Four Seasons' midlife crisis.

• Position: Statewide: TRIAD REGION - Statistical table

Greensboro's Four Seasons Town Centre mall is facing one of its biggest challenges since opening 40 years ago. Anchor tenant Belk is leaving, joining a national migration from enclosed shopping centers. The Charlotte-based retailer, the nation's largest privately owned department-store chain, plans to close the 212,000-square-foot store in February and expand one 4 miles away at open-air Friendly Center. Four Seasons opened in 1974 on land that developer Joe Koury started accumulating in the 1950s. With an adjacent hotel and convention center as well as proximity to Interstate 40 and Greensboro Coliseum, it became a Tar Heel retail institution. Koury died in 1998, and Chicago-based General Growth Properties bought the property for $116 million in 2004. Being near a highway matters less these days, with many shoppers preferring the newness and community feel of open-air centers, which usually are in more-affluent neighborhoods, New York-based market researchers Nielsen said in a 2014 report on malls...