Power center (retail)

A retail park or power center (a term the New York Times used in 1999) is an unenclosed shopping center with a typical range of 250,000 square feet (23,000 m²) to 600,000 square feet (56,000 m²) of gross leasable area that usually contains three or more big box retailers and various smaller retailers (usually located in strip plazas) with a common parking area shared among the retailers. It is likely to have more money spent on features and architecture than a traditional big box shopping center.

In 1986, "280 Metro Center", an open-air, strip shopping complex composed of discount and warehouse retailers, opened in Colma, California in the United States; it is credited with being the first ever power center.Northern Lights Shopping Center in Economy, Pennsylvania, which opened in 1962, could be considered an earlier example of a power center based on square footage (it had 609,405 square feet (57,000 m²) of leaseable space until the demolition of the former J. C. Penney building in 2006) and having multiple anchors (it had four until the aforementioned demolition, with two of the remaining three anchors currently being vacant as of 2014), though it has largely become more of a traditional community-style strip mall since the early 2000s and is generally considered a dead mall due to its high vacancy rate.

In recent years, it has become quite common for an older shopping mall to be renovated as (or replaced entirely by) a power center, adding big-box stores, category killers and strip shopping center-type buildings to the parking and open areas, rather than to add anchors and new retail space to the existing mall facility. Puente Hills Mall and Del Amo Fashion Center in Southern California are good examples of this. Other examples are Seven Corners Shopping Center in suburban Washington, D.C. and Deerfoot Meadows in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Power centers are almost always located in suburban areas, but occasionally redevelopment has brought power centers to densely populated urban areas.

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