The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a pair of articles about the ICSC show taking place in Atlanta right now.

Hardest hit have been restaurants and high-end stores. Even when customers do sit down at a nicer restaurant, Del Monaco said, they’re more likely to opt for water than wine with their meal.

“A lot of retail tenants have called me and said, ‘I’m scared,’ ” she said.

On the other hand, August sales were up at wholesale clubs and discount stores.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty out there, with people waiting to see who gets elected president and the impact of that,” said convention attendee Harold Shumacher, an Atlanta restaurant broker. “People are very guarded.”

Despite the drop in attendance at this year’s ICSC conference, he said, “The core constituency of deal-makers, landlords, developers and tenants will still be there because they have to be.”

“Those of us who are older have been through this before,” Schumacher said. “Sure, we’re not happy about things being slow right now. But what goes up must come down. The question is, how long is the recovery going to take?”

The proposed $800 million Central Park upscale retail development is dead, the latest victim of the uncertain economy.

Developer Peter Rubin told city officials on Friday that his Coral Co. no longer needs a rezoning issue on the Nov. 4 ballot for the project, billed as a transformation of the city’s business district into a town center.

Council voted to withdrawing the rezoning issue Monday night. The issue still will appear on the already-printed ballots. The county elections board told the city the votes won’t be counted, Mayor Kevin Patton said. Notices will be posted at the polls informing voters the issue has been removed.

Stores, parks, restaurants, a hotel, housing and offices all were part of the plan for 90 acres bordered by SOM Center, Solon, Bainbridge and Sharondale roads.

Rubin informed residents whose property made up the parcel last week that his company would not exercise its option to buy their land.

Link.

The credit crisis continues to deepen. Yet another large development has secured financing. This time it’s the mammoth CityCenter project in Las Vegas.

MGM Mirage said Monday that it completed the first stage of its $3 billion financing package for CityCenter, a $9.2 billion Las Vegas Strip casino project being developed with Dubai World.

MGM said it had secured a $1.8 billion senior bank credit facility that will mature in April 2013.

CityCenter has received addition commitment letters of more than $500 million, which executives said will be added to the facility once completed.

CityCenter - which MGM Mirage (nyse: MGM - news - people ) officials have called the most expensive private commercial development in U.S. history - is expected to include six high-rise towers with a 4,000-room hotel-casino, condominiums, boutique hotels and a retail, dining and entertainment complex.

A few months ago we linked to an item from Boston about how the mayor wanted greater assurances from developers about financing before giving the green light to large projects. At the time, the Filene’s redevelopment was stalled because of lack of financing.

It appears that even amid the credit crisis, the project was able to secure financing. The big question, of course, is what the terms are. They are not described in the story.

After weeks of uncertainty about the struggling project, developer John B. Hynes III and partner Vornado Realty Trust have secured financing to proceed with construction on the 1.25 million-square-foot mixed-used site, which will include retail shops, condominiums, a hotel, and offices in the historic department store building and a new 38-story tower next to it.

The head of the company building the project, John F. Fish of Suffolk Construction Co., said he was told by the developers to ramp up construction work because the team had locked in its final pieces of funding in recent days.

“We’ve been given the green light to move forward, and the financing has been validated, so we’re in good shape,” Fish said. His firm has even bought the structural steel for the complex.

The project has been in the works for a while.

The Senate is now discussing the bailout. They’ve added something like 300 pages of tax breaks and credits.

There may be, however, a bunch of provisions in this version that the commercial real estate industry will like, including sections on how to treat losses and damages resulting from natural disasters and credits for adopting green building standards.

I’m not sure what that has to do with the bailout and getting credit flowing again, but it should make some people happy anyway.

The Wall Street Journal is taking a rather negative view of the retail real estate development pipeline. The data they are citing comes from Property & Portfolio Research Inc., perhaps the most bearish of the major real estate data providers. Data from Reis Inc., in contrast, shows that the pace of construction did not match the peak of the 1980s. Also worth nothing, deliveries as a percent of existing inventory also are not out of line with historic numbers.

Here are some charts we ran in our May issue illustrating the discrepancies.

Developers have built one billion square feet of retail space in the 54 largest U.S. markets since the start of 2000, 25% more than what they built during the same period of the 1990s, according to Property & Portfolio Research Inc. of Boston. U.S. retail space now amounts to 38 square feet for every person in those 54 markets, up from 29 square feet in 1983, the firm says.

Consider a six-mile stretch of highway north of Dallas, where three developers are racing to finish four huge shopping centers with a combined three million square feet of space. Not only will they compete with each other, but there are three existing malls within a 10-mile radius.

“There just aren’t enough tenants to go around for three projects,” concedes Gar Herring, president of shopping center developer MGHerring Group of Dallas, which is building the largest of the centers.

Update: The New York Times also decided to look at malls today.

Realpoint, a credit rating agency in Horsham, Pa., has tracked 127 mall loans that are delinquent or in default, including a $22.2 million mortgage on Midway Mall in the Dallas suburb of Sherman, Tex. Like many older malls, Midway, which is managed by Simon Property Group, the largest operator in the country, was unable to withstand competition from a nearby new open-air center, Sherman Town Center, and is nearly half vacant.

In the face of a prolonged housing crisis, the decline in consumer spending, and the lack of construction financing, developers have been forced to abandon, postpone or scale back projects.

Don Chapman, a managing director at Ariel Preferred Retail Group of Williamsburg, Va., which owns seven outlet centers across the country, began lining up tenants a year ago for a $90 million outlet center he plans to build in Rockford, Ill., but is finding that lenders are insisting on onerous terms, including more equity as well as personal guarantees from the developer. “Our thinking was that we would be in the ground by now,” said Mr. Chapman, who plans to continue seeking tenants. “It’s taking longer than we anticipated.”

Brian M. Smith, the chief investment officer for Regency Centers, a national strip mall developer and operator based in Jacksonville, Fla., said the company revised its development strategy in the spring of 2007. “We saw it coming,” Mr. Smith said. “We dropped $400 million worth of projects and totally revamped our pipeline.”

Construction loans outstanding backed by major commercial property types continued to expand, growing to $295 billion at the end of the second quarter, according to a report from Foresight Analytics, but the pace of growth is slowing.

Based on an analysis of data from the FDIC, relating to commercial bank and thrift construction lending activity, Oakland, Calif.-based Foresight Analytics reports that construction loans outstanding backed by industrial, retail, office and hotel properties rose 5% in the second quarter of 2008, compared with the first quarter of the year.

However, the pace of growth is slowing. And Foresight Analytics expects the pace to decline further during the course of the year.

“Commercial construction — if it is not quite grinding to a halt — is getting pretty close in the credit crunch. The broader credit crunch is having an impact and making lenders more reticent to make construction loans. Also developers are more cautious as well,” says Matt Anderson, a partner with Foresight Analytics.

Link.

Could this be a new trend in the works? Boston Mayor Thomas Menino wants to require developers of large projects to prove they have financing in place before they’re allowed to move ahead with projects. Apparently this is being triggered by two high-cost projects that have run into financing problems after construction already began. Menino wants to avoid any other eyesores on his city’s landscape.

His call follows financial problems for two high-profile developments that have already begun construction in Boston: the $650 million redevelopment of the Filene’s building in Downtown Crossing and the $800 million Columbus Center complex over the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Menino is having city planners devise a regulation that would delay approvals for developers who cannot show adequate financial backing to proceed with construction. The regulation is an attempt to prevent city streets from being at the mercy of credit markets that can suddenly stall or upend projects.

“We already have two or three holes in our landscape; we don’t want any more,” said Menino. “We don’t want to stifle development, but we don’t want developers to take advantage of the city.”

The mayor spoke yesterday after the Globe reported that the developers of the 38-story commercial and residential tower on the former Filene’s property have been unable to raise financing because credit markets have severely tightened in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle.

Duke Realty, a diversified real estate company that owns industrial, office, health care and retail, announced it’s getting out of retail real estate and focusing on its other property areas. In reality, retail has been a very small part of its business in recent years, so this isn’t as drastic as it sounds.

The move will eliminate about six jobs, said company spokesman Joel Reuter. The company’s retail properties represent only about 1.5 percent of its nationwide portfolio, but it has worked on some high-profile local projects—including West Carmel Marketplace along Michigan Road, and Marketplace at Anson.

Duke has partnered with Grubb & Ellis Harding Dahm & Co. to develop the remainder of the Anson space, but is looking to sell other retail properties it holds across the country, Reuter said.

Hoping to win back the sex appeal, the Cherry Hill, Plymouth Meeting and former Echelon Malls are undergoing a real estate version of plastic and bariatric surgery.

The bill: $365 million - most of it borrowed cash at a time when borrowed cash is scarce and retailers are hurting.

The goal: that by 2009 all three bear little resemblance to your mother’s mall - or the mall of your own perhaps ill-spent, hair-sprayed youth.

For months, bulldozers have lopped off dead anchor stores and sliced and diced concrete like Legos on a kindergarten floor.

The jewel, and most expensive makeover, is Cherry Hill. That 47-year-old mall is going upscale by adding a Nordstrom department store, the region’s second; adding high-end catches such as Apple, BCBG and Armani Exchange; building new restaurants; and replacing its food court with ritzier tenants.

The Echelon Mall has been chopped down and renamed Voorhees Town Center. New homes are planned where half the mall once stood.

Plymouth Meeting is becoming a recreation-and-errands hub in the inescapable shadow of King of Prussia. A knot of mall stores is now a two-story Dave & Buster’s arcade, freestanding restaurants including P.F. Chang and Redstone have opened to long lines of workers from nearby offices, and a Whole Foods market attached to a strip of pricey new shops is going up where an Ikea once beckoned.

Though the $165 million being spent between Voorhees and Plymouth Meeting is huge, the $200 million Cherry Hill project is the glitziest and potentially most threatening to the competition.

“This mall is - without a Nordstrom - a powerhouse,” said Joseph F. Coradino, who helped hatch the overhaul. “With a Nordstrom, it turns from a powerhouse into a trophy.”

“You’re taking a very good mall,” real estate analyst Nathan Isbee of Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. said, “and you’re making it into a great mall.”

Link.