The mall manager at Penn Square shed some light on why management at Crossroads "may" not be doing much with the property.

"Fair questions and I am asked about Crossroads often. Even the Mayor asked for my opinion on that recently.

Let me go back and talk about some personal examples about malls I have managed.
My first mall was in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was on the less affluent side of town. Most of the larger homes, the "better" school systems and a newer, better, shinier mall was across town. I managed to hold it together and had some success, but about 5 years after I left, it was torn down and made into a strip center.
Later, I managed Eastland Mall in Tulsa. Eastland was an attractive 600,000 square foot mall in a terrible location and overpowered by Woodland Hills. I loved that mall and worked my heart out to keep it going. One of my proudest victories was opening an Old Navy store in the mall. Trouble was, after the first year, it was the second lowest volume store in the chain and closed 2 years later. The J C Penney store was also low volume and unprofitable and closed 2 years ago. Once in a low volume spiral it is hard to pull out. Eastland is now only 40% leased and will probably close in a few years.

There is a social phenomenon that young people especially, want to shop at the "hot" malls and will drive past the B level malls even if they have many of the same stores.

Two things happen to malls that aren't on top. One is that new retailers won't go there even if the rent is a giveaway. Most national retailers are public companies and Wall Street looks at sales per square foot. They can only handle so many new openings each year, so they would rather pay high rent at a successful property than free rent at a low volume mall. Even with high rent, a million dollar volume store is more profitable than a half million dollar store with almost free rent.

The second is the use of the developers capital. Simon has a huge pot of capital funding which it spends to upgrade existing properties each year. Spending a million dollars at successful malls like Penn generate immediate and significant return on investment. When we still owned Heritage Park, we needed to spend a few million to upgrade, but the return would be minimal and only Band-Aid the problems. As a public company, we need to maximize the use of money.

Macerich could spend money at Crossroads, but would that help enough to make people shop there? They have difficult access, a poor location to market to affluent customersand there are other bigger, stronger centers in the community. The manager at Crossroads is an old friend of mine and he is a very talented guy. He also faces that old north side / south side perception in OKC and a group of theaters on property which can create teen problems.
The GM closing will hurt Crossroads. I don't envy his job."