On Wednesday evening, a reader tipped me off that after fifteen years of operation, the beloved neighborhood dessert shop The Meadows Frozen Custard at the Hickory Ridge Village Center will be closing by the end of this year. Upon hearing the news, I went straight to the shop, talked to the owner, got the story, and shared it on Facebook that same night.
Here’s the recap of what I learned. Meadows’ lease expired earlier this year. The shop and its landlord, Kimco Realty, had been negotiating a renewal, and they’d reached an agreement in principle: a three-year extension, higher rent than their old pandemic-era lease, and a commitment to stay open year-round rather than seasonally. They were told the deal was done. They were waiting on the final contract to sign.
It never came. Instead, Kimco emailed to say that after meeting with company leadership, they had decided not to renew Meadows’ lease.
Meadows has until the end of the year.
The Facebook post has been viewed 100,000 times and drew nearly 1,000 reactions and several hundred comments combined between the original post and places it was shared. The reaction was almost entirely one-directional: grief about Meadows, anger at Kimco.
Some of that anger is warranted. A fair amount of it is aimed at things that don’t quite work the way people assume they do. This piece is my attempt to sort it all out.
On Thursday morning, I emailed Kimco’s Senior VP of Marketing and Communications, who had previously given me an on-the-record quote for my piece on the disappearance of the El Sabor Chapin food truck from this very village center. I asked Kimco five questions: whether an extension had been agreed to in principle before the reversal, the reason for declining to renew, whether a new tenant is signed, how Kimco weighs renewing an existing tenant against re-leasing to someone new, and whether they had any response to the community reaction. I gave them until 3 p.m. Friday.
This time, they did not reply.
Who is the Decider?
Kimco Realty owns the Hickory Ridge Village Center. It is their property, and as property owners, they can do with it as they please, subject to local zoning ordinances. Who they lease the retail spaces to is entirely at their discretion.
Howard County government has no say in which tenants Kimco selects. Neither does the Columbia Association, nor the Hickory Ridge Village Board. There’s no hearing, no comment period, no vote, no appeal on what businesses Kimco leases their space to. There is also nobody who selected Kimco as landlord and could therefore un-select them.
Kimco owns six of Columbia’s nine village centers and will continue to own them indefinitely. There is no mechanism to force them to sell. As owner, they can lease space to whoever they want, on whatever terms they can get, in accordance with their business strategy. As a publicly traded company answering to shareholders, they’re going to make the business decision that maximizes their return. That’s not villainy. It’s how commercial real estate works everywhere. It’s good ol’ capitalism. It’s about as American as apple pie.
So when I say a lot of the anger is aimed at things that don’t work the way people think they work — this is what I mean. This isn’t a policy direction or a use of taxpayer funds you disagree with and can take up with the political decision-makers. There’s no council bill, no zoning case, no public process where residents get to weigh in. Perhaps any confusion is because the village centers were originally developed and owned by the Rouse Company, until the Rouse Company sold them to Kimco in 2002.1
What we can do is analyze their business decision. We can question it. We can criticize it. And we can absolutely be mad about it. I’m about to do all of those things at length. What we can’t do is change how Kimco decides to do business.
And no, a petition or a boycott isn't going to do it either. Boycott who, exactly? Certainly not the business owners leasing space in the village center, who are stuck with Kimco as their landlord just as much as we're stuck with Kimco as the property owner of the village center. The businesses that had nothing to do with this decision — Ranazul, RoCo, Celia's, Decanter, Grille Chick’n Pollo, and all the rest — still deserve our visits.
Why Kimco Doesn’t Want Meadows
On its face, it seems crazy. You have a long-time tenant, largely beloved by their community that helps draw families to the center throughout the warm summer months, and they were willing to meet Kimco’s rent demands.
So, why didn’t Kimco renew the lease? To be clear, I don’t actually know. Kimco didn’t answer my questions. What follows is my best attempt to construct the case for the decision, putting myself in their shoes, and using what I do know about how retail landlords think.
Here’s the strongest version I can construct.
Meadows sells frozen dessert. It’s a seasonal business. It’s hard to move enough custard in the winter months to cover a monthly rent check, and rent is due all twelve months whether the shop is open or not. A landlord looking at that space sees a tenant whose revenue is concentrated in five or six months each year, and who is therefore always one bad summer away from trouble.
The obvious counterpoint is that Meadows has been there fifteen years, paying rent the whole time. Clearly the business has proven that it works. The rent was paid.
But that’s fifteen years at their old rent, including a just-expired pandemic-era lease rate that was almost certainly below market. The question in front of Kimco today wasn’t whether Meadows could survive. It was whether Meadows could survive at today’s market rate — and the seasonality of the ice cream business makes that harder. There’s strong demand to lease at Hickory Ridge now, which means Kimco has options. They can command more cash.
A business with revenue concentrated in five or six months a year has to carry a higher rent through the off-season on money it earned that summer. That’s a thinner margin for error than a business that earns evenly all year.
That risk compounds because Meadows is a locally-owned single-location operator, with just one revenue stream and one balance sheet. There’s no corporate parent to carry them when business temporarily falls. A national chain in that same space can lose money at one location for a year and not blink, knowing the company can absorb the losses. From a landlord’s perspective, the national operator is simply the safer choice, and that’s true regardless of which one makes better custard or which one the neighborhood loves.
A landlord also cares about a business's revenue. Some leases include percentage rent — where the landlord takes a share of sales above a set threshold, a common structure in retail leasing — then the landlord’s upside depends directly on how much business the tenant does.
So Kimco’s thinking might be this: at the old rent, Meadows was a fine tenant. At market rent, a seasonal single-location independent is a riskier bet than the alternative, whatever that alternative may be.
And yes, Meadows had agreed to the higher rent, and agreed to go year-round instead of seasonal. But agreeing to a rate and actually being able to pay that rent are different things. Meadows was willing to accept that risk. But Kimco cares not just what the tenant agrees to pay, but also whether the business can actually afford to pay it. If it turns out that Meadows can’t afford the agreed-upon rent, Kimco is the one left short.
So Kimco clearly looked at all of this and made the call they believe is in their best business interest, which is to lease this spot to somebody else. Presumably they concluded that whoever the next tenant is offers more financial upside and less risk. That's a business decision, and it is entirely their right to make it.
But having the right to make a decision doesn’t make it a good one. And in this case, I think this is a piss-poor business decision.
Why Kimco Should Want Meadows
Their reasoning on credit risk may be sound on the narrow math. It’s wrong on the bigger picture. Whatever Kimco gains from leasing 850 square feet to a slightly more profitable tenant is immaterial next to the reputational cost of how they got there. This isn’t just “we chose someone else.” It’s that Meadows spent months negotiating in good faith, reached an agreement, and then got ghosted by email. That’s the part that I think will hurt Kimco, not the part where they picked a different tenant.
It sends a message to every current and future village center tenant: long-term relationships don’t count for much here. If I were another tenant at this village center, I'd be livid with my landlord for causing self-inflicted reputational harm that ultimately lands on me too — because some people, as much as I hope they don't, may think twice about frequenting the village center at all, even though its other tenants had nothing to do with this.
And it comes at a cost that doesn’t show up on this quarter’s rent roll but will eventually show up somewhere — the next time Kimco needs community goodwill or political support for a redevelopment, a rezoning, or anything where public sentiment actually matters. you’d better believe the public is going to remember this. Ten years on, people still bring up Luna Bella and Hickory Ridge Grill in the comments every time Hickory Ridge comes up.
Community Interests and Kimco’s Profits Don’t Have to Conflict
Jim Rouse designed Columbia with the vision that its village centers would serve the retail needs of residents, and be the center of civic life, drawing neighbors together as they went about their day.
But retail environments and consumer preferences have changed dramatically since the 1960s, and so has Columbia. Village centers are absolutely not the only game in town anymore.
Amid all the handwringing about the decline of Columbia’s village centers, nobody is arguing we lack adequate retail options. Any store you want — restaurant brand, grocery store, big box — is within a ten-minute drive of most places in Columbia. It just might not be in a village center. That’s a point I raised when George Berkheimer of The Business Monthly interviewed me for a piece running soon in their August edition.
And yet I still want that community gathering place, and so does everybody else. We want our village centers to have retailers we actually frequent. A place to gather, and to bump into friends and neighbors.
Nothing exemplifies that better than an ice cream shop. You buy a frozen treat and sit outside and enjoy it, and your kids run around, and you might see three people you know. It’s an experience my family and I enjoy frequently at this very shop.
Kimco doesn’t see it that way.
They own something like 550 shopping centers. Hickory Ridge is one of them. It gets evaluated the same way Kimco evaluates Columbia Crossing, or Snowden Square, or any of the hundreds of other retail centers it owns across the country. Same underwriting model, same metrics, same questions about credit quality and rent per square foot and tenant mix. There’s a spreadsheet, and this center is a row in it.
What that spreadsheet misses is that Kimco owns something most of its portfolio doesn’t have: this place actually means something to people.
Most of Kimco’s shopping centers are interchangeable. A boring strip just off a divided highway. Hickory Ridge means something. So does every other Columbia village center, because Rouse deliberately built them that way. That’s not nostalgia Kimco has to manufacture — it’s already there, for free, baked into how 60 years of Columbia residents think about these places.
A landlord who understood that would treat it as an asset, not an inconvenience. Lean into the village center as a gathering place — market it that way, curate for it, protect the tenants who create it — and you don’t just avoid the backlash. You increase traffic from customers who put a premium on that identity, and you make the center more desirable to lease — because it has a neighborhood identity tenants and customers alike will go out of their way for.
So we’re optimizing for different things. Residents want a village center with tenants that actually serve the community. Kimco wants a village center that maximizes its profits. Those two goals don’t have to conflict. There’s a real business opportunity for them to converge.
Which is what makes this decision so frustrating. Hickory Ridge had assembled a genuine lineup of community-focused independents that seemingly do both — Ranazul, RoCo, Celia’s. Losing Meadows, right when it looked like Kimco was turning this center into a real destination for locally owned businesses and a true community gathering place, is a gut punch that runs against the goodwill they had been building.
Losing Meadows is upsetting enough. What’s harder to understand is why Kimco thought this was a smart move.
Meadows is a Casualty of the Village Center’s Success
One other thing worth clearing up.
After neglecting the center for years while Kimco pushed for — and failed to win — zoning board approval for a residential redevelopment, they have pivoted hard to leasing. New leases, new signage, landscaping, the fountain finally fixed. Ranazul, RoCo, Celia’s, Savorists. Even a Pilates studio is opening soon.
Under no circumstances do I believe Kimco is purposely clearing out retail tenants to force a residential redevelopment. That was last decade. If you want the full backstory, it’s in my archives — I’ve told that saga multiple times, most recently in The Tale of Three Village Centers. That’s not happening now. At Hickory Ridge, the focus is leasing to maximize the value of the property they have now.
Kimco’s own site plan now shows just one vacant space out of twenty-one.
Regular visitors to the HRVC may notice that Miracle Ear is currently operating in the prime corner space (#4) that this map labels as vacant. My understanding is that this is only temporary. Kimco is actively marketing the corner as available, and once Kimco finds a tenant for it, Miracle Ear will move into their smaller space next door (#3). That’s a landlord keeping their best space occupied and active while they shop it.
Kimco wants this center full, and they want it leased to whoever pays the most.
Meadows isn't a casualty of the same scheme that Kimco purportedly used last decade to force out Luna Bella and Hickory Ridge Grill. Meadows is a casualty of a landlord who is finally motivated to lease each of its spaces to the highest bidder — without consideration for the tenant mix that would actually deliver the highest return.
Kimco Will Regret This
Nobody can force Kimco’s hand here. There’s no petition, no boycott, no council vote that reverses this decision. Kimco owns the village center, and they can do with it as they please.
I think Kimco made a bad call, and I think residents are right to be frustrated by it — not because Kimco owes Meadows or its customers anything, but because embracing what makes village centers special is actually the smarter business play, and they missed it.
Kimco’s decision costs us a neighborhood ice cream shop. It costs them something too — goodwill I suspect they’ll come to regret losing, the next time they actually need it. A future redevelopment. Support at a public hearing. They’d been rebuilding that goodwill, at least here at Hickory Ridge. This decision undoes it.
About The Merriweather Post
I’m Jeremy Dommu — a Columbia resident who writes about development, land use, and the entities operating in Howard County as an independent hobby. I have a real job and a family. This is what I do in my spare time.
Every article I write is free. No paywalls, no exceptions. Ever.
If you found this piece valuable — if you think someone should be driving over to a custard shop the night a tip comes in to hear the story firsthand, pulling a landlord’s own site plan to count exactly how many spaces are actually vacant, walking through the leasing math a national REIT runs on an 850-square-foot corner, and emailing the company for comment before writing a word of criticism — becoming a paid subscriber is how you keep this going.
If you’ve been reading for free, keep doing that. And please keep sharing my articles — the reach on this story came almost entirely from people forwarding it. But if you’re ready to support independent local coverage of Howard County, the button is below.
Originally, the Rouse Company owned eight of Columbia’s nine village centers — Owen Brown, developed by Giant Food’s realty division in 1978, being the exception. In 2002, the Rouse Company sold all eight to Kimco. Kimco has since divested Oakland Mills and Long Reach, and remains the owner of six village centers today: Hickory Ridge, Harper’s Choice, Kings Contrivance, River Hill, Dorsey’s Search, and Wilde Lake.
(Own views) The article is correct that there is no governing body that can control what Kimco does with its own property outside of county zoning, but the Hickory Ridge Community Association (HRCA) does have strong influence over the Hickory Ridge Village Center. It was Kimco that came to HRCA just last year for help in getting approval for its new awnings. Howard Hughes has architectural control over the village center, and HRCA sent a letter to Howard Hughes in support of Kimco’s proposed awnings, which were then approved. HRCA did this while also asking Kimco to fix a specific list of overdue maintenance items at the village center. Kimco fixed all of the items including the new fountain, but Kimco did not just fix those things on its own - we asked them to.
Potentially in the case of Meadows, HRCA could write a letter in support of Meadows, which could influence Kimco enough to reverse its decision, so I encourage folks to get involved with the community association. Come to a resident speak out. Ask the board to get involved. Finally, our village manager does a fantastic job in general, and she has a deep list of contacts from Kimco to Howard County Gov. This is one of the best benefits of living in Hickory Ridge. Don’t forget to leverage it to advocate for the community’s interests.
When they were open in the winter, we used to buy ice cream pies for family get-togethers!