The Southern California Mini-Mall’s Rise and Fall

As the so-called power center has emerged as the darling of developers during the late 1990s, the street-corner mini-mall was its counterpart during the last real estate boom.

In a little more than 10 years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the mini-mall shot to popularity as a convenient alternative to big shopping centers--then just as quickly became a symbol of overdevelopment, widely reviled as a blight and a neighborhood nuisance.

According to those who were present at the creation, the modern Southern California mini-mall (as opposed to its 1920s equivalent, the drive-in market) was born out of a confluence of events in the 1970s. Oil companies began closing scores of gas stations during the energy crunch, just as convenience store companies like Southland Corp., the parent of 7-Eleven stores, began a huge expansion.

Consumers generally welcomed the small neighborhood centers as an alternative to going out of their way to larger malls just to pick up a few items or drop off their dry-cleaning. At first, mini-malls made sense, says Robert Champion, a Los Angeles developer who worked for La Mancha Development Corp., the region’s premier developer of mini-malls during their heyday.

Mini-malls brought needed services close to consumers, Champion says. Indeed, before they earned the pejorative nickname “mini-malls,” they were known as “convenience centers.”

But developers built the malls at a reckless pace, Champion says, spurred by their early success as well as the general zeal to build that characterized the 1980s. According to research by The Times, as many as 3,000 of the street-corner centers had been built in Los Angeles County by 1985.

During the mid-1980s, the abundance of mini-malls prompted a backlash against what many considered to be revolting architecture and rampant overbuilding. Then-Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo declared, derisively, that Los Angeles was “the mini-mall capital of the world.” In a Times “quality of life” poll about the same time, 10% of respondents named ‘mini-malls” as their biggest pet peeve--between “stupid local TV news” at 4% and “potholes” at 16%.

In response to the backlash against new malls, Los Angeles and many other cities in Los Angeles County adopted ordinances designed to restrict their development. The ordinances slowed the building of mini-malls until the recession came along a few years later and finished the job.

According to Jack Mahoney, president of El Segundo-based Summit Commercial Properties, many of the malls failed during the recession because they lacked “credit tenants”--real estate jargon for well-financed companies that can ride out the ups and downs of the economy.

“A lot of them depended on mom-and-pop tenants, and those are the first to fail when the economy slows down,” Mahoney said. Many of the mini-malls were repossessed by lenders, then sold at rock-bottom prices.

The mini-malls remain today, of course, often prospering in the economic recovery. Others struggle to keep tenants. A few more are even being built in new suburbs.

“The ones being built today are much different from their predecessors. They’re driven by tenant need rather than speculation,” Champion said.

Champion, who now runs his own development company, recalls what his wife said to him one day when he was flaunting his success.

“When I was engaged to my wife, I was driving her around town showing her all the mini-malls I was building for La Mancha,” he said. “She was unimpressed. She turned to me and said, ‘Sweetheart, is this really the legacy you want to leave your kids?’ ”

Champion now develops centers that he considers the architectural antithesis of the mini-mall.

“I’ve got a lot of bad mini-mall karma to make up for,” he says.