Stephen Lawton is a Retail Consultant at Main Street Property Services, Inc., providing consulting and leasing services to owners, developers and public agencies. Mr. Lawton utilizes his twenty years of consulting experience to assist in leasing and developing shopping centers, main streets, and town focal points. Mr. Lawton’s expertise is in new urbanism, planning, and economic development.

Mr. Lawton is dedicated to assisting Main Street’s clients navigate the financial, administrative and community issues that always accompany infill development. His extensive private and public sector experience enables Main Street to provide practical, institutional-quality consulting and leasing services across its client base. Previous consulting engagements include clients at Goldman Sachs, Federal Express, Bank of America, HongkongBank, United States Postal Service and Burlington Northern Railroad. He is the co-inventor of an electronic commerce system, US Patent 5832100.

Mr. Lawton has a comprehensive knowledge of what it takes to create valuable retail districts and centers. His recent experience includes public and private partnerships, retail leasing of a mixed-use building, programming and delivery of a festival marketplace, major construction, complex property transactions and large land entitlements. He led the effort that created the first form-based zoning code to be adopted into the law of a California city, and helped change state law to allow innovations in zoning. 

Mr. Lawton holds a BA degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. As a licensed real estate broker in California, he served as the Public Sector Chair of the Northern California Alliance program of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC), and is a longtime member of its program committee. Mr. Lawton is a founder and President of the Northern California Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as the chair of an advisory committee to the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, and an active member of the East Bay committee for the Urban Land Institute in San Francisco.