Malls could be the best co-working offices. Ample daytime parking, baller food courts, medical facilities, hair dressers, dentists, cafes, movie theaters, entertainment, etc all under one roof.
Malls as coworking space would be literally the arcologies of dystopian cyberpunk.
No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world. Just one giant homogenised hermetically sealed world.
It wouldn't be "best" for many people.
Maybe "convenient" for bosses who don't like how much productivity they lose when a Meat Flavoured Productivity Unit has to go get a haircut or imbibe sustenance....
Malls can definitely obtain natural lighting if architected properly (eg sky lights and light pipes) -- malls are no different than other commercial offices.
For example: I used to work at GoogleX's "San Antonio station", which was a converted shopping mall, and it had great lighting, even on lower floors.
With multiple employers in same building, you'd also have many more socializing options -- including random colleagues who drop by to run errands.
Besides, what would you suggest instead -- let them turn into suburban blight?!
Where does the money come from? Cities are cash-strapped, which makes demolition & park development unlikely. Existing property owners aren't exactly in the business of giving away prime realestate or operating charities -- they'd probably opt for more suburban housing developments.
Cities are not cash strapped, they just claim to be when they don't want to pay for something. Most cities have tons of cash flow paying for roads, services like garbage/recycling, maintaining existing parks.
If they really cant find the money sell it to developers to make condos or single family homes.
Somehow a small city I used to live in managed to do it. The mall declined to the point that all that was left were the anchor stores and a few other internal stores when they decided to demolish it.
They left the major anchor stores (Target, Von Maur, Hobby Lobby), turned most of the center of the mall into parking lots, and put up a few multi-store strips around it, and it went from empty to having thriving businesses that have mostly all remained the past 16 years.
This guy has more details and took some pictures of the mall just before they closed it:
The city would only pay for redevelopment if it owned the land underneath and that land was unsellable. And if that's the case, the city has bigger problems than the mall (something like Detroit, where, for many years, there was simply nobody there to buy/use/redevelop).
Provide the right financial incentives and a developer should be able to do it on terms favorable to the city (vs getting little/no revenue from a derelict mall complex).
Indoor square footage is not, and will never will be a relevant constraint on food production.
At $400/square foot to build a mall, and $XY/square foot/year to maintain it, the only thing that makes financial sense to grow in one is black market marijuana.
Ok but the perfect isn't the enemy of the good here.
Being able to go for a climate-controlled one-kilometer walk every lunch break is a real luxury for a lot of people, it's way better than a cell in some high-rise near the highway. The mall could have a hackerspace too!
The simple solution is work from home because most people already have a home, and simple solutions win. The only reason you're mentioning malls is because they are there, but unless you're a mall-walker on the weekends, I'm pretty sure the average developer's definition of a good lunch break isn't "walking past the mall McDonald's 3 times before returning to your mall wework" or whatever.
Assuming that everyone has a comfortable and spacious home with a desk&chair area is, well, a bad assumption.
A bunch of people I know are now working significantly more time from a couch, in a clearly non-ergonomic position. We will see and hear about the real damage 5 years from now.
We are 3 up (two adults, 1 child) in a 2 bed flat (apartment) with no garden and for the last year both my partner and I have been WFH full time (in my case I changed job to one that is 100% remote forever).
I couldn't agree more, the transition for me was trivial - I'm a developer who plays games, I already had a nice chair, two 27" 4K displays and a fast desktop so for me my hardware/comfort improved - for my partner work issued her a just about passable laptop and..well that was it.
With the lack of space I used a spare 27" monitor I had putting it on the boys desk with a decent external mouse/keyboard and we bought him a gaming chair - that way my partner can use his room as an office while he's at school/his fathers but yeah it's not be great for her.
We are moving next year and my only criteria for the house is at has to have either a large brick built garage or a concrete garage and space for an office pod in the garden, working from home around a near-teenager was challenging (and frankly that's just gonna get worse) and long term not something I want - I need quiet solitude to work most comfortably.
Just curious, where are you that you're moving from a small-ish flat to a home with enough garden space for a stand-alone ADU/man-cave/office?
I assume you're moving out of the city and into the suburbs or similar?
I wonder if the last year of WFH will actually make suburban sprawl worse in the short- to medium-term? Lots of people moving out of city flats into suburban homes for just the reasons you mention. I can't blame them, but it's probably not sustainable either. [and easy for me to say, as I already own a suburban home]
Many demographics were moving out of American cities through at least the mid-90s. A city like Boston was losing population until that time. The influx of, especially, college-educated young people is fairly recent. There's no particular reason to think it has to continue.
I know a bunch of people who were in urban apartments who have moved to larger places a number of hours out. There's a huge spike in real estate prices outside of cities now.
Apartment thats 10m from city center I had when we got together to a much larger house in a smaller town on the outskirts (actually the town I grew up in, small world).
I'm in the UK but in the north earning a southern developers salary so that gives us a lot of options.
I don't want to discard the fact that this is a real problem right now but in an efficient remote economy, employees are more likely to move to lower cost of living locations, possibly with better life quality and away from crazy overpriced urban centers that optimise for high salary in exchange for very little space. I think a world where people are more evenly distributed and have larger dwellings than a single room is more positive than keeping everyone clustered and have them working in malls.
There is a certain demographic in which a fair number of people find (certain) cities attractive. But, honestly, take convenience to employment out of the equation and the attraction of cities shrinks a lot. And if enough higher earning people move out, the city won't be as attractive to others. Take a look at NYC, among others, in the 70s and 80s.
Yup. Even people with floor space had to make significant adjustments. We had to buy 2 office chairs, 1 desk, and ended up buying some other furniture to make the wife's home office more pleasant. Probably $5000 total. Would have rather spent that on something fun, but oh well.
Our employers did at provide additional monitors (both of us already had suitable laptops), which was nice and better than many received.
OTOH, sometimes the budget needed to fix the ergonomic issue (if it can be fixed) is massive.
Especially for those with already limited space. It may become a useless spending when companies back to WFO after pandemi over or changing company that don't support WFH.
I have loved not commuting and I have a comfortable setup but I can’t honestly say that it hasn’t been a big problem being unable to get people’s answers to quick questions for days on end.
In my case I live in a 1br apartment where before the pandemic I was basically never home except to sleep and maybe on the weekend. Which I prefer, now having it be everything from office to social space and living space is very uncomfortable.
Anecdata, but the company I moved to a few months ago have 18 staff: only 3 of us have a dedicated work space (from the morning standups that I can see).
My brother works from home now and he's either in his living room or kitchen and my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office but prior to that worked from her dining room.
I've worked from home for a few years and have an office (spare bedroom we didn't use) so it's no big deal for me.
I'd love to see a large-scale survey around home office working.
> my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office
This is an interesting change happening in many places now and I wonder how it will impact the higher end of the market (and expectations) in a long term. Some people in larger houses recently went from 4 bedrooms with lots of space to 1 bedroom, 1 nursery, 2 offices. (yes, nice problem to have in practice, but still interesting)
I work for an all-remote company so there has been literally no change in my work life as a result of the pandemic.
It's not for everyone! Even for me, if there was a mall in my area, which had coworking, an attached hackerspace and, let's say, a gym? I would pick up a minimal "grab a desk" coworking package.
Why not? Sometimes being around people is nice. Sometimes there's lawn work or construction happening near my house. I could make a thermos of coffee and a protein shake first thing in the morning, head to coworking, get some stuff done, hit the gym, have my choice of food court meals, and head home for a shower and a quiet afternoon at home. Or call it a soft half-day and spend the afternoon working on something with circuit boards, or just shooting the breeze with the hackers.
Gosh this is sounding really nice! Anyone finds a setup like this, let me know!
There are plenty of malls in SF Bay Area that actually have good & healthy options instead of McDonalds. That's a solvable problem -- just like how some tech companies have amazing cafeterias.
What kind of malls do you have in your area to have no natural light? Pretty much every mall I’ve ever been to has tons of skylights and rooftop windows.
That's generally only in the common areas, not in the retail spaces that make up the vast majority of the actual floorplan and where any converted offices would actually be.
Yeah but that could be redesigned. They could punch some holes in the external facing sides of the former retail stores and add some glass. They could add more skylights on the roof and funnel them down too.
> No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world.
I think it's a US thing. Many malls have significant sun-light, though not for the stores (I think this is done on purpose so that you are not distracted and focus on the goods). This could be re-purposed, however. Concrete walls get removed and replaced by glass.
I’m not an architect but I doubt that. Refitting a building is expensive and buildings designed for one purpose are not going to be awesome for another unless your extremely lucky. Specialization is real. That said you could definitely retrofit the average department store building into reasonable offices.
I love how in the US, instead of building all these services and offices near each other and walkable from people's homes, we insist on ideas that force people to drive dozens of miles to get a walkable and convenient experience.
These Obama "we"s that contradict all known facts must stop. It's a kind of logical falacy to throw out a we that includes a vast majority that you know are not in agreement with you!
Americans absolutely freaking love their cars and have no desire to change the drive-thru lifestyle. I can't convince my parents not to feel pity on me when I'm overseas without one, they don't understand and can't understand that I am not merely indifferent, I hate the burden of a car and living in the inconvenient cities that pop up as an result of mass car ownership. The preferences of my friends in their 30s make it clear to me this American preference is not changing within our lifetimes. The lifestyle I want is only available, for the most part, in Asia. A recent long stay in Paris was even quite a surprise for me, I found the population density way too low to enjoy the convenient walk everywhere lifestyle easily found in Shanghai, Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul etc.
Right - I moved to the city because here in the US it's the only option to get any human-scale density. The next level down that you can commonly find is car-centric suburbia. The remaining human-scale places in the US outside of city centers are mostly isolated remnants from before we started knocking them all down to make room for cars. Nobody's building new ones.
1. Usually already located at a crossroads; you want a mall at a busy junction to attract custom
2. Usually already a local transit hub, since they tend to be a major concentration of jobs
3. Are separated from any pesky residential neighbors by major roads and/or large swathes for parking
4. Have a lot of land in the form of said large swathes of parking
These characteristics actually make them ideal for densification into a more walkable oasis; they already have some mixed uses, and the parking lots are developable without much fuss from neighbors. And you can do the whole thing in phases.
A bunch of malls in the Seattle area are getting redeveloped in this manner.
#1 is a mixed bag. Access by car is "easy", but traffic can be awful.
#3 is a negative. The separation from housing makes them LESS suitable for office space.
Put the two together, and even if the mall is redeveloped into nice office space with room to walk around, people outside the mall have to drive to do so. For people on the other side of those major arteries, they literally have to drive 1-2 blocks to walk around the mall (or former mall).
None of which is to imply we shouldn't redevelop malls into mixed use "urban" hubs. But, we shouldn't assume that redeveloping the mall in isolation will succeed. The surrounding area might need significant changes to fully utilize the former mall zone.
To be fair the US has the space to do what Asian and European countries couldn't.
Also America was basically virgin land. The invention of the car and highways shaped US cities when Tokyo and Paris were already centuries old.
I think you’ll find its pretty split. Lots of people prefer the privacy of a private car and large yards, but others would prefer walkable denser areas.
On the whole it might be slightly trending to the latter.
I'm an avid cyclist, so follow local traffic and infrastructure plans and related political/governmental issues. I live in a fairly dense suburb about 40 minutes outside DC (near Dulles Airport).
From what I can see, there is a subset of people who love owning a yard and having some of their own space for kids or gardening or whatever. And they like having a garage to store all their crap (and occasionally a car).
But, within that group, there is often a sort of despair (probably too strong a word) about the rotting infrastructure that surrounds them. Potholed roads, bridges literally crumbling, too much traffic, etc. This group pushes hard for more road construction, more sprawl, etc despite studies that mostly show more infrastructure doesn't help (demand always catches up). And they don't want to fund it via taxes.
There is another group that lives in the suburbs by necessity. Jobs are out here, costs are manageable, etc. They'd move to a city, if it were easier/affordable. I fall into this group. I actually sold my single-family home a few years ago and bought a smaller townhouse in a denser neighborhood so I could walk more places. Cost was the same and I enjoy the downsized home/yard, ability to walk/cycle for coffee or beer, and walk to work (thought that last bit was dumb luck on an office move).
And the vast majority are somewhere in between. Mostly ambivalent. Maybe some notion of the "American Dream" (big colonial home, white picket fence, etc), but content somewhere in the middle.
tl;dr - Americans like the cost and convenience of the suburbs, but much of that comes from indefinitely deferred infrastructure investment (though a massive chunk of suburban residents don't actually realize just how badly that spending is being deferred).
I once had a thought experiment of how a suburban city could be reworked with a focus on coworking centers.
Like the center of a neighborhood would be a coworking center and a park, it could be surrounded on each side by a subdivision, and the corners could be commercial/services. That way you'd be able to easily walk to your job if you wanted, and head home to let out pets or have lunch, no problem.
It would require pretty much everyone to move to coworking for it to be viable, though, and you might find out you don't like spending so much time with your neighbors.
After living in various parts of Europe for a few years and coming back, the US way of doing it seems mind-boggingly wasteful. Huge swaths of our country are long roads that lead to massive parking lots.
And of course we're obese, many people couldn't walk to accomplish errands if they wanted to.
I've been watching some Virtual Japan videos on YouTube lately, and it was really interesting how so many major streets in Japan don't seem to even be built for cars, people just walk in the center of the street and from location to location no problem, there might be some motorbikes but that's about it.
I don't think I've ever been to a city where they decide they don't need cars on their major streets. All of our cities presuppose that enough people will need to drive through it, and everything is much more spaced out because of it.
It's important not to underestimate how many customers a store in a mall needs to survive. Most need tens of thousands of people to visit the mall every week in order to generate sufficient customers to have enough revenue to be viable businesses. Food-based businesses are a bit different because the same customers can visit every day, but you can't operate a hairdresser or a movie theatre by serving the same few hundred co-working space users every day if you have to pay the sort of costs it takes to run a store in a mall.
You're assuming that the economics that work for a mall would still work the same way when it's converted to "office space plus amenities". I know a few office buildings in Berlin that have a food court, barber shops/hairdressers, dry-cleaners etc. inside the building. And I doubt they're paying full price on the rent - they're advertised as amenities that make the office space more attractive, raising the price of the office space in the building.
In Natick Mass they build a condo on top of the mall.
https://patch.com/massachusetts/natick/see-inside-natick-mal...
"This condo building was built in 2008 overlooking the Natick Mall. For just $925,000 you get sweeping views, 3 bedrooms, and access to all the shopping you can do (if you have any cash left over)."
But massachusetts has a weird relationship with Malls. I visited the Wayfair Offices, which sit above a really high end mall (Copley Place) in Boston. When I visited there was a pretty long line in the mall to get up the escalator to get onto the office floor...
From the article: "An Epic Games spokesperson told the Triangle Business Journal that the campus would include office buildings and recreational spaces."
That sure gives me the impression that they're tearing down the mall structure and probably parts of the parking lot, and then building new buildings.
I work out of (and take meetings in) Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan all the time. Lunch time crowd is a boisterous mix of Conde Nast fashion editors and Goldman Sachs analysts. All hating their jobs, ready to gossip. The food court is top tier. Blue Ribbon Sushi. MomoFuku japanese fried chicken and beer. You can stroll down to the marina to watch the boats bobbing in the hudson river. Or try on the trenches at Burberry.
But the best part is the proximity to the 9/11 memorial. The bottomless reflecting pools gargantuan in size where the former twin towers once loomed. Nothing quite focuses the mind like a few minutes at that historic work of public sculpture.
>>> Americans do more of their shopping online and gravitate to specialty brands and discount chains
The phenomenal rise of mobile shopping apps like PLT, DePop, Nova, and Shein provides a remarkable case study in instant commerce. One, the merch is so cheap, even teens can afford to wear an item just once. Two, the auxiliary market around creating digital content by fashion influences perpetuates the virtuous cycle. The compensation of course coming in the form of promotions, gift cards, commissions ...
Many malls I've been to had working offices on some floor or section of it, but they're not as visible as the store fronts. I'm sure they are great offices as well.
> The film centres on a group of office colleagues in downtown Calgary, Alberta, who bet a month's salary on who can last the longest without going outside by using the system of covered walkways that connect the buildings. The film takes place over one lunch hour on day 28 of the month-long competition.
The more or less dead mall fairly near me--there is still a thriving grocery store and Home Depot in the surrounding complex but not part of the mall as such--had as anchor stores JC Penney, Macy's, and Sears. It's in a smaller city. That (and even more rural areas--surrounding the smaller city is a lot of farmland such as where I live). There's nothing there to support significant co-working space.
The luxury malls in cities that would support more co-working space--though ask WeWork how things are going--are mostly doing better.
That’s pretty close to the mall’s original intent. They were supposed to be little villages of the future. They turned into uninspired, bland corporate centers.
Rackspace actually did this, their San Antonio HQ was a former mall (it had some goofy castle based theme and name, I forget).
I thought the idea was brilliant. The mall had a ton of space in which the company plonked a bunch of cubicles that everyone (including the CEO) used, plus many other amenities. On some days there would be delicious food trucks outside.
Malls need to be remade. I like the few I've gone to that are mostly outside or have some open airways and greenery, art, music, some sort of novelty event or thing to check out. I don't really miss giant generic malls at all. They're used more as a free babysitter and I hate visiting them.
The funny thing is that the early malls were like that. The word "mall" originally just meant an open space, like the National Mall in DC or the "Cuba Mall" that I grew up near in Wellington, New Zealand.
The modern shopping mall is distinguished by a single financial entity which owns the land/buildings, provides shared infrastructure (e.g. parking/power), and rents it all out as a package to many mostly small tenants. Enclosure is an optional feature. Later in life I lived near one of the earliest US malls built on this model - Shoppers World in Framingham, MA. It was not enclosed. It was basically a ring (or maybe more of a figure eight) with two stories of balconies over a shared courtyard. The familiar enclosed structure came later.
Ironically, Shoppers World itself became unable to compete with the newer enclosed Natick Mall across the street, so it was torn down. Now the name persists, but it's basically a big parking lot with a dozen or so isolated big-box stores around the periphery.
Yep. It meant croquet lawn, basically. It's from Pall Mall (ultimately, ball hit / palla malleus) - the place Charles II played lawn games and around which fashionable people would promenade.
In most suburban areas, the land malls sit on are worth far more than the structure. There's also a desperate need for housing in most metros. Particularly high density single family homes near the center of town.
It's cool to imagine alternate uses for existing malls, but I'm guessing the best thing to do would be to demolish them, then convert the land to small, dense housing developments.
Better yet, set aside some of that housing for small business owners who would have their locations in the development. Explicitly zone it for commerce as well as residential, like all of the old small town and city neighborhoods people are clamoring to get into.
A while back I was hearing about large department stores, especially Sears/Primark, considering conversion to data centers. They're everywhere, so not hard to find one in a desired location, and they usually have good access to relevant kinds of infrastructure (especially power). And sellers who are desperate to wring some money out of them before they literally fall apart. Conversion wouldn't be free, of course, but it seemed like a way to get a new DC for far less than it would cost to build its equivalent from scratch. Haven't heard about the idea for a while now, though. Not sure why.
The cloud happened, probably. The big cloud vendors have DCs in rural areas that have access to even cheaper power and unlimited land. I could see some colocations there, perhaps.
Agreed. The more popular new shopping areas I’ve been are outdoor “malls”. Shopping mixed with outdoors, and as you said greenery, art, music and novelties.
A lot of indoor malls are dying. I can remember when the same empty places exploded in the 90s.
> Lots of parts of the country have unpleasant weather much of the year.
I spent a large chunk of my formative years in a desert climate in the southwest. The sort of place where you would try to stay in air-conditioned spaces as often as possible during the summer. The regional mall was a huge air-conditioned enclosure where people would go just to sit around for hours on end with the occasional stroll through a department store.
In the 30 years since it first opened 2 of the 5 "anchor stores" closed. Other than that it's just been plugging along. One of the reviews I recently read for it was, "A great place to go when you're in a desert and need a mall."
I live in the northern Midwest. Our mall closed this past year and is being made into some sort of mixed-use outdoor space.
The reality is the cold weather doesn't really bother people who are use to it. I'm happy to spend time outside jumping store to store because I'll be dressed appropriately.
Within limits. Some of the large cities in the cold parts of Canada have their malls underground connected by subway or metro. With some planning, non-natives can stay underground for months. It takes a little getting used to walking around in -20c weather or colder.
Across the border in Vermont, some of the strip malls have a glass-enclosed front layer for similar thermal protection.
That was the impetus for Minnesota to enclose Brookdale Mall in Brooklyn Center (1962), and Southdale in Edina MN (1956 and back drop for the movie Mall Rats).
I don't think the malls "got rid" of either one. Music stores and bookstores just couldn't deal with the business realities of the post-amazon world. I'm certain the malls would have been happy to take their rent money.
I loved going to arcades. They're still somewhat around here (including the largest arcade in the US, Galloping Ghost), but they're almost exclusively older games at this point, and they're mainly free-play. Which is still good, but it used to be cool having a stack of quarters and seeing how far you could stretch them.
In my hometown in Australia, there was a shopping area (small chain grocery store) and a newsagent. Across the road was a foodhall, real estate agent and adult book store. Once the book shop went, the area struggled to keep customers and it became fast food and people travel to the next suburb for groceries. Maybe all shopping centres really need is access to porn?
Malls (shopping centres here in Australia) are terrible experiences. I don't like shopping, but the general process for shopping at a such a place is:
1) Drive some distance to get there
2) Park in a cramped car park, where the size of the parks is generally as small as legally allowed
3) Walk through the same car park, which bizarrely doesn't have walking ways for people to safely go through
4) Go to the shop and search for the item(s) you are after
5) Wait in line for some arbitrary amount of time because the store has hired as few staff as they could possibly managed. Note that I'm being asked to wait, despite clearly indicating a willingness to buy
6) Get accused of shoplifting on the way out, have to show a receipt and have a staff member ask to see all through my bag
7) Get back into the car, hope you don't hit any pedestrians as you are backing your car out
8) Exit through a maze of one-way streets, trying not to hit or get hit by other cars, shopping trolleys or pedestrians.
Obviously it's not all bad - you get to see the item you are buying and see related items, try on clothes to see they fit, and take the item home immediately. However, overall as an experience it is painful.
Online shopping has its negatives, but I can stay home, order what I want, pay immediately and move on with my day.
Malls peaked decades ago in the US, but they haven't peaked at all yet in the developing world. In the Philippines, for instance, they can't build enough huge, 4-storey malls fast enough. They are significant meeting places for young people and people use them to get out of the tropical heat because many people here do not have A/C.
I quite like the shopping centre experience in Australia. I went down to the my local centre today. It was vibrant and absolutely teaming with people. We shopped around and the kids had a good time in the play area with other kids.
Despite it being really busy most stores had short to no queues and aside from JB Hifi had nobody anywhere near the doors checking receipts.
This exactly the same in the UK - I absolutely hate parking in those cramped multi-storey car parks, where after parking you can only open your door about an inch, and have to kind of ooze out of your car. Getting back in is even worse!
I would have imagined things in Australia were different (more like US), what with how much land there is.
That's the one thing I didn't do online. Early on, stock was just so limited and, by the time it wasn't, it just seemed easier to go in person. I was more organized and would go early-on once every week or two and it took me well under an hour.
Malls seem like the perfect mixed use type property. Stores on 1 floor, offices on 2nd floor, then 2-3 floors of housing. 1 of the big department stores could be a grocery store.
100% agree. It drives me bonkers that even now with towns and cities expanding and new town centres forming, there's still a strict separation between residential and commercial use. Why not allow spaces for light commercial use in apartment buildings?
There are malls like this in the US. Such as places called "Galleria". But these seem like much more expensive projects that clearly can't be built everywhere, while the typical mall is really just an american version of an enclosed bazaar.
Also one US-specific issue is Christmas shopping, which probably drives a lot of the planing. Stores make the most money during a limited interval when they are packed to capacity and need to plan for that.
The circulation of a business's customers is regarded as a toxic impact to nearby housing. There is a decent amount of mixed zoning, actually, for businesses that rarely or never have customers visit in person.
This suggestion put me in mind of George Romero’s seminal 1978 analysis of the potential for reallocation and repurposing of large-scale commercial property, and in 2021 the notion of high-density rehousing for communities displaced by a public health crisis seems all the more relevant.
This is the single greatest comment I have read on the internet in at least 10 years. You have made my night, and probably my weekend too. Thank you, I genuinely needed something to laugh about and you provided in huge amounts.
Stonestown isn't in the Outer Sunset, its closer to "Lakeside" TBH. It'd probably be a good spot for housing since the lightrail runs next to it, its near a college (SF State), and near 280 which makes commuting to the southbay easy.
I honestly don't recall what it was called before the Mall existed, then again it was built in the 50's and tons of new neighborhood names showed up then...
Its a stones throw from Daly City so indeed about as far as you can get from downtown heheh.
Once a mall can't be used as a mall, it is pretty much useless and generally gets torn down. They can't be used for housing since people don't want to live in windowless giant buildings surrounded by parking lots (and owners don't want to lower the rent until the desperate move it. Even the city doesn't want to house the homeless there). Malls might have a bit of office space already but the store-spaces aren't really suited for that either.
Edit: which is to say that traditional malls are just terrible because mixed use would be much better. City center buildings, even strip mall buildings, get a bunch of uses. But the scale of traditional suburbans just forces a single use on it.
Things like this exist in some city centers - but I’ve never seen one in the normal areas malls lurk. The three types usually try to stay some distance from each other unless forced together by exorbitant land prices.
The surviving stores that used to be anchor candidates seem to be happy being on their own in a sea of dedicated parking.
In Korea, there is a special term for buildings like that, translating to basically "residential and commercial complex". Most cases are apartment high-rises with the first few floors dedicated to businesses, which can include restaurants, banks, doctor's offices, and private academies. Some are actually attached to malls. These apartments usually command premium prices due to 1. convenience, and 2. being typically of a higher quality than standard apartments. You can find them in city centers as well as suburbs.
There is one near me (Dayton, OH). Not exactly as parent described, it is more of an outdoor mall, with lots of restaraunts, there is a gym, but no grocery store. The apartments are quite expensive for the area. I can certainly see the appeal.
The effect of zoning is vanishingly small relative to the effects of money. An insurance company investing its reserves isn't going to change its risk tolerance just because zoning changes.
These people look at the numbers produced by their model and send their money where indicated. It's why Walgreens and CVS will build on two corners of the same intersection. Both have the same traffic counts and same catchment demographics.
> It does but the dirty secret is that given enough money or interest zoning is a relatively weak opponent
Neither interest nor money are a given and the amount of either necessary varies wildly by jurisdiction. Even quite small obstacles can change outcomes a lot. Zoning has quite real effects.
It does but the dirty secret is that given enough money or interest zoning is a relatively weak opponent - there jus tidbit that much desire for mixed use buildings in most areas.
(The low-key method for normal people is to get “variances” - which are not as impossible to obtain as you may think if you work slowly and quietly on them.)
I’ve attended a few variance hearings (always in support of my neighbors who wanted to get a variance for their property). Variances are granted here for the flimsiest of reasons, to regular people who don’t have a clue how to ask for what they want and what they saw two other people get variances for in the same hearing.
I remember seeing a condo complex on top of a Ralph’s in San Diego: the Ralph’s was 24 hour and it always struck me as being incredibly convenient (the condos had an elevator direct into the store) - who needs a pantry at all when you have a 24hr grocery store literally five seconds away?
There is a supermarket in Boston over an interstate highway. The store is nothing special so I never thought much of it but now I'm really wondering what kind of political gymnastics had to occur to make that happen. At this point it's such a landmark that traffic reports refer to it as "the supermarket."
I used to live above the Safeway near the Giants baseball stadium in San Francisco - it wasn’t 24 hours at the time (not sure if it is now) but you’re right, it was crazy convenient.
Far less food waste too, I’d rarely buy more than a bag’s worth of food at a time and would just go shop 3+ times per week.
It's the supermarket doesn't want housing on top. If it is the only way to get the location and the location is incredibly good, then the supermarket will accept it. Leasing to a supermarket is incredibly more profitable than leasing or selling housing.
At the professional level, urban planners meet confidentially with developers and figure out how to make projects happen. What you see is what money wants to do. The professional urban planner's job is to generate economic development. Theories live in the academy.
A planner at my firm recently told me, with complete confidence, that on-street parking increases safety. Then I was told that research from AASHTO was just not something this person agreed with, and haven’t I heard of Strong Towns? Here’s a lovely YouTube video.
The planners at the firm are paid to do what paying clients want. That’s what everyone there is supposed to do. What matters is that checks don’t bounce.
I’m actually trying to say that it is an industry dominated by snake-oil, charlatans and coffee-table “science”. There is no standard or obvious measure of performance, and liability is usually of little concern. The planners I know are hardly puppets of the real estate cabal and much more victims of naïveté and wiz-bang marketing. Like, I’m assuming rails-devs a decade ago and, maybe, rust devs today.
Most malls I've seen are one-story (rarely two), and given the natural cost-minimizing nature of their construction I doubt that you could just build more stories atop the existing structure (but I'd like for an engineer to chime in).
It's more likely you could turn the empty big box store (sears, circuit city) into a complex within itself. You need windows added, but generally speaking 3 outside walls for people to look out
I think it must be human nature that we don’t desire housing and commerce in a single building in the same way as how we’d want kitchen and bathroom to be separate, because buildings in that apartment on top configuration always seems borderline rundown to me.
Office + mall examples usually seem to be working fine, except there always are one entrance for each, distanced physically as well as in general aesthetics.
I think it's just tradition and what people are used to, since buildings with both are actually considered more desirable in Korea, and are often more luxurious apartments than normal.
We who? I've lived in mixed use buildings with bars, restaurants, and other small businesses on the first floor and apartments above. It was quite nice, I really enjoyed it.
> we don’t desire housing and commerce in a single building in the same way as how we’d want kitchen and bathroom to be separate
Wait, what?
Other than very old houses (which I've been told had the bathroom in a separate building), every residence I know of has the kitchen and the bathroom in the same building. Yes, they are separated by walls, in the same way housing and commerce in a single building would be separated by walls and floors.
The retail portion of a mall is so much more valuable that it is difficult to make economic sense out of that sort of configuration. [1] Architecturally isolating access and services for residential and office uses will tend to dramatically increase costs of those lesser uses...you don't want random mall patrons to have access to the residential areas. If the offices are accessible from the mall use, then why not build more mall which can be rented at much higher rates and can compliment the other stores?
Finally, there is the issue of investment. There are big pots of money for each use...investors who invest in retail, office, and residential. The pots of money for non-conventional projects are much much smaller. One reason is that with mixed use, there are three economic cycles that have to be timed. The retail, office, and housing sectors don't cycle in lock-step.
Your good ideas in real-estate only have legs if you have the money to make them happen. And the time. You're talking a several hundred million dollars and a decade optimistically down the happy path. More likely more since most mall land is already malls and you will have to acquire multiple parcels from multiple owners without them being the wiser and holding out for premium prices.
[1]: Retail uses produce so much income that it makes sense for them to sit vacant for many years instead of converting to some other use.
I think one point is that there are only so many stores one mall can support, depending on the local population size. If land is expensive, then building on top of the mall to further utilize the land can become economical. As to whether offices or apartments are the better choice, that would depend on the local supply and demand of each.
Major projects take a couple of decades to get out of the ground. What was the demand like for housing ten years ago? What is the demand for office space like today? What was the demand for retail twenty years ago? (Low, low, and low) [1].
I agree there are only so many stores a mall can support. At that point the economically sound strategy is to stop building. It's not to layer on incidental complexity that provides lower returns at increased risks. It will only create problems syndicating investors for the project.
[1] Retail was still recovering from over-supply from the S&L pre-crisis and under-demand from the dot.com crash. At the low point of the cycle it could have been perfectly sensible to start planning a retail project on the prediction that retail could only come back and in the hope of timing the up-cycle correctly. But you would not have been building a mall. You would have been planning a power center.
Yes, real estate is a very regional thing, and places not affected by the S&L crisis and the dot.com crash would have different economics, for example in other countries. The place I had in my mind when replying to your comment was South Korea, where there are many mixed-use high rises with business or even malls on the first few floors, and residential above. I don't know the impact of S&L and dot.com on the economics of these buildings back when they were being planned and built, but seeing as how they are not an uncommon sight, and are sought after as residences, likely they had a different view than your analysis.
People think there are ways for the market to produce non-market outcomes. And don’t realize the scale at which market makers operate is qualitatively different from normal experience with real-estate. For big money quick profits are a problem.
As a layman, it almost seems like a either “quick profit” or “zero risk”.
A family friend opened a bakery. Finding a storefront was an insane process, in some
cases it’s apparent that the landlord doesn’t want to rent out the space, it’s been vacant for 4 years and rent is... aspirational.
Four years is nothing on a multi-generational investment horizon.
Any real-estate pro forma will include a vacancy rate.
If a person owns ten storefronts on a block, discounting one lease sets a lower rate for the nine other leases.
If a business can't afford the lease, that is a problem with its cashflow and/or access to capital relative to its aspirations. Often the landlord can simply take depreciation and meet its IRR targets. Particularly if the landlord is unleveraged. The building and land aren't going anywhere. That's the nature of real property as an asset class.
I probably shouldn't admit to this but I went to the Mall yesterday, I went to Hot Topic. I think the people who worked there were glad to just see people at all so customer service was really great.
Also - Hot Topic is a great place to go for fun masks.
USA Malls are a symptom of car sprawl, and are textbook terrible landuse planning; they happen to have a super-simple business formula and appeal to certain fiefdom's egos.. cannot be fast enough for these formats to dry up, in my opinion
Malls in Asia are also publicly accessible places with air conditioning and lots of food options. When kids want a place to hang out they work pretty well as a meeting place. When I lived in Asia the malls were packed with teens on weekends. Similar to the US 30-40 years ago. I’d be curious if it changes in Asia too.
I've been to many malls in south east Asia and found them much nicer. Lots of good food usually and better integrated into the city. Often adjacent to residential areas.
The end state of US malls is going to be when Amazon secretly purchases a large number of them, converts the department stores into distribution centers, opens them en masse, and provides a $1/item discount for orders picked up at the mall.
That will provide the necessary foot traffic to rent out the rest of the mall to small time players that will try to compete with Amazon. Unfortunately, they'll have all their sales tracked by Ring cameras, and eventually have their offerings cloned as Amazon Basics knock offs. On the plus side the food court and restaurants will do fine as there will be plenty of people burning $2 of gas to save $1 on a $10 made in China knickknack.
The food courts will be subsidised by Amazon, using 1 day before expired products from Whole Foods. The food courts will have an amazing automated delivery system with robots and overhead tracks whisking around salads and burgers.
Mall security will be offered for free by Pinkerton, on condition that they get to keep the parking lot fines.
Ring cameras on Pinkerton guards will identify known union organisers via facial recognition, and a they will be delivered "special" salads, laced with E Coli bacteria.
I have trouble buying clothes online. It's hard to determine fit, shipping things back is a hassle beyond comprehension, and it's impossible to try things on (which is fun).
Malls need to improve along a number of dimensions. Better dining, easier transportation or integration into live / work / play mixed use, and addition of grocery stores would make them better than Amazon.
Add a Target to any mall and it's twice as good. Add good food or a movie theater, and that's my weekend shopping destination.
Build instant check out. That'd be a game changer. One of the worst parts of shopping is the checkout process.
Malls need to improve. They can win, but they have to get better. Lean into the things Amazon can never do. Physical, social, evening or weekend as a destination you plan your time around.
> Malls need to improve along a number of dimensions. Better dining, easier transportation or integration into live / work / play mixed use, and addition of grocery stores would make them better than Amazon.
That's because no one implemented the original vision of the mall, at least in the US.
"He imagined designing an environment full of greenery and shops: an indoor plaza that could be an island of connection in the middle of the sprawl, one that would get people out of their cars in order to walk and stroll within them. He saw his structure as an architectural panacea—it would remedy environmental, commercial, and sociological problems with the creation of a single building. Gruen presented his a solution for America: the shopping mall.
Gruen’s full vision for the mall was more than just shops. He imagined them as mixed-use facilities, with apartments, offices, medical centers, child care facilities, libraries, and (since it was the 1950s) bomb shelters. He wrote theoretical sketches of shopping malls long before he ever built one, but for a long time, none of his ideas came to fruition. Then in 1952, the owner of Dayton Company commissioned him to build the very first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center. It would be in Edina, Minnesota."
Of course, if everything was enclosed instead of open air as envisioned, it would have been a pandemic nightmare
Yes, but he planned on enclosing them all inside one structure so not really a city. Its more like an enclosed village or small town within a city. It’s a revolutionary idea that is being implemented in Asia as we speak
It is important to distinguish between malls and other types of property. Malls were built around cornerstone tenants, and the idea was agglomeration: one big tenant, lots of small single units, everyone wins. The death of malls is due to (often, but not always) location and amenities but, primarily, because the cornerstone tenants just sell things that no-one wants and they have way too much space.
Transportation is essential (and underrated). I am in the UK, we have a huge share of online retail but some large physical retailers are totally fine (Next is a well-known one)...if they pivoted their stores ten years ago to locations with strong traffic links. Local councils during the pandemic shut down parking, that basically finished small-time retail (not an exaggeration, most of these changes have been made permanent, single-unit operators won't ever be able to reopen because councils have shut down parking everywhere). And adding multi-use units (food, film, gyms, etc.) is also another strong play. But it is only easy to do this if your model doesn't revolve around a cornerstone tenant, and you have flexibility in your space. The locations doing well here have been able to flexibly add amenities (post-2008, these places were dead but slowly added restaurants as the economy recovered) and are composed of medium-sized units with no one cornerstone tenant.
The issue is largely structural. Most malls can't improve. They can't suddenly change the economics of having too much space. They can't change the price gap between warehouses and retail (or the debt backing these prices). The only solution is going to be BK and conversion into other forms of commercial property (largely warehouses but some offices/mixed-use). It will be other areas that thrive, not old areas being revived (look at what happened to inner cities when chain department stores took off and people moved to the suburbs...a lot of these places just died because the issue was structural).
> I have trouble buying clothes online. It's hard to determine fit, shipping things back is a hassle beyond comprehension, and it's impossible to try things on (which is fun).
Same. Given we now have depth sensors and 3D modelling capabilities in our phones, sounds like something a disruptive startup could solve.
The closest I have seen is in an online store for glasses whose name I cannot recall but might have some spam in my inbox from. They do a decent job with a "printed ruler for scale on your face plus phone camera" to do a "photoshop job" to show the look but not the feel yet. They also just don't seem to get that I buy eyeglasses mostly based upon perscription change and that after I buy is the worst time to send me ads.
The opening for this piece is something else. "Adrienne Whyte used to go to the mall twice a week, where she might meet up with her personal shoppers at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue or scour Macy’s for bedding and kitchenware."
Twice a week? Is this common for people? Even when online shopping wasn't a thing I don't think I was at a mall once a week.
I vaguely feel like 5% of people now make so much money they don't shop at the mall, they shop at boutique stores with higher prices and more personalized service. 95% people have so little money they can't afford shopping anymore.
A new Dick's sporting goods opened near me with experiential attractions like a batting cage and a climbing wall. Galyans had a climbing wall when Dick's bought them out 15 years ago and promptly ended the experience after converting the stores over.
I remember malls during my childhood being packed on week nights November to Christmas. Now they are still kinda busy but not in even close to the same way.
Watching the Mall scene in Christmas vacation I don't think I have seen a store busy like that in years, maybe on black Friday.
is this a American thing? here in Canada malls are doing well and we keep building even more sometimes next to busy malls... its strange even they tell us Toys R Us is gone? yet they are not closed here basically all the malls have a Toys R Us..
Right. The state of malls in US is quite a contrast to Asia where new malls keep being built, especially here in Thailand.
Malls across Asia represent the height of social interaction.
Teenagers come and hang out. Social events like fashion shows, food fairs, car shows all are held in the clean comfort malls Public area. If you have a child that does any kind of singing dancing or musical instrument the recital is most likely to be held at the mall.
Meeting someone for dinner is easiest done at the mall restaurants - which includes some many chains but also unique sole proprietor restaurants.
I’ve yet to go to a popular mall where the parking lot is not absolutely packed. In this case you use the malls built-in car wash services while you take a stroll.
The pandemic has certainly taken a toll on Thailand’s malls as well, but it does not look their position in society will be uprooted by online shopping anytime soon.
Check out photos of the recently built Icon Siam to see the latest in mall monstrosities.
They overbuilt 20-30 years ago and buildings are designed to go 20-30 years between major capital expenditure. A big part of that business is syndicating and selling tax write offs... no capital investment breaks that.
So now malls are facing envelopement from discount stores and big box, plus the ever growing threat of Amazon and other e-commerce.
The malls that get investment are pivoting to supermarket anchors and entertainment.
Then as things shifted back to linear depreciation, it made building/running malls much less attractive, and we're seeing that play out over the 20-30 year capital lifecycle you mention.
and yet i don't see any of this in Canada, malls packed, more malls built and Toys R Us still in all of them. What could be the difference between Canada and USA?
that was built out of the city middle of no where because there was not enough water and land to do it in the city, and yet still full and now Costco and others opened next to it, plus a new mall built across it. there are like 10+ malls withing 20km
something is different maybe the weather leads more people to liking to go to a warm place in the winter? but then again many parts of the world malls are doing well.
I see a lot of Sbarros at airports. Which is absolutely not to say they're not struggling - they probably very much are - but only to say that they're not a mall-only place.
FWIW this isn't necessarily indicative of the number of ones in airports. For example "Istanbul Havalimani H-42 HPS Sbarro" only says airport in Turkish and "Aeropuerto Los Cabos" is in Spanish (though maybe these are the exception, not the rule).
Looking at it further, it does go both ways as well - for example "Gurnee Mills" is in a mall.
There also seem to be a surprising number of Sbarros outside of the U.S though they are all listed first in the list.
It was my first taste of European pizza. It had no tomato sauce inside it. I went to the staff to signal that I wanted sauce in the pizza and they had no clue what I was saying.
That day I came to the shocking realization that that's how the rest of the world ate pizza.
Sbarro seems to have redone itself in the last few years so I’ll renounce my previous hatred but I have an unreasonable affection for Orange Julius, even if I have to sit in a DQ drive thru. It’s unpretentious and undemanding. The Jeffrey Archer novel (ok maybe I should say mindless instead of unpretentious) of drinks.
A car oasis that used to be along my commute has a Sbarro that serves breakfast, and it's pretty great. Scrambled eggs, sausage links, potatoes, and several different breakfast calzones. I often stopped there in the mornings.
In the city I used to life a ton of strip and traditional malls were bought up by the state and turned into offices. It was kinda weird to live across the road from the place that managed my state income tax while it looked like it was supposed to be a discount clothing store.
How many of these are genuinely because the store couldn't make a profit vs got saddled by a bunch of private equity financial engineering debt?
Guitar Center is a good example--if you sent them through a full blown Chapter 7 where they could finally discharge the stupid private equity debt they would be a perfectly profitable running business.
Aren't those two roughly equivalent by opportunity costs? One which is raking in money is too expensive if your goal is borderline debt dumping fraud when you can buy a mediocre stable business for those shenanigans.
An unprofitable business with $1 billion in cash flow is way more useful for financial engineering than a profitable business with $100 million in cash flow.
The point of shoving something like Guitar Center through Chapter 7 is that the financial engineering debt holders actually take a bath and consequently think twice about wading into this with another firm.
If these kinds of financial engineering games can just keep getting handed around, there is no incentive to stop as you can shuffle the chairs around and keep looting the cash.
Modest mouse called this one but probably not for the reasons they were thinking of.
“Here's the man with teeth like God's shoeshine
He sparkles shimmers shines
Let's all have another Orange Julius
Thick syrup standing in lines
The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye”
I don’t know why this downvoted. Great excerpt from peak 90s album. In the broader context, Americans aren’t finding what they want in malls today but the dissatisfaction has been brewing for younger non baby boomer generations.
Well, the situation varies from place to place. What you're suggesting is definitely true to some extent. But other factors predominate sometimes, like a relentless taxpayer-funded fear campaign supported eagerly by the press, which loves to be able to report anything alarming. Some businesses are being put under by curfews, limits on what they can sell, expensive new requirements, and other forms of interference.
Emory University converted a sizable chunk of the local mall into a mass vaccination site. I'm hoping they keep renting the place and turn it into a permanent clinic.
"Malls are dying" seems like a "the suit is back" sort of meme. I've literally been hearing this for 20+ years. And the mall near me seems busier than ever. Someone must be pushing this for some reason. People shorting mall real estate?
I used to work next to a mall that literally went out of business and was torn down. The mall in my hometown has the highest vacancy rate I've ever seen.
My guess is that they are collectively dying, but that the severity of symptoms is not evenly distributed.
In our current "age of big data" is there a source of data that would show the number of malls as a function of time? It would also be interesting to know the trend of vacancy in malls over time, and things like average number of outlets in malls over time. Where would someone mine data like that?
The people shorting malls have already made out like bandits. Mall operators are very close to bankruptcy. Macerich down 85% in the past five years, Simon down 70%, Alexander Baldwin down 70%...it is already over. Once these places lose their main tenant, it all shuts down.
You haven't been hearing it twenty years either. Some people were putting on this trade in the early 2010s but this trade really picked up around 2018/19, when it became apparent that the situation was irreparable. Before that point, the "smart trade" was long malls...most of these people got wiped out (Bill Ackman more than once in TGT than JCP, Lampert in Sears...the trade that worked in 2004 went to zero by 2014).
You can also look at countries which have higher online share of retail, they are further down this path. In the UK, these places are just being boarded up (retail parks, what you would call strip malls in the US are thriving however). One mall near me with tens of units traded for $200k, that was worth $10m a few years ago. The largest mall operator (which owns almost all the top 20 largest malls) is in BK.
But the easy money has been made. Yesterday's news. The money is in redeveloping/converting these places into mixed-use and offices.
From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"
"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."
The reason seems to be provincialism and extrapolation of their lived experiences as universal. One thing I noticed with relatively little travel in my life is that the one thing you cannot tell easily is if something in your home region is common in other places.
The suit may well have a stake through its heart on the west coast. It never died in the east coast mega-metrapolisis group from Wall Street/NYC and Washington DC setting the norms.
Similiarly suburban malls are generally either sickly at best or maybe a bunch of high end outlets /might/ survive or could go the way of strip malls in a few decades. Urban malls tend to be vibrant in comparison as the limited big box store viability means that if it isn't viable to do a particular store at street level retail small stores for whatever reason the mall is the perfect place to locate them.
Pretty sure that "Malls are dying" is large part negativity bias - cities don't get "too crowded" with malls, so we never experience having "too many" of them, but we DO experience having them close down. A mall closing down will stick out much more to a person than a new one coming up.
It doesn't help that malls are practically designed to get old and decrepit - malls are built to a completed state - once one is built, it will never get "bigger, newer, and better", it will only get more and more older and "outdated". They weren't DESIGNED to be updated and last for decades.
where? here our malls have gotten massive updates, expansions and renovations over the years, not one is closed that would be a waste of a busy business...
Back in the 80's the last new mall was built in an 30 mile area that had 8 malls. Only 3 remain, the rest have been torn down. Ironically, that last mall built was the third one torn down.
It seems to entirely depend on good mall management honestly. The mall near me is a Simon mall ($SPG) and it’s doing great. Part of that is because they refuse to have vacancies and seem to actively recruit appealing businesses to locate there.
Is there a good way to quantify? There are also endless youtube videos of all manner of abandoned structures in Detroit, but I don't know that extrapolates to things outside of Detroit for example.
You can look at department stores that are typical anchor tenants like Macy's, Sears, Carson's, Nordstrom, and JCPenney. Thousands of locations have been closed and the trend is expected to continue; new ones aren't being opened.
We know that when a mall loses its anchor tenants its demise accelerates as its smaller retailers depend on the anchor tenants to pull in foot traffic. It's a doom feedback cycle.
yup here they keep building more malls and all i hear is malls are dying... they build a mall almost in the middle of no where and yet its still busy. Just recently they built a mall next to a busy mall...
Malls are like the default behavior for the masses in suburbia that have nothing to do and not many interesting hobbies. Go get some $10 ice cream cake and walk around Hollister.
Department stores will die, but existing malls will be repurposed into community centers, homeless shelters, Amusement facilities.
As my doctor ordered I walk 4 miles a day, I go to different malls in the DC area at least twice a week. I don't even buy anything, I just look around.
I see lots of gen Z shoppers. They still have that intoxicated look, running around with shopping bags. Like you would of seen in a 1970s mall promotional video.
Again, I'm sure eventually Amazon, Walmart and online shopping will wipe retail stores off the face of the earth. But I don't think we'll see a replacement for the indoor foreground experience you get at a mall.
