I haven't seen this area so I don't know exactly what it's like, but you see this kind of thing popping up all over the place, where mixed use development gets plunked down in, say, an existing mall parking lot.
The situation a lot of places face is that they've gotten too dense for the imagined nice aspects of suburban sprawl development to exist. Getting around by car isn't easy anymore; it's hard. There's really no going backwards, so the question is whether they can understand that density, if done right, can actually have advantages too.