Sale of Dicker’s Cuts Loose Anchor Holding Down Mall
 
Record Searchlight, April 6, 2005

The deal hangs on a six-month escrow to study the potential hang-ups of rebuilding old urban properties, but the expected sale of the Dicker’s building in downtown Redding heralds real progress for the mall.

The 60,000-square-foot one-time anchor of the The Mall in downtown Redding closed in 1992, and having the prime mall tenant’s building sit mostly empty has weighed down the area’s retail fortunes ever since.

LINC Housing Corp., the nonprofit developer buying the former department store, has a record of reviving properties that have fallen on hard times. Locally, LINC has built Seasons at Los Robles, a senior housing complex whose first phase opens this month in Anderson on the site of the once crime-ridden Anderson Oaks apartments.

Farther afield geographically but more on point, LINC won an award in 2002 for rehabbing an old shopping complex in Ontario, in San Bernardino County. The California Redevelopment Association described the site as an “aging, nearly-empty shopping center ... part of a deteriorating commercial corridor” that “was retaining only 30 percent occupancy and was unable to compete with the more modern retail centers.” Sound familiar?

In the old shopping center’s place rose a complex of 80 apartments and 153,000 square feet of retail space, all of which has been close to fully occupied since the redevelopment.

With the LINC project and Shasta College’s new downtown building — the vacant lot on Tehama Street doesn’t exactly shout progress today, but the gears are turning — the two former anchor stores will both be reconstructed and put to new use. Throw in the investments of a handful of entrepreneurs who spot an opportunity in the making, and they add up to the biggest thing to happen to the downtown mall, well, since the city built it in the 1970s.

The roof over downtown’s core seemed visionary at the time, but the vision of its being removed can’t come a minute too soon.

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