The Boardwalk at Ira Needles

[ijmorlan]

It's definitely a huge improvement over the Sportsworld style of this sort of development.

Is it?

Maybe the central portions are, but the big box stores seem largely the same inaccessible hostile development

I might call it a "small" improvement.

Even keeping the same ratio of parking, but clustering the stores would have been better.  That would have achieved at least something like an outdoor version of Connestoga Mall.

They should have just built one huge long building along and immediately next to Ira Needles (in phases, presumably, like the actual development). Put the parking behind the building. It would be quite walkable for people in the adjacent residential areas, one could walk between the various services in weather-protected corridors, and it wouldn’t really be any different for accessing by car — just park in the parking lot close to where one needs to go and walk in.

I don’t know why everybody is so hot for these multiple-building developments. How is it better to have to go outside through a parking lot to walk from one store to another?