Worcester Business Journal

www.wbjournal.com • Worcester Business Journal • 2 022 Economic Forecast 17 Altus Vision™ is underwritten by Altus Dental Insurance Company. Claims processing, claims service, and provider network administration for Altus Vision™ are provided under contract by Vision Service Plan Insurance Company ("VSP"). Altus Dental sure looks different these days. Introducing Altus Vision TM The company that's been delivering great dental plans for the last twenty years now offers total vision coverage, in partnership with VSP ® , a national leader in vision benefits. With Altus Vision, you get: Robust plans | Easy access | Great rates And you thought we only did great dental plans. View plans at vision.altusdental.com R E A L E S TAT E Zero malls: Worcester is no longer a regional indoor shopping destination It was 1987, and Worcester was perhaps at its apex as a regional shopping destination. e Greendale Mall was opening, joining the Galleria mall downtown and completing a long conversion of the city from a place once drawing shoppers to downtown storefronts – like Denholm's and Woolworth – to one attracting people to indoor malls in a new era of retail. Worcester may have improbably managed to keep shoppers coming into the city in the age of new highways and suburbanization, but it didn't last. In the past decade or two, Worcester has seemed to lose its place as the shopping heart of Worcester County. e Galleria, which opened in 1971, closed in 2006. Its glory days were gone long before then, with one anchor, Jordan Marsh, closed by 1991, and the other, Filene's, two years later. In the end, the Galleria never came close to living up to a neighborhood-saving standard, and even city officials deemed the mall a failure. e demise of the Greendale Mall was similarly long foreshadowed. Anchors le, the mall went into foreclosure, and the Worcester Regional Transit Authority even eliminated a bus stop at the mall. Finard Properties of Boston, which bought the mall in 2019, first pitched knocking down the mall in favor of a denser mixed- use development, but now the plan is to replace the mall with an Amazon warehouse. Ultimately, Worcester has the unwelcome distinction of having not just one but two closed malls. e hundreds of thousands of square feet of stores they once offered have not been replicated elsewhere in the city. "Unfortunately, when you have these big anchors leave and they're not replaced, a mall can fall out of favor quickly," said Aaron Jodka, an analyst for the real estate firm Colliers International in Boston. Rich dreams, poor dreams: Racial discrimination in mortgages is holding communities down Racial discrimination in mortgage lending and home ownership -- a key to building generational wealth in America -- creates neighborhoods of have's and have-not's in Greater Worcester, where educational and economic success is harder to achieve. is three-part, five-month joint investigation by Worcester Business Journal and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau examines the problems caused by racial discrimination in home lending: WBJ Part 1: Racial discrimination in mortgage lending has created a segregated Worcester with unequal school environments and worries about gentrification in the city's poor, but up- and-coming neighborhoods. WBJ Part 2: Poor neighborhoods with diverse populations struggle to sustain economic development, which destabilizes the region's poorest areas and creates obstacles to economic improvement, particularly for existing residents. e entire Worcester Regional Research Bureau report -- Achieving the American Dream: Disparities in Worcester Homeownership -- breaks down into more detail the differences between the richest and poorest neighborhoods in Central Massachusetts, and how that impacts quality of life and upward mobility. To read the Rich dream, poor dreams investigation, visit WBJournal.com. Clark University professor Ramon Borg- es-Mendez, of the Rich dreams, poor dreams investigation PHOTO/MATT WRIGHT Top real estate stories from 2021 W

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