The Arbor Hills Crossing development is moving closer to rising on the vacant 7.45-acre site at the corner of Washtenaw Ave. and Platt Rd. after the plan was presented at a citizens outreach meeting last week. Ann Arbor's Campus Realty, together with Chicago-based North Shore Properties Group, is developing the project, which will go before the Ann Arbor planning commission in March, says Tom Stegeman, Campus Realty's development manager for the project.
No cost figures are available yet, Stegeman says, as the project is still at the early architectural design and engineering stage. In the works is an approximately 90,000-square-foot center that will be mostly retail, but will hold 10,000 square feet of flex space for either offices or residences, making it nominally mixed-use. The four-building development will be mainly one level, but two of the buildings will have partial second stories.
The developer is looking at national tenants and is in "preliminary but meaningful discussions" with regional and local businesses. While releasing specific operators would be premature, Stegeman mentions specialty retailers, apparel purveyors, and food providers as possibilities.
Arbor Hills Crossing does not bill itself as a shopping mall or even a shopping center, he says. "With the high-quality architecture and the reasonable, kind of modest scale that we're going for, this is essentially a collection of smaller buildings that create a real sense of place on the site."
The developer also plans to integrate the property with the city's push towards alternative forms of transportation. "Connectivity is the word," Stegeman says. "We've listened to the city and worked with our designers... We're certainly going to have bike racks and sidewalks and routing that will connect the property to the adjacent areas." Preliminary discussions with AATA regarding the placement of a bus stop on Washtenaw and an inset bus lane to prevent traffic backups have also been held.
Groundbreaking will begin at the end of 2011 at the earliest, Stegeman says, and possibly not until early-to-mid 2012.
Source: Tom Stegeman, development manager, Campus Realty
Writer: Tanya Muzumdar
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