Before I moved to downtown Shreveport, Louisiana, after living in suburban Dallas for the first 20 years of my life, I didn’t think much about the physical form of the place I grew up. In Allen, Texas, life was pretty “normal” as far as I knew, and many of the suburbs around me looked very similar. However, one particular item of note always surprised me when I shared that I was from Allen to someone from outside of the Dallas area. About half the time, the person I’m talking to would ask: “Wait, isn’t that where those huge outlet malls are??”

If that isn’t peak suburbia, I don’t know what is.

The reputation of outlet malls, strip shopping centers, and big box stores is often not a good one—at least, not as they age. The once-shiny outlet mall with high-end outlets is replaced by a second-tier shopping center, maybe one that resells goods from other stores, and eventually the trend continues as an even lower-intensity store takes a lease in the third generation. To use Strong Towns lingo, they were built to a “finished state” and then slowly decayed, instead of built in a way that could be—or was intended to be—incrementally improved and adapted.

On a recent trip back to visit my family, I noticed that the Allen Outlet Malls that everyone was familiar with had actually increased in intensity. I was not expecting this, and it made me ask some questions about the value of these outlet malls. It also made me evaluate some of the changes that were made to attempt to make this area a little more people-friendly. I’d like to show you these changes and evaluate what those changes mean.

Land Use Change: Converting Parking to Retail

The first change I noticed was a new ring of commercial buildings on the inside of the existing retail shops. This wasn’t a new commercial area adjacent to the existing, but made the existing commercial area a bit more dense. (There was more parking to the northeast; however, there were a few new big box stores too so I assumed parking was for that.)