Great Northern Mall’s future: Less retail, more mixed-use development

NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio — City Council is expected to soon approve new zoning that will reshape the future of Great Northern Mall.

“The current code is your typical single-use zoning — B3 and general business, designed for big box, automobile-oriented retail,” said North Olmsted Director of Economic and Community Development Max Upton.

“This zoning overlay will allow for more density, more flexibility of uses and ultimately better design guidelines as to what we want for the center of our commercial corridor.”

The Cuyahoga County Planning Commission’s creation of the mall area’s mixed-use overlay district code is the byproduct of North Olmsted being awarded a regional $60,000 planning grant

“We applied for and won the grant about this time last year,” Upton said.

“That’s 13 chapters of zoning code, along with the corresponding design guidelines.”

In terms of what type of economic development could be coming to Great Northern Mall, Upton said a salient example is the new Belle Oaks Marketplace project in Richmond Heights.

“That’s a former mall site now being redeveloped into retail, office, residential — the whole nine yards,” he said.

“This will introduce the ability to bring residential and green space into the 138 acres that make up the Great Northern Mall site.

“While actually reducing the square footage of retail, it will make the existing retail stronger, because I think right now that site is overbuilt — meaning there’s too much square footage and not enough to man for that space, which is why you see vacancy.”

A 1.2-million-square-foot shopping center built in 1976 and redeveloped in 2011, Great Northern Mall features a mix of roughly 120 national and local brands.

It has a current vacancy rate of roughly 20 percent.

In 2020, original anchor tenant Sears closed its store, and the 172,000-square-foot space has been vacant ever since.

“One fun fact about the existing conditions of our mall, of its 138 acres in total, 100 (acres) are dedicated to parking and roadway,” Upton said.

“There’s an emerging trend in the real estate development and economic development space around your traditional shopping mall plazas.”

In fact, he said the city already has had cursory conversations with potential developers eagerly waiting for the passage of the mixed-use overlay code.

“The last thing you want to do as a developer or investor is tie up time and money,” Upton said.

“Now we’re essentially 16 months into this rewriting process.

“We’ve done all of that due diligence so that we’re ready for investment now. That’s going to put us a leg up on other communities that may be thinking about this.

“We’ve already done all the legwork and we have an investment-ready site.”

A representative of Great Northern Mall declined comment to cleveland.com for this story.

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