Tim Steller's column: Converting Tucson's big boxes, vast parking lots into housing tantalizes

If there’s one thing Tucson has plenty of, it’s parking lots.

You could practically walk from the Vail to Casas Adobes and never leave our cherished blacktop seas.

Combine those with old big-box stores, and we’re talking about a plentiful local resource, almost as abundant as sunshine.

But what purpose will they all serve, now that many retail stores are declining and the acres of blacktop are increasingly unnecessary?

My colleague Gabriela Rico pointed out one of the most positive possible outcomes of the decline of retail in a story Feb. 12. A Phoenix-based company is redeveloping the old Sears store at Park Place Mall, along with some portion of the adjacent parking lot, making a mixed-use development that includes housing.

They’re not far along in the project, but the whole idea has tantalizing potential for Tucson. Just think of all the underused or abandoned retail sites and lots, out East Broadway, south along I-19, north up the Oracle Road corridor.

The potential is clear, especially for adding housing units, but the way to realize it is not. Using up Tucson’s underused spaces is going to take a lot of creativity and compromise on the part of officials, neighborhood residents, and business people — something that is not always plentiful.

The one thing that could make this idea work is that it simply makes too much sense for it to fail. That’s one thing that’s driving Derek Lis, the development manager for Evergreen, which is behind the redevelopment of the Sears property and adjacent lot.

“That’s what’s kept us moving forward,” he said. “We don’t know how exactly to do this, but everyone feels like this can happen.”

“It’s not a brand new idea, but it’s not broadly done. We’re carving our own path, to work with the city, work the mall owners and use our best judgment as to how to navigate this.”

His company is redeveloping a former Sears site in Colorado Springs, but that’s a tear-down project. And other malls are being redeveloped around the country, and even in Tucson. Bourn Companies is in the midst of what it calls a “a radical redevelopment and rebranding of the 51-acre Foothills Mall site.”

The Bourn project, named Uptown, proposes new food, entertainment and shopping options, but also a healthy dose of housing — “Tucson’s first urban-style wellness residential community.”

When you start thinking about the sites that could be redeveloped, a few come rapidly to mind. Mayor Regina Romero has mentioned the El Con Center and Tucson Mall.

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When I spoke to him last week, Council Member Steve Kozachik also brought up the Williams Center office complex along East Broadway. Offices, too, are increasingly vacant.

And further east, Council Member Paul Cunningham brought up what is perhaps the most obvious example: The old Kmart at 7055 East Broadway. That big box store closed as 2018 turned to 2019 — four years ago. Rumors circulate occasionally about a new use — homeless shelter, retail store — but it has been empty ever since.

The owner is a New Jersey-based LLC, Tupart II. In the last year, permits filed with the city of Tucson have suggested that the Floor & Decor store across North Kolb Road will move into the old Kmart. Maybe so, but it hasn’t happened yet.

“Could it be mixed-use? I think absolutely,” Cunningham said. “It could be converted into a different type of use, like a civic center.”

“Every day we’re trying something different,” he said. “Any creative idea to solve the housing crunch and think about the way we do urbanism is welcome.”

The place I fantasize changing is the never-used parking lot on the northeast side of the El Con center. You may know of it: There is a road that divides the parking lots serving Target and Home Depot from the lot I’m talking about further east.

Occasionally you’ll see young people practicing driving in this lot. What you won’t see is people parking there. I reached out to El Con representatives to ask them about doing something different with this piece of unneeded blacktop that radiates heat half the year, but I didn’t hear back.

The obvious difficulty with redeveloping that parking lot into anything that attracts humans is that neighbors, who famously fought the Walmart on the east end of El Con for years, may well fight this too. The familiar concerns of traffic and noise could well arise.

Kozachik, who has been through his share of NIMBY wars, said he thinks it’s still worth pursuing.

“Whether or not things have been contested in the past, this is a piece of ground that is ripe for the picking,” he said. “From their self interest, it’s doing nothing.”

“These are boat anchors waiting to be hoisted on to the deck,” Kozachik went on. “There are multiples of them all over the community, waiting to be housing.”

Of course, most are privately owned, which means that we in the public and our representatives in government can only suggest and cajole, or in egregious examples like the abandoned Kmart, shame.

Economic conditions aren’t always ripe for these developments in the short term. Over the long term, our best hope for redeveloping these sites may be that, as at the old Sears, it simply makes so much sense to repurpose them that it would be silly not to.

Tim Steller is an opinion columnist. A 25-year veteran of reporting and editing, he digs into issues and stories that matter in the Tucson area, reports the results and tells you his conclusions. Contact him at tsteller@tucson.com or 520-807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter