This article originally appeared in the Dallas-Fort Worth Real Estate Review.

The retail landscape is changing quickly, and Arlington hasn’t been immune to that. Two former shopping malls, Six Flags Mall and Forum 303 Mall, closed years ago as shoppers migrated to more modern shopping centers.

“Both those malls, while they were dark for a little bit of time, we were able to partner with the market to repurpose the land for a higher and better use and preserve the tax base,” Yelverton says.

The old Six Flags Mall has been demolished at the northeast corner of State Highway 360 and East Division Street to make way for the future Arlington Automotive Logistics Center. The 1.2-million-square-foot facility will supply parts to the GM Assembly Plant across the highway.

Just south on S.H. 360, the Forum 303 Mall was closed and razed more than a decade ago, paving the way for several industrial developments on the site.

That leaves The Parks Mall in south Arlington as the lone traditional, indoor mall in the city. Currently, there are about 500 such malls still open around the country, but not all of them will survive, Yelverton said.

So far, the feedback from GGP, the company that manages the mall, has been positive, Yelverton says. H&M recently opened in the store.

“That’s the kind of thing that they’re going to have to continue to do to make sure the shopping experience is great — make sure they have cutting-edge retailers in there that people want to see,” Yelverton says. “We’re going to hope that the mall holds its own and continues to do well because it’s a huge sales tax generator for Arlington.”

Other major repurposing included the former National Semiconductor facility on I-20 near Cooper Street.

“Places like Intel and Texas Instruments survived,” Yelverton says. “They [National Semiconductor] weren’t the player that survived everything.”

The microchip manufacturing plant couldn’t be converted into anything else so it was torn down, Yelverton says, adding that a developer is constructing a spec industrial building on the site.

The former High Point Church at the northwest corner of S.H. 360 and I-20 took over the former Johnson & Johnson Medical complex but was forced out by foreclosure in 2014. Now, a developer proposes building up to eight industrial buildings on the 119-acre site.

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