Dozens of Shopping Centers Planned in McKinney

Nearly 50 shopping centers are in various stages of development and approval, per newspaper analysis

Nearly 50 shopping centers are either currently under construction or approved for development in McKinney, according to city officials.

The business boom, first reported by Community Impact Newspaper, is exciting news for the man whose top priority is to encourage commercial development in the city.

“Our residential development in the City of McKinney grew astronomically over the last 10 years, but the commercial development did not keep pace,” said Michael Quint, Executive Director of Development Services in the City of McKinney. “While I would love to take all the credit, while I would love to give credit to the council, I think a lot of it is we just happened to be in a great market and we’ve been underserved for commercial development for some extended period of time.”

There is no official definition of ‘shopping center,’ but Quint said he would consider a shopping center to be a development “that includes a mixture of related or interrelated commercial uses developed in close proximity to one another or in a defined geographic area.”

According to the Community Impact report, the business developments are slated to include businesses including retail, restaurants and big box stores.

“One of the things that we hear about from our residents is, ‘I live in McKinney. I want to shop in McKinney. I want to keep my sales tax dollars local. I don't want to spend or give that sales tax money to Plano, Frisco and Allen,’” Quint said.

Quint noted that this surge in development may be only the tip of the iceberg.

Only about half of McKinney’s 68 square miles have been developed to date, according to Quint. And if you count the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) – an area not within the city limits but land that McKinney has legal authority over – then only about 30 percent of the 116 square miles have been developed.

“We really have so much land left open for development that we are not taking the development that we see now as kind of our success story,” Quint said. “We are trying to push that envelope a little bit more with coming weeks, the coming months,the coming years.”

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