Garden State Plaza Names Co-Developer For Residential Project

Westfield Garden State Plaza took a key step toward advancing its plan to make New Jersey’s busiest shopping center part of a work, live, play residential community with the announcement today of the co-developer for the project.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the European mall developer that owns Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, N.J., has selected Mill Creek Residential Trust LLC, headquartered in Boca Raton, FL, as co-developer.

Mill Creek has built, and currently manages, over 100 upscale rental properties around the country. The Garden State Plaza project, however, presents a unique challenge. Mill Creek has to build a 500-plus apartment complex, and create a new town-center -style residential and business district, without getting in the way of the bustling mall next door.

Garden State Plaza consistently ranks as one of the best performing malls in the country, and its location, less than 20 miles from midtown Manhattan, makes it a favorite spot for retailers looking to open flagship stores or test new concepts.

But the mall’s owners decided nearly a decade ago that they needed to a bold plan for the future in order to compete with online shopping, and the mega-mall being built 10 miles away, the American Dream entertainment complex.

Instead of competing with American Dream on size, Garden State Plaza’s owners decided instead to reinvent a suburban mall, by combining the Plaza with a modern, streetscape living environment.

Unlike other projects, where malls have sold off adjacent parcels of land for residential buildings, the Garden State Plaza residential project is intended to be an integrated extension of the mall, with the mall providing amenities for the apartment residents, and the mixed-use town center giving mall visitors new reasons to come to Garden State Plaza.

“We look at it as a watershed moment, not just for the organization but really in our industry as well,” said Geoff Mason, executive vice president U.S. development, design and operating management for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.

“We’ve always thought of ourselves of being at the forefront of retail, and now we’re taking our next step and next evolution to become true town centers and true destinations,” Mason said.

“Anyone can sell a plot of land and allow a developer to build but what we’re trying to create is this entire eco-system where the residential is highly integrated to the existing retail asset,” he said.

While Mill Creek has done mixed-use retail and residential projects in the past, acting as joint partners with the mall owner makes the Plaza project unique, Sean Caldwell, a founding partner of Mill Creek and executive managing director for Mill Creek’s Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and North Carolina properties, said in a phone interview.

“Developing part of a mall is a whole new level of complexity that we’re excited to be a part of, and we’re excited to have Westfield as our partner,” Caldwell said.

“It’s pretty easy when it’s a dead mall. You go in and say we’re going to knock this mall down and we’re going to create a town center and you start from scratch,” he said. But at the Plaza, “we have a vibrant mall, we have a gem that continues to succeed and it needs to succeed 24/7, 365 while we’re under construction.”

The project is expected to break ground in 2024, and is scheduled to open to residents in 2026. Mill Creek and Westfield expect to submit additional plans to Paramus officials within several months.

The complex is slated to have about 550 apartments, with about 400 of the units geared toward young professionals, with an additional 150 units grouped in a “boutique” building targeted to an older, empty-nester market.

The project will include 45,000 square feet of retail, which will be managed by the mall, as well as a one-acre “town green” for community events sponsored by the mall.

The town green, and restoration of the Sprout Brook waterway that runs through the mall property is intended to create more green space and is core to the sustainability goals for the project, URW’s Mason said.

The residential buildings and town center are phase one of a four-phase plan expected to take a decade to complete, and that could eventually include office spaces or medical buildings.

The goal is to make the mall more of an “all” – a place where people work, live, and play, in addition to shop, said Stephen Fluhr, senior vice president of development for URW, who has been preparing for the project for the past seven years.

Part of Fluhr’s work in preparing for the project, and an ongoing job while it is underway, has been ensuring that while the mall is being transformed into an “all”, it still will be easy for the millions of visitors it draws every year to get in and shop.

“It was the number one question we asked ourselves when we started thinking about it all those years ago,” Fluhr said.

The mall did traffic studies, tracked parking lot utilization, and will reconfigure a key entrance to route mall shoppers away from any construction bottlenecks.

The residential buildings and town center will be constructed on the huge parking area on the west side of the mall.

“This is the first step of turning that western lot into a true community,” Fluhr said. “Everything we’re doing is about how do we make the Plaza a better place for people to come and shop, then come and live, and eventually come and work.”