For Rent: 575 Apartments With A View Of The Mall

According to the plans, vast parking areas that used to hold thousands of cars will be converted to a walkable town center, with 575 apartments, a town park, and a pedestrian walkway connecting the complex to the shopping mall.

A new transit center and 45,000 square feet of ground level retail will also be part of the project, when completed.

The mall’s owners, Uniball-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), and its co-developer, Mill Creek Residential (MCR), a national investment and rental housing company, entered into a joint-venture agreement to develop the site, with each company having an equity stake in the project.

They expect construction to take about 30 months, with the first move-ins expected to occur in mid-2028, and with all units ready for occupancy in early 2029.

The apartments built in the initial phase of the project will be rental units, with 15% of the units designated for affordable housing, as required by state law.

Retail Needs More Mixed Use, URW Exec Says

“The idea around turning this from a retail business into a town center is pretty simple,” Dominic Lowe, Chief Operating Officer, U.S., for URW said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “We’re in the human business. Retail has always been that place where people want to find a connection, and meet and greet, whether it’s loved ones, or new people they haven’t met.”

But retailing today “needs to provide more mixed uses and that’s what we’re doing here,” Lowe said. “And that isn’t just physical buildings. It’s also greenscape, park areas, places to meander and walk.”

Doug Arsham, Executive Managing Director at Mill Creek Residential, said one of Mill Creek’s taglines is “People, Places, Relationships,” adding that this project exemplifies those three principles.

Mill Creek is planning to invest $300 million in constructing the initial phase of the project, Arsham said.

Paramus Mayor Christopher DiPiazza, also spoke at the groundbreaking and said he is confident that the project will create positive change for the borough.

Paramus residents, DiPiazza said, value “family, their safety, and their community,” and the project developers have demonstrated they will guard those values. “This town will still be a family town with new families living behind us,” he said, gesturing to the construction site.

DiPiazza and County Executive James Tedesco recalled the many changes that have occurred at the site over the past 150 years. The area where the mall stands, and where the new development will be built, first was home to celery farms, and later was occupied by a drive-in movie theater. When the Garden State Parkway and the Route 4 and Route 17 highways were built, they intersected the farmlands and paved the way for commercial development.

“Change sometimes quite frankly is scary, but change becomes progress when we don’t lose what we value the most,” DiPiazza said.

Tedesco said he hopes the project will give Paramus something it has lacked - a downtown that will serve as a community gathering place.

The mall’s owners have been actively working towards today’s groundbreaking for more than 10 years. Residential development was included in the mall’s internal master plan for the site in 2015. The borough of Paramus made the project possible when it voted in 2016 to revise its zoning laws to allow for mixed use residential along the municipality’s two retail highways, Routes 4 and 17. Garden State Plaza is located at the intersection of Routes 4 and 17.

Thirty Years of Laying The Groundwork For Residential

But the original groundwork that led to this project began more than 30 years ago, after Australian shopping center operator The Westfield Group acquired the mall in 1986. Westfield later was acquired by Paris-based global real estate company Unibail-Rodamco in 2018, forming the current company, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.

Westfield, when it took over management of the mall, had to overcome strained relations with local officials and Paramus residents concerned that a series of planned expansions at the mall would hurt their quality of life.

They did that by working to become a better neighbor, giving the borough a place to host the annual fireworks celebration, contributing to community fundraisers, and being responsive to complaints.

Paramus at one time had four major malls located within its 10 square malls, the largest of those being Garden State Plaza. Paramus residents and civic leaders loved the malls for the taxes they paid that kept homeowners property taxes low. But they hated the traffic and other headaches associated with having a major mall in their midst.

The response of Paramus and neighboring towns to the mall explosion that occured in their midst starting in the 1950s was to pass laws prohibiting retail stores from opening on Sundays. Paramus residents have been the toughest defenders of those laws, which remain in place today, arguing they would accept crowds in their small borough six days a week, but on Sunday at least they wanted to be traffic-free.

Over the years, being closed on Sundays has served to boost Garden State Plaza’s status, as it rang up some of the highest sales per quare foot in the country despite being closed one day a week.

Garden State Plaza for the past three decades has consistently been ahead of retail trends. It pushed to add a 16-theater multiplex when in-mall theaters and entertainment still were rarities. It added fine dining restaurants when the phrase “fine dining at the mall” was laughed at as an oxymoron. And now, while still thriving and drawing crowds, it is looking ahead to a future when it might not sprawling parking lots for 10,000 or more cars.

While the mall has continued to thrive in recent years, it has faced challenges, including the growth of online shopping, and competition for retail tenants and customers from a new American Dream megamall, which opened in 2019.

The zoning change that made the Garden State Plaza project possible also benefits other malls in Paramus that border those roadways, some of which also are planning residential expansions.

Paramus ‘Read The Tea Leaves’ About Retail

Richard LaBarbiera, who was Paramus’ mayor for 18 years until 2023, credits the borough for having the foresight to plan ahead for an evolving retail world.

“We were lucky that we saw the writing on the wall and read the tea leaves that the future of bricks and sticks was in jeopardy,” LaBarbiera said in an interview this week. “If not for the zoning change and then the [development plan] and now the groundbreaking, I am not too sure where the Garden State Plaza might be today.”

When the Plaza unveiled further details of its planned residential development in 2019, retail consultant Jan Rogers Kniffen, in an interview with a local newspaper, The Record, described it as “one of the absolute best malls in America,” noting that its consistent ranking among the 10 most productive malls in the country was particularly impressive considering it was only open six days a week.

If a mall as powerful as Garden State Plaza was looking to add mixed-use residential, Kniffen said in 2019, then every other mall also should be. “The options have run out,” he said.