The view from our recession

[elfs]

The Landing at Renton

I've been doing the grim can't-look-away thing of photographing evidence of the recession, and exhibit #1 has to be The Landing, a four-square-block shopping complex down at Renton.

Renton tentatively opened up a big area between I-405 and one of the Boeing Commercial Airliner plants, which had for years been little more than an abandoned manufacturing wasteland, for commercial development. The first two big buy-ins were from a Frys Electronics and a Lowe's Hardware. Then a Target and a Joe's Sports Equipment big-box opened up across the street.

Bouyed by this success, Renton opened up The Landing, which has a multi-screen theater, an LA Fitness, and four full blocks of smaller retail space.

Well, the Joe's is going out of business, the LA Fitness isn't doing too well, and the smaller retail space is completely unused. There's more retail square footage per capita in the United States than anywhere else in the world, and apparently most retailers don't believe that we need more of it, not down in blue-collar Renton.

Nissan gone down.

The other exhibit of the day is the Nissan dealership. We hear all the time about GM and Chrysler, and how Ford is bravely sticking to its private plan even though it's not going to get any relief and is probably going to get screwed in the end. But the sales market sucks, and "foreign" car dealerships are having just as much trouble moving cars as the domestics.

The Nissan dealership in my town has been hurting for a while. The cars were all gone a few weeks ago, and now the service bays are shut down. Another major contributor to Burien's economy, fallen silent.