County Line Road, a shopping corridor of huge potential straddling the Jackson-Ridgeland border, continues to baffle officials and frustrate residents looking for alternatives to the far-flung shopping centers of the suburbs.
Planners insist the stores there do well. And small wonder, given the traffic the road gets.
Yet Sam’s Club and Havertys are leaving. Michaels and Barnes & Noble are long gone. And the “For Lease” signs aren’t consigned to the Jackson side of the road.
But it’s hard to fix a problem when you don’t fully understand the cause.
“The irony is that the city of Jackson and our citizens create the largest core of consumers in the metro area,” Jackson Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. said. “So you know, with these decisions that are being made by businesses to move to ‘follow their customer base,’ I don’t quite get it. But that’s what they’re telling me.”
Full stores, empty buildings
Today, County Line Road makes for a curious case study. Mainstays like Academy and Toys R Us pack in customers, especially during the holidays. The stores at Ridgewood Court, among them Best Buy, Old Navy – and, yes, Sam’s Club – do equally well, as does Northpark mall across the street.
Jimmy Stiglets, president of the Lake Trace Homeowners Association in northeast Jackson, puts it bluntly: “Where is the idea that people don’t shop there coming from? I see parking lots full of cars all the time up and down County Line Road.”
Indeed, the road has many of the factors that retailers seek.
Between Ridgeland and northeast Jackson, there’s plenty of shoppers nearby. It’s easily accessible from the interstate. And it gets good traffic – 29,000 cars per day, according to the Central Mississippi Planning Development District. That puts it ahead of Highland Colony Parkway in Ridgeland (10,000) and the exit leading to Grandview Boulevard in Madison (18,000), albeit behind Lakeland Drive in Flowood (48,000), which doubles as a major highway.
“It is still one of the busiest corridors in the whole state of Mississippi,” says Jeff Speed, president of Speed Commercial Real Estate, which manages several properties along the road. “You can’t beat the traffic.”
Still, signs of blight are everywhere. One lot on the Jackson side has hundreds of perpetually empty parking spaces where Circuit City, Old Navy and Shoe Carnival used to be. On the Ridgeland side, “For Lease” signs litter the storefronts at Centre Park.
Speed says retailers have been lured away by more attractive new developments.
“No other area – Southaven, Hattiesburg – none of those other places has had to weather this type of competition in such a short period of time,” Speed said. “I mean, think about that. You had 2 to 3 million square feet of retail and office space built in less than 4 or 5 years . They had to get their tenants from somewhere.”
“It’s just the economic ebb and flow of the times,” adds Bennie Hopkins, the Jackson planning director. “When someone opens up a new retail area, the newness is a draw for some people.”
Ridgeland planners add that County Line faces another problem – its image. Storefronts here aren’t as attractive as in the new lifestyle centers, for one thing. And the popular perception is that traffic is a nightmare.
“I would say that some folks are just flat out angry from the experiences that they’ve had on County Line Road and they just won’t give it another chance,” said Alan Hart, Ridgeland’s director of Community Development.
Hart said he still has people complain that it takes as much as 15 minutes to get from the interstate to Northpark mall. But that’s simply not true. Clock it at lunchtime on a given weekday, and it’s closer to 3 minutes, Hart said. Even in holiday traffic, you can get to Northpark within 6 minutes.
Area leaders aren’t worried about the corridor dropping off completely. It’s how to improve it that concerns them.
“I am not so fearful every time I hear one close that it’s the end of the world,” Hart said. “It is a well-positioned, convenient shopping district. And that’s not something that Madison or Flowood are going to change.”
And there remain reasons for optimism. Speed insists leasing has been good, pointing to the Atrium, an office building that he says had poor occupancy when his group took over in 2009. It’s now 100 percent full.
A leasing agent with SRS Real Estate Partners said the old Circuit City has been leased to a national retailer, though the group hasn’t announced which one.
“The mall’s not going anywhere, Walmart’s not going anywhere, Target’s not going anywhere,” said Josh Burmeister, senior vice president of SRS. “It’s just you’ve got turnover and it’s going to be backfilled by someone.”