When The Dispatch reported Leigh Mall would go up for auction in December, it created an immediate response in the community and rightly so.
When the mall opened 45 years ago, it immediately became the catalyst for retail in the city. But for well over a decade now, the mall has been in decline. Sears and JC Penney, the anchors of the 300,000 square foot mall, left while eight of the remaining 34 storefronts are unoccupied.
As the mall owner, Security National, fell into bankruptcy, the mall fell into what Joe Max Higgins of the Golden Triangle Development LINK called a death spiral — low revenues led to deteriorating conditions and those conditions made the mall less appealing to new tenants, leading to lower rents.
Current tenants complain that repairs aren’t made and customers are afraid to shop at the mall after dark because of a lack of security.
Over the past 15 years, a half-dozen developers have approached the owners to buy the property, but have balked on paying the price Security National has set.
While the upcoming auction creates a sense of uncertainty about the future of this important part of the city, in some respects it may turn out to be beneficial.
“Whatever happens, it has to be better than the way it is now,” Burke’s Outlet manager Evelyn Horne observed.
Whatever happens, it will likely have little short-term impact.
Even if the mall is sold at auction on Dec. 4, it will be some time before any changes are made. The new owner is likely to want to maintain whatever revenue streams exists and there is also the matter of what happens to the leases held by the current tenants. Most importantly, it’s unlikely someone would buy it and close it.
But with a new owner, there will be changes and there are any number of possibilities.
A good example might be Tupelo, which had two malls open in the 1970s, both of which had failed by the early 1990s. The Tupelo mall, located near North Mississippi Medical Center is now used as medical offices. The Downtown Mall was purchased by the city of Tupelo, which tore down the building and built the BancorpSouth Center on the site.
Leigh Mall could also be reinvented as the kind of retail development better-suited to how we shop today. There is also talk of a mixed-use development that would include apartments, entertainment options, restaurants and retail.
What happens at the property at this point is impossible to predict.
But given the state of the mall now, we agree that whatever the future holds is preferable to the “death spiral” Leigh Mall represents now.
Although in decline, no one seriously questions how important the mall property is to our community. That is the one thing that hasn’t changed since Leigh Mall opened its doors in 1973.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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