Mall Face Lifts Seen as Key to Keeping Retail Sales Up : Shopping: The Southeast marketing area already has 10 major malls from Long Beach to Montebello. Rather than build more, cities are looking to update existing ones to stay competitive.

Three years ago, Downey city officials took a hard look at their largest retail area, the Stonewood Shopping Center, and concluded that it was sliding dangerously close to economic senility. Downey residents were leaving town to do their shopping.

“What we saw was that Stonewood would continue to decline unless we did something to reverse the trend,” said Kenneth Farfsing, assistant city manager in charge of redevelopment. “We felt we needed to do something dramatic.”

With a new owner already talking of renovation, the city decided to nudge him into action with a deal: For 12 years after the remodeling, the city would split its share of increased sales tax revenue with the developer. The city also agreed to improve surrounding streets.

Today, Stonewood is like a new mall. Completely enclosed, the once open-air shopping center has a new anchor, the May Co., and a host of new restaurants edging its parking lot. When the remodeling is completed, the mall will have 161 new stores, more than double its original number.

Southeast-area shoppers are bound to see more of such reincarnations. In an area that already has 10 major shopping centers from Long Beach to Montebello and relatively little open space for new malls, the renovation of existing shopping complexes is the likely look of things to come.

“In my opinion, the area is saturated with malls and really couldn’t support another one,” said Skip Keyzers, senior vice president of MaceRich Corp., which owns the highly successful Lakewood Center Mall.

Larry Norton, Stonewood’s general manager, commented, “There are only so many people within a market. You can only split the market so many times.”

Of the county’s major shopping centers, some of the most and least successful are in the Southeast. Yet at both extremes, refurbishment is being discussed--either to invigorate sales at such aging, badly designed centers as Paddison Square in Norwalk, or to maintain the cash flow at such well-established malls as Los Cerritos Center.

“I would like to see us really consider some revitalization,” said Cerritos Mayor Ann B. Joynt, who thinks the 20-year-old regional mall could use a trendier look, a new parking structure, and perhaps a second story of shops.

As Southeast malls get their midlife face lifts, Westside swank is still not for them.

Cerritos officials were thinking of further bolstering their already substantial sales tax base with construction of an upscale mall in Towne Center, the last major vacant tract in the city. But after studying the demographics and income level of the area, a private consultant concluded that there simply was not a market for such high-end stores as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

Largely working class and middle class, Southeast is the land of Mervyn’s, Broadway and May Co.

If there is an empty shopping niche waiting to be filled, it is for membership warehouse stores such as Price Club and so-called “power centers,” which are devoted to anchors selling a single category of goods, such as Home Depot, the building supply store.

Recognizing that, Long Beach city officials are now courting developers to build a power center on a former oil drilling tract near the San Diego Freeway where the city had once envisioned an auto mall.

In the era of sluggish property tax growth that followed Proposition 13’s restrictions on increasing property levies, city officials have viewed shopping malls with the same covetous eyes as auto malls. They wooed shopping center developers with redevelopment deals, discounting the price of land for them and building roads. And officials watch sales as if they were shopkeepers.

Without a really successful major mall in the city, Long Beach has long fretted over the way its shoppers go out of town to Lakewood and Cerritos to spend their money. Redevelopment officials are talking of helping Los Altos owners spruce up their drab, 25-year-old shopping center in eastern Long Beach, and the city is also talking to potential buyers of the downtown Long Beach Plaza, again hoping for a remodeling to boost sales.

As the area’s big shopping areas struggle to improve their market share or maintain it, they may well face hard times.

“All forecasts--and I’m totally in agreement--are that in the next 10-year period there will be a great shake-out in retailing all over the country,” observed Tracey Hall, president of The Hall Olson Marketing Group in Newport Beach. “California is no exception.”

Too much retail development, not all of it wise, has left the nation with more than it can handle, say national analysts, some of whom have predicted that as many as half the country’s retailers will fail over the next decade.

Pointing to the recent conversion of Old Towne Mall in Torrance to a smaller strip center, Hall said some malls may actually decrease their size to make more profitable use of their space. Indeed, developers are shrinking the 15-year-old La Mirada Mall from an unwieldy 135-store complex that covered 75 acres to a 35-store shopping center covering about half the area.

RETAIL SALES Taxable retail sales reported in 1989 by each of the major shopping centers in Long Beach and Southeastern Los Angeles, and how that figure ranked among the county’s 45 largest malls:

Mall Sales Rank* Lakewood Center Mall $324,193,000 3 Los Cerritos Center $275,554,000 5 Montebello Town Center $144,430,000 14 Stonewood Shopping Center $112,436,000 19 Whitwood Mall $104,926,000 20 Los Altos Shopping Center $87,450,000 26 Long Beach Plaza $68,230,000 30 Santa Fe Springs Mall $56,803,000 35 Pico Rivera Plaza $30,828,000 42 Paddison Square $21,195,000 44

*Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance ranked No. 1 in the county, with taxable retail sales of $444,658,000. RETAIL SALES Average sales per square foot for each mall, derived by dividing taxable retail sales by total retail area: Montebello Center: $224 Los Cerritos Center: $212 Los Altos Center: $152 Lakewood Center Mall: $135 Santa Fe Springs Mall: $126 Whitwood Mall: $121 Stonewood Shopping Center: $119 Pico Rivera Plaza: $108 Long Beach Plaza: $101 Paddison Square: $67 Source: State Board of Equalization and individual shopping centers