HOUSTON – (By Ralph Bivins of Realty News Report) – An innovation hub. Brilliant technologists gather there. Venture capitalists walk the halls. Entrepreneurship seems to drip from the ceiling.
In a modern café, a Stanford alumnus and an MIT engineer sit together over bitter coffee. By the time they leave the table, it’s easy to imagine a new startup has been born.
This is an Innovation Hub.
And the most fitting location for an Innovation Hub? Inside an old Sears store, surprisingly.
It sounds unlikely. Sears and innovation hardly seem compatible. The company’s last major innovations trace back to the days of the Sears & Roebuck catalog a century ago.
Is this the same Sears that sold off its most recognizable brands—Craftsman tools, introduced in 1927, and Kenmore appliances, introduced in 1913?
Is this the same Sears that once held 423 million square feet of retail space in 2004, a portfolio later reduced to just a few hundred stores?
How could an Innovation Hub be located in an old Sears store?
Sears was once a quintessential American retailer. It was overtaken by Walmart and Amazon while its leadership failed to adapt. A former colleague who worked as a retail copywriter at Sears Tower in the 1970s recalls a corporate culture that discouraged ambition and creativity. Executives reportedly believed they had no real competitors and dismissed emerging discount chains—an arrogance that proved costly.
Those forces of pride and complacency took their toll. Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last October.
The 1939-era Sears store on Main Street in Midtown Houston closed early last year. It is now being reborn as an innovation center called The Ion.
The former Sears building is a four-level, roughly 200,000-square-foot structure. Its ill-conceived 1960s exterior has been removed to reveal the original Art Deco architecture at 4201 Main Street. The project team includes Hines overseeing redevelopment, with Gensler and James Carpenter Design handling architecture.
The property is owned by Rice Management Company, which manages Rice University’s endowment. Rice controls more than 10 acres around Main and Wheeler, near an area that experienced a noticeable increase in homelessness, prompting city health officials to recommend a cleanup last year.
A groundbreaking for The Ion is scheduled for this week. Planners envision The Ion as the heart of a startup ecosystem and a central node in an innovation corridor stretching from downtown Houston to the Texas Medical Center.
At first glance the fit seems odd: a former retail giant’s cavernous store transformed into a tech incubator. Sears and The Ion—an unlikely pairing.
Yet Houston’s Sears is not the first to be repurposed this way. In Cincinnati, a historic Sears building became the 1819 Innovation Hub in partnership with the University of Cincinnati. That 133,000-square-foot center repurposed the city’s original Sears location into research and technology space, according to trade reporting.
Similarly, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, part of a Sears store that closed in 2018 has been converted into a startup space called Anchor.
In these examples innovation behaves like a hermit crab, seeking empty shells to inhabit. The vacant shell of the Midtown Sears will become a home for Houston startups. The new ecosystem will be very different—no Kenmore appliances, no Craftsman tools, no Sears & Roebuck catalog.
But The Ion may still deliver meaningful outcomes. It could help launch strong companies and generate jobs. It might even improve Houston’s standing the next time a major corporation evaluates potential locations for a new headquarters.
July 16, 2019 Realty News Report Copyright 2019
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