On the other hand, I live in a fairly newly built area and the shopping center/strip mall they're opening near me seems to be geared towards more local-owned or at least smaller stores. The biggest store is a supermarket (Food Lion, ugh. I go elsewhere), followed by an Ace Hardware. (Ace is the place with the helpful hardware high school kid who doesn't know what you're talking about, but at least the conclusion is that either they don't have it or it costs 50% more than everywhere else, by, hey, at least Ace is a franchise, so it means that that store is owned by someone local. Unfortunately, I also don't go there, mostly because it's just a terrible store. You know those stores that have too many floor employees and you can't go without being accosted, so you try to avoid the large aisles and end up feeling like you're trying to rob the place? Also, the Home Depots around here haven't changed their layouts as far as I can remember in ten years, maybe more.)

Anyway, the rest seems to be geared towards locally-owned businesses or, again, niche stores. There's a pharmacy that opened up. Several boutique clothing stores. A Trek bicycle store. Two hairdressers, one cheap, one nice. And so on. The point being that the developers specifically wanted to get smaller, less homogenous stores.