City Issues RFP For Retail At Downtown Garages | Major Taylor, Union Station garages on city schedule for fall, winter
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The new Union Station parking garage in Worcester includes more than 8,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space. The city has put out an RFP seeking developers.
Proposals reviewed by St. Patrick’s Day, a month to select a developer and negotiate a lease, construction underway in the summer and open by fall may seem like a tall order for the development of the first-floor retail space at the Major Taylor Boulevard parking garage, but that’s what the City of Worcester is hoping for.
And retail real estate experts, despite a truly grim market for such properties, say now may be the perfect time for the city to undertake such a project.
The city issued RFPs for retail and restaurant space at two garages, the Major Taylor Boulevard garage near the DCU Center and the newly-constructed garage attached to Union Station. Both are downtown. Both — 11,400 square feet at Major Taylor and 8,100 square feet at Union Station — are vacant.
With the way the commercial real estate market, and especially retail property, has gone in recent months that space could be expected to remain vacant.
Jump On It
But Bob Sheehan, vice president of research at Burlington-based commercial real estate and retail market research firm KeyPoint Partners, noted that “you can’t lease anything until you list it.” He also said the Worcester properties have at least a chance to find their way into the “transit-oriented retail projects” niche.
“They’re becoming more popular,” Sheehan said, and there are projects similar to the one the city wishes to be undertaken at Union Station near MBTA stations in Medford and Hingham.
“I can imagine it would be ripe for things oriented toward commuters: a market, a grocer, a drug store, but with the lack of success in the history of Worcester center, it’s hard to say if it’s potentially a good retail space and that everyone would want to jump on it.”
Timothy McGourthy, the city’s economic development director, is of course taking a much more optimistic approach.
“Both locations have inherent value, regardless of the market,” he said. In fact, he said the city has turned away developers who have shown interest in the Major Taylor garage because they didn’t have “the right approach” to the property.
“That is a prime location across from the DCU Center, the Hilton Garden Inn and the courthouse. A million people a year go through there.”
Past developers have proposed building the space out with a single entrance at one end and entrances to shops and restaurants along an interior hallway parallel to Major Taylor Boulevard. The city wants proposals that show individual storefronts that open directly to the street, McGourthy said. The Union Station site will be more difficult to develop, McGourthy admitted. He said that space needs a developer “with an eye for the future.”
The best the city can hope for in the very short term, Sheehan said, would be to try to sign temporary tenants to short-term or one-year leases to “fill the space today” while deals for the properties’ development are hammered out.
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