost every type of retailing imaginable. In addition, we estimate that there are at least another one million square feet of retail space in free standing stores along Baltimore Pike, including Kohl’s, Pier One, Best Buy, Toys R Us, Michaels, Raymour and Flannigan Furniture, Blockbuster, Sleepy’s Mattress Giant, Burlington Coat Factory, and Bennigans.
Between the shopping centers and the freestanding retail stores that we identified, there may be as many as 4.5 to 5 million square feet of retail space of all types within 4.5 miles of Lansdowne. In short, there is practically nothing that can’t be bought there. However, the shopping experience and the driving experience leave something to be desired. Baltimore Pike is congested during the weekdays, and on weekends it is sometimes impassable. Four-mile trips to buy convenience goods sometimes turn into half day expeditions.