Jenks Outlet Mall starting?

[swake]

I don't like the design details either. Its another thing that's bizarre about that document. It keeps talking about Tulsa's Art Deco heritage and then in the last pages previews a design that is not at all in keeping with the existing built environment of Tulsa. At best the proposal matches the Jenks aquarium, which is super ugly and has that tacky faux-nautical theme.

1. Reorient the construction toward the river to enhance the site not diminish it.
2. Drop the tacky "could be anywhere waterfront" design
3. Actually deliver exciting retailers in a comfortable compelling setting.

Accomplish those three things and I'll be totally on board. Miss on them and I think this thing will fail long term or never get off the ground.

The site isn't actually on the river. There is a good deal of developable land between the site for the mall and the river itself.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

You are 100% right. The fact that you're right also explains a significant part of why retail is struggling so much in the US right now. The built environment does matter economically.

It's sad, but this is a microcosm of development in the US (and large parts of the developing world also). I'm imagining anthropologists in the distant future, studying how we live now, seeing this example of how we have pages and pages of reasons this development is a bad idea and how retail will be failing and how we have countless vacant shopping centers and yet they'll still build in this flood-prone area just to appease the investors and get that ROI they need. And how our society did this sort of wasteful thing again and again until the earth finally gave way.

This kind of child-like laissez-faire developments worked while the earth had 4-6 billion inhabitants. Enough of the planet was still blind to modern necessities. As the earth approaches 8 billion inhabitants and billions more join the middle class, while virtually all countries emulate this type of consumeristic mindset they see on the American media we export, the earth is going to have a reckoning. Our society is actively engaging in wasteful short-sighted investments like this which will hurt the environment and yet some people are even celebrating this! It will be sad to look back and see how forums like this were right all along, but nothing can compete with the stock market's effect on the global economy. Money always wins. Until it can't anymore. I hope I'm wrong (but have to defer to the millions of scientists raising alarms) , but looks like long-term the planet as we knew it is doomed and this sort of thing will be Exhibit A for those digging through the remains.

[DTowner]

It's sad, but this is a microcosm of development in the US (and large parts of the developing world also). I'm imagining anthropologists in the distant future, studying how we live now, seeing this example of how we have pages and pages of reasons this development is a bad idea and how retail will be failing and how we have countless vacant shopping centers and yet they'll still build in this flood-prone area just to appease the investors and get that ROI they need. And how our society did this sort of wasteful thing again and again until the earth finally gave way.

This kind of child-like laissez-faire developments worked while the earth had 4-6 billion inhabitants. Enough of the planet was still blind to modern necessities. As the earth approaches 8 billion inhabitants and billions more join the middle class, while virtually all countries emulate this type of consumeristic mindset they see on the American media we export, the earth is going to have a reckoning. Our society is actively engaging in wasteful short-sighted investments like this which will hurt the environment and yet some people are even celebrating this! It will be sad to look back and see how forums like this were right all along, but nothing can compete with the stock market's effect on the global economy. Money always wins. Until it can't anymore. I hope I'm wrong (but have to defer to the millions of scientists raising alarms) , but looks like long-term the planet as we knew it is doomed and this sort of thing will be Exhibit A for those digging through the remains.

That seems like a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

They are all leased up and ready to go. Ground breaking will be announced soon. This will be an exciting development. This will be the only location in Oklahoma for a lot of the stores. It's a whole different market then Woodland Hills.

No it won't. Let's celebrate all the additional garbage this will send to landfills and rivers with the "fast-fashion" sub-par clothing this will distribute to all the poor mothers who shouldn't be buying this garbage "name brand" clothing for their kids who will either not like it or wear it for maybe a few months before it tears (I remember hating almost all outlet clothes I got as a kid because they were such terrible quality and often looked like cheesy knock-offs).

Lets celebrate the hundreds of thousands of square feet of existing retail that will have to close to make room in the market place for this additional retail that will be added in. Lets celebrate pushing tax dollars further and further out to enhance the urban sprawl which is destroying our farmlands, our wildlife and ensuring that our civilization is chained to the highest-polluting means of conveyance available! What a win! Nature can rot in hell! I'll be Rolling Coal to my microplastic-tainted grave! and fast!  

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/05/climate-change-apocalypse-could-start-2050-if-we-do-noting/1356865001/

https://www.ecowatch.com/fast-fashion-is-the-second-dirtiest-industry-in-the-world-next-to-big--1882083445.html

https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3062698/fashion-industry-accounts-for-more-than-a-third-of-ocean-microplastics-report-warns


Scientists are just now wrapping their heads around what a globalized economy means for monumentous all the waste and pollution is and how ingrained it is into our society. Global Warming and CO2 are just the mainstream tip of the iceberg (Or the 18 billion pounds of plastic going into the oceans every year). Celebrating this outlet mall opening would be akin to cracking open a flask and celebrating sharing another drink with your alcoholic father at his bedside in the hospital. It's not over yet, but boy every single one of those organs look pretty damn awful.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

That seems like a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

That's why I said it's a "microcosm" of our society. Our whole society is built on ROI's that cannot (and shouldn't) happen forever. We throw away old and build new. Eventually it'll come back to hurt us, but then it'll be too late. I can see that despite the promise of a "Retail-ocalypse", and a thousand retail vacancies across the city, progress will march on and they'll build yet another redundant shopping center. This is proof that corporations are not driven by reason, more by just a bit more potential future profit, and they really can't be trusted to fix the issues we're seeing. It's going to get far far worse before anything changes, but that'll be too late.

[ELG4America]

TulsaGoldenHurriCAN I genuinely love your rant here. My one critique is that corporations' decisions are not driven by actual future profits they are driven by "profit models." Profit models require that a project be a slight modification of something done previously. Despite every corporate stock fund noting that "past results are no guarantee of future performance" nearly every corporation pretends like they're last project is exactly replicable. ROI calculations drive decision making and ROI calculations are easiest if the project is a repackaging of the last project. Therefore adaptive reuse like the Ross Group's Tulsa Club Hotel can be difficult to accurately calculate an ROI, so the numbers are often conservative. Thus, many unique projects exceed their ROI pitch. An example of that would be the BOK Center (if memory serves.) Meanwhile, cheap replicable and ultimately disposable suburban projects like these outlets are easy to calculate a ROI on for the first 5-10 years. Thus, the numbers tend to be much less conservative and more attractive on the surface.

I say all this because a 5-10 year period should be considered inadequate for making major development decisions and not just for environmental reasons. For business reasons too. We should be building for a century not a decade. Does anyone believe Simon Outlets Jenks will exist in 2119? What about the Philtower? I know where I'd rather have my money. Capitalists are only going to be convinced by a capitalist argument. They won't listen when we say don't build like this because it's: ugly, environmentally damaging, and fails to build a lasting and sustainable community. They will list when we convince them: THIS WILL LOSE YOU MONEY.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

TulsaGoldenHurriCAN I genuinely love your rant here. My one critique is that corporations' decisions are not driven by actual future profits they are driven by "profit models." Profit models require that a project be a slight modification of something done previously. Despite every corporate stock fund noting that "past results are no guarantee of future performance" nearly every corporation pretends like they're last project is exactly replicable. ROI calculations drive decision making and ROI calculations are easiest if the project is a repackaging of the last project. Therefore adaptive reuse like the Ross Group's Tulsa Club Hotel can be difficult to accurately calculate an ROI, so the numbers are often conservative. Thus, many unique projects exceed their ROI pitch. An example of that would be the BOK Center (if memory serves.) Meanwhile, cheap replicable and ultimately disposable suburban projects like these outlets are easy to calculate a ROI on for the first 5-10 years. Thus, the numbers tend to be much less conservative and more attractive on the surface.

I say all this because a 5-10 year period should be considered inadequate for making major development decisions and not just for environmental reasons. For business reasons too. We should be building for a century not a decade. Does anyone believe Simon Outlets Jenks will exist in 2119? What about the Philtower? I know where I'd rather have my money. Capitalists are only going to be convinced by a capitalist argument. They won't listen when we say don't build like this because it's: ugly, environmentally damaging, and fails to build a lasting and sustainable community. They will list when we convince them: THIS WILL LOSE YOU MONEY.

Good points. I'm frustrated by the massive number of suburban sprawl developments going on in comparison to the very limited (and often very pricey) midtown developments. Downtown is moving, but it's still a far from an ideal walkable livable place. Tulsa is far too reliant on cars and with new reports coming out all the time with more difficult findings of environmental damage (One scientific study even claiming the earth will be largely uninhabitable by 2050 due to runaway climate change; it takes many years for the previous CO2 emissions to really hit), the future of suburbia is looking extremely dire. And at present, it is incredibly harmful. Yet people are not adjusting. It's all over the US and we can either learn to live together in an urban framework with close neighbors, or we can suffer. At some point we will have to face the consequences. We need to at least confine our destruction to previously developed places.

Looks like the only option will be having the government place large taxes on brand new further out developments and incentivize revitalization and building up in the urban cores (and apply that to everything: cars, consumer goods, etc). I don't like new taxes, but I'd prefer we do what it takes to remain alive.

[DTowner]

Good points. I'm frustrated by the massive number of suburban sprawl developments going on in comparison to the very limited (and often very pricey) midtown developments. Downtown is moving, but it's still a far from an ideal walkable livable place. Tulsa is far too reliant on cars and with new reports coming out all the time with more difficult findings of environmental damage (One scientific study even claiming the earth will be largely uninhabitable by 2050 due to runaway climate change; it takes many years for the previous CO2 emissions to really hit), the future of suburbia is looking extremely dire. And at present, it is incredibly harmful. Yet people are not adjusting. It's all over the US and we can either learn to live together in an urban framework with close neighbors, or we can suffer. At some point we will have to face the consequences. We need to at least confine our destruction to previously developed places.

Looks like the only option will be having the government place large taxes on brand new further out developments and incentivize revitalization and building up in the urban cores (and apply that to everything: cars, consumer goods, etc). I don't like new taxes, but I'd prefer we do what it takes to remain alive.

Earth uninhabitable by 2050?  That is a really heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

Earth uninhabitable by 2050?  That is a really heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

I said "Largely uninhabitable"... currently the world is already largely uninhabitable (the entire Ocean, arctics and most of the desert regions). The studies predict what the additional warming and sea level rises will do to populations around the world. It will push enough people to and fro and wreak enough havoc on ecosystems to have a massive end effect, far more than just higher water levels. No prediction is completely accurate and that one is extreme. It sound more like the 2100 predictions. Regardless, eventually we will need to adapt fast or die out. There's already a number of places in the world which used to be inhabitable but are not any longer due to near permanent drought and high temps.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597kpd/new-report-suggests-high-likelihood-of-human-civilization-coming-to-an-end-in-2050

[DTowner]

I said "Largely uninhabitable"... currently the world is already largely uninhabitable (the entire Ocean, arctics and most of the desert regions). The studies predict what the additional warming and sea level rises will do to populations around the world. It will push enough people to and fro and wreak enough havoc on ecosystems to have a massive end effect, far more than just higher water levels. No prediction is completely accurate and that one is extreme. It sound more like the 2100 predictions. Regardless, eventually we will need to adapt fast or die out. There's already a number of places in the world which used to be inhabitable but are not any longer due to near permanent drought and high temps.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597kpd/new-report-suggests-high-likelihood-of-human-civilization-coming-to-an-end-in-2050

Fair enough, but a largely uninhabitable earth still seems like a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.  As for me, in grade school I was watching Leonard Nimoy tell me the coming new ice age was going to wipe out most of us right about the time I was supposed to graduate from college.  So I've pretty much always figured I'm living on borrowed time.  Besides, AOC told us the planet was doomed in 12 years, so this 2050 near extinction thing seems like a reprieve that should get me to my top end life expectancy.  In that sense, whether or not a kitschy and wasteful outlet mall is built in Jenks does not seem all that important.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

Fair enough, but a largely uninhabitable earth still seems like a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.  As for me, in grade school I was watching Leonard Nimoy tell me the coming new ice age was going to wipe out most of us right about the time I was supposed to graduate from college.  So I've pretty much always figured I'm living on borrowed time.  Besides, AOC told us the planet was doomed in 12 years, so this 2050 near extinction thing seems like a reprieve that should get me to my top end life expectancy.  In that sense, whether or not a kitschy and wasteful outlet mall is built in Jenks does not seem all that important.

You're probably right that one actor's inaccurate claim from decades ago likely invalidates all modern science. Pack it up boys, climate change is a "Chinese hoax"! We're going to be fine after all. No need to fight against wasteful proposals for one of the most wasteful industries like this one... Besides, everyone who matters will be dead by then anyways! The real token Baby Boomer attitude: F#$K YOU I got mine! College costed 440 minimum wage hours for us so screw millenials who complain about having to work 4,400 minimum wage hours to pay for their college! Someone once said something about global cooling so F#$K them, climate change can't possibly be real!

You must not have any kids or grand kids, or anyone young you care about. If everyone thinks like you do, we really are doomed and deserve exactly what's coming. Please hurry up and die off so the rest of us can try to do something about it.

[DTowner]

You're probably right that one actor's inaccurate claim from decades ago likely invalidates all modern science. Pack it up boys, climate change is a "Chinese hoax"! We're going to be fine after all. No need to fight against wasteful proposals for one of the most wasteful industries like this one... Besides, everyone who matters will be dead by then anyways! The real token Baby Boomer attitude: F#$K YOU I got mine! College costed 440 minimum wage hours for us so screw millenials who complain about having to work 4,400 minimum wage hours to pay for their college! Someone once said something about global cooling so F#$K them, climate change can't possibly be real!

You must not have any kids or grand kids, or anyone young you care about. If everyone thinks like you do, we really are doomed and deserve exactly what's coming. Please hurry up and die off so the rest of us can try to do something about it.

It wasn't just some actor, it was Mr. Spock!  

Perhaps your study is right, but a largely uninhabitable earth and your college debt is a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

It wasn't just some actor, it was Mr. Spock!  

Perhaps your study is right, but a largely uninhabitable earth and your college debt is a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

I don't have any college debt and never did, but somehow I still care about the large scale inflation of education prices by guaranteed student loans and the long term effects that have wreaked havoc on young people's financial lives and on higher education. There's a lot of problems being almost completely ignored by the Baby Boomer generation and those things are eventually going to reach a critical point (Like underfunded Social Security that's going to dry up after they're dead).

Honestly Oklahoma and most of the central parts of the US will be seemingly unaffected by climate change for a long time. It's those places on the coasts and on the cusps with little water and regular high temps and ecosystems in the balance, like desert climates, rainforests and reefs (half the Great Barrier Reef has died since 2015). It'll take a long time for it to really show up in our daily lives. Meanwhile corporations keep building new massive shopping centers like Tulsa Hills and this unnecessary behemoth. And we keep supporting them, completely oblivious to what the long term effects are. Those old shopping centers don't go away, last year's "out of style" clothes or the trash we leave in landfills doesn't magically go away:

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/oxley-nature-center-covered-in-trash-after-old-city-dump/article_78a1e00a-a4ac-5c99-ab82-74a01d3a5b23.html

Also, the effects of oil and gas on our state are significant and a lot of those poisoned superfund sites are too expensive to clean up and are here to stay. Who knows what injecting all the disposal fluids will do long term to underground water supplies.

[TheArtist]

I don't have any college debt and never did, but somehow I still care about the large scale inflation of education prices by guaranteed student loans and the long term effects that have wreaked havoc on young people's financial lives and on higher education. There's a lot of problems being almost completely ignored by the Baby Boomer generation and those things are eventually going to reach a critical point (Like underfunded Social Security that's going to dry up after they're dead).

Honestly Oklahoma and most of the central parts of the US will be seemingly unaffected by climate change for a long time. It's those places on the coasts and on the cusps with little water and regular high temps and ecosystems in the balance, like desert climates, rainforests and reefs (half the Great Barrier Reef has died since 2015). It'll take a long time for it to really show up in our daily lives. Meanwhile corporations keep building new massive shopping centers like Tulsa Hills and this unnecessary behemoth. And we keep supporting them, completely oblivious to what the long term effects are. Those old shopping centers don't go away, last year's "out of style" clothes or the trash we leave in landfills doesn't magically go away:

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/oxley-nature-center-covered-in-trash-after-old-city-dump/article_78a1e00a-a4ac-5c99-ab82-74a01d3a5b23.html

Also, the effects of oil and gas on our state are significant and a lot of those poisoned superfund sites are too expensive to clean up and are here to stay. Who knows what injecting all the disposal fluids will do long term to underground water supplies.

"Seemingly unaffected"?  The usual weather patterns we are having now are not what they were when I was a kid.  Even the official planting zones have changed. We were I believe a 6, but are now in zone 7, and I will likely see in my lifetime us be in zone 8.  Which is fine with me for it is a bother bringing in my tropical plants each year (though interestingly enough I got lazy and dug up only about half my elephant ears last year and surprise surprise all the ones I left in the ground are going gangbusters this year).  Whether we end up being in a more tropical environment or desert is yet to be seen but some of the old climate projections I saw favored the tropical version.

The nasty trick on us being in Oklahoma is that with the weakening jet streams that blob of super cold air over the north pole may on occasion "escape" and drift our way. So until a "new normal" settles in (who knows when or what that will be) we will be in for some occasional extreme events.

To shift the conversation back to the Outlet Mall, I think it would be lovely with some palm trees   

[ELG4America]

That seems like a heavy burden for an outlet mall to bear.

Respectfully, this outlet mall is emblematic of the industry. While it is true that this outlet mall is not to blame for all the issues raised in this thread, this one is in our community. We had no voice in the conversation about building the last ugly, environmentally unsound, wasteful and short-sighted mall project because that one was on the other side of the country. Moreover, ignoring the global context because this project or that is so small in the grand scheme is exactly how we will fail to "turn the ship." As a global society we have to recognize and commit ourselves to individual actions that contribute to the solution. These will all be small steps but it is only collective action that will put us on a sustainable course.