This was inevitable, and not even because of online shopping.
America has been over-retailed for a long time. Retail per square foot around the world looks like this, in decreasing order
US - 23.5 sq ft of retail per person
Canada - 16.8 sq ft
Australia - 11.2 sq ft
UK - 4.6
Japan - 4.4
etc.
US stores got here by taking on more debt than they could handle, expanding aggressively, and then collapsing under the burden. When the big box stores and department stores went bankrupt, they often took whatever mall they were anchoring down with them. The question has always been not if this would happen, but how quickly.
The UK and especially Japan have significantly higher population densities. You would expect them to have less square footage of retail space.
Meanwhile, a reason for the mall explosion was because real estate developments, especially commercial malls were heavily subsidized by taxpayers in the 1980s (might have the decade off). Those still exist at a smaller scale, but not enough to justify their levels, even back before 2008.
It also depends on whether those numbers include the whole mall or just the area within the shops themselves.
Because in the UK, there’s something that looks suspiciously like a giant American mall in the center of nearly every town. They just call it the High Street.
If you included all the sidewalks, road surface and parking for every downtown in the UK, you’d probably get a number that looks like the USA in the table above.
Most UK towns have a mall, my city has typically had three, although it can't support three, what happens is they build a new mall, the oldest one loses all its occupants and takes on desperate clients like e.g. an entire floor is just discount no-brand furniture, or a factory seconds outlet, eventually it goes bankrupt, closes, they tear it down and... build another mall, rinse and repeat.
The last decade or so though they realised ah, that's not actually a sane plan, and the city council started demanding they provide a plan that can actually work before issuing permission, so e.g. the big mall in the city centre had originally planned a huge extension full of new stores, they realised there is zero demand for that, so they pivoted to it's a nice cinema, plus restaurants, and some residential on the side.
Meanwhile the last mall site went from "We're building a new mall" to "A new mall... and residential space" and then "A residential block, also there's some retail on the ground floor" as they realised that retail space is not going to move. Residential isn't as profitable, but "£5k profit selling a £200k new home" is a better deal than "Ongoing loss on a £1M retail space you can't sell".
The UK government changed planning laws some years back to encourage commercial to residential conversion. If you wanted to build a new residential building with shitty paper walls between homes, third rate insulation and not enough elevators, you'd get told "No". But if you want to convert an office block that is now useless or a shop that hasn't been rented for years, that already exists so the planning restrictions are fewer, maybe you put a little bit of extra insulation in, you run some extra plumbing, but you don't need to meet new home standards, and people get a "new" home that kinda sucks.
The result is that a lot of what you're talking about as "High Street" (the US has "Main Street" filling the same role) was converted to housing. There's a row of shops not far from me, ten years ago the upper floors once used as office space or for storage became housing, this year the shops closed and are boarded up, they'll tear that out and make them into more housing. A pub I used to go to regularly was converted to nasty poorly put together flats in the same period.
My point is that extra space to move (wide aisles that can handle multiple carts across or space around an in store display or other empty space) is much cheaper in the US, so you can just afford it. But the cost of devoting 100's of sq ft of space to mannequins on pedestals might not fly in a Japan (Walmart equivalent)
square footage per capita is a misleading metric, coz it assumes that each square foot is equivalent in each country - and that a higher area equates to a higher spending and cost.
I think profit per-capita is a better metric. It's harder obtain that metric of course...
Whichever country (given income equality and ignoring cultural disposition to consumption patterns) a human would need approx' same amount of goods, whether grocery, clothing or other such, and those items would occupy exact same space in all countries.
Not at all. Consider a toy store in Manhattan(or Tokyo) vs. one in Des Moines. The former would be naturally compact due to the expensive real estate while the latter could be far more expansive. By extension country-wide retail square footage can be expected to vary by density (in addition to other cultural factors).
Because I was curious, it looks like FAO Schwarz currently has a flagship store in NYC again, since November 2018, after some troubles and owner bankruptcies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAO_Schwarz
I still remember visiting one of the Fifth Avenue ones as a kid. Because yes, apparently you can build something as big as a department store, but all toys. :)
Hamley's in London (UK) is the world's largest toy store. It is seven floors.
I have visited it once I think, but that was way before having kids. Feels like it would be a two-day exploration marathon now with our two boys. Hopefully travel will make sense at some point again.
Sure, they take the same space. That doesn't mean you need a sprawling store with an eatery to buy them in, nor do you need 12ft (3.6 meters) of a single laundry soap nor a full shelf of one type of ketchup.
Store layout and the space allotted for each product differs between places, in other words. I'm going to assume things like shelf height does as well. When these things are in the back room, they don't take up space in the same way as the sales floor. Also, it is quite possible that many retailers simply do not have the same sort of selection as they do elsewhere: If you sell fewer things, you don't need so much space.
If we're interested in the viability of retail across nations, revenue/sqft & cost/sqft seem the two most relevant metrics. I.e. How affordable is a business' retail space?
This would have the side effect of including varying levels of foot traffic (in revenue) and real estate price (in cost), which seem the two biggest differentiators.
Right, but where real estate costs are high compared to labor costs you will restock more than once a day to save on real estate. Where labor is high compared to real estate you use less labor.
Note that compared is key above. Real estate and labor are both more expensive in dense cities, but comparatively real estate is more important to optimize and so you pay the higher labor. Even though labor is cheaper in suburbs you sill optimize that because real estate is so much cheaper.
And the statistic we're discussing doesn't take into account warehouse space. So the UK may have a similar amount of space devoted to retail throughout the supply chain, just much more in the backend and smaller front end.
What? Do you have a source for them all taking the same amount of space? Bit of an assumption. For example, many stores in Tokyo are quite compact due to the real-estate cost, so I don't see how this applies generally.
Profit per sq foot is really the golden metric here. The problem is that profits, generally, are a lot harder to data collect into a metric like that, and a lot of the private equity activity that doomed many retail chains in the US were designed to artificially inflate profits.
The model worked until it apparently didn't. If Amazon and online shopping hadn't happened, we'd still be going to the malls.
A large number of retailers fell not to online shopping, but instead to lowering quality of service and goods. Sears, Circuit City, JC Penny, and Kmart each have analogous stores and former competitors that remain and are doing well.
Outside of disposably fast fashion like Shein, it's usually more convenient to try clothes on shotgun fashion. In person.
Fragrance, jewelry, luxury goods. All better done in person.
Home Depot is peerless and will never be replaced with an online equivalent.
Touching and trying things on is an experience that just can't be matched online (sans metaverse, if it actually delivers).
Amazon is aggressively expanding physical retail presence. They're focusing on convenience, which is probably the biggest reason people avoid shopping in person.
People love shopping. And if the shopping experience is modern and fun, and interspersed with drinking and dining, they love doing it with friends. It's a social activity too.
If malls morph into "live-work-play" hubs like this old sears factory [1] or this entirely new construction in that mold [2], they'll absolutely flourish.
Genuine question, does this still hold true? I'm asking because I've also read it (relatively recently) in other places and it struck me, because I personally dread shopping, and I didn't think I was the only one with those type of feelings.
And ignoring old recluse people like me (even though this pandemic has transformed many of us into recluse people), I had the impression that spending your free time with friends at the mall had died out as a cool thing do to in the late 2000s-early 2010s (when the Mall Cop movies were premiered, they were more a testament to a period that had just ended).
>I didn't think I was the only one with those type of feelings.
You're not. There are plenty of people that hate shopping, just as there are plenty of people that hate watching sports. Probably a disproportionate number of both groups are on HN.
It still has huge broad appeal, though, especially among women.
I certainly know a fair number of women (admittedly, the grandparent commenter would probably not call them "young") who regularly shop as a recreation and social activity. Mostly with other women from their family and circle of friends. They often shop for half a day or more, without buying anything. Usually not at "The Mall" - instead they're walking a denser shopping district, or driving around to strip malls, estate sales, antique shows, etc. Probably not grocery shopping together, but they may do the Farmer's Market.
I figure that it's the women's version of a few older guys going out and playing golf for hours. Humans spent quite a time as hunger-gatherers, and still enjoy exercising their old software.
I don't particularly like shopping. I go in, I look for something I want, I see something I like, I buy it, I leave. The satisfaction of having the thing(s) that I want trumps all other concerns, so I optimize a path to there from where I am which means spending as little time in-store. Sometimes I browse, just to see what is available, but not too much.
My girlfriend is... way different. She can spend hours, browsing around, examining the merchandise, evaluating the color or style or fabric or thread count for linens, looking for things to "call out" to her (the joke goes that you go to Target and Target tells you what to buy), chatting with sales staff, and of course ensuring that as many things we need, might need, or want are bought in that one go as possible. The shopping experience is just as important as obtaining the things. Plus, during the pandemic, retail locations were her primary spot for "people bathing" (akin to Japanese "forest bathing"), fulfilling a need she has for contact with random other folks.
This is anecdata, but I'd say yes, there are types who love and need to shop, and I'd be willing to guess that there's a bimodal distribution with strong gender correlation.
Personally, there are enjoyable parts of shopping and there are the not enjoyable parts. Depending on which parts you enjoy, and the magnitude at which you like or dislike something, means that it varies.
Trying things on without the anxieties of mailing returns and what happens if a return gets lost or rejected etc. is amazing.
Waiting in line for 30 minutes+ because a typical American mall store is understaffed and has maybe one constant cashier is not fun.
It depends on how much you like the discovery vs. how much you hate the waiting. Some people who are big, tall, and petite don't get the joy of discovery, for example, due to limited in-store selections.
Malls probably "failed" in the same way car movies did. They run their course, they never were a goal, just a means to an end. To get people to shop. The shopping industry as a whole is raking in more money than ever before, the actual mall buildings never had that much value (as evidenced by how now they are sitting empty and waiting for someone to eventually want to build something new, maybe a warehouse or a community center or whatever in their place.)
Amazon happened because having a mall with ~20-50 shops for a few thousand people regionally is so big of a waste of resources compared to having one warehouse that is shared by all the shops close to the folks. Of course this was enabled by ubiquitous online presence. Algorithmically curated catalog. It wouldn't have worked with a big paper catalog shipped to people every week/month.
This. That is part of what makes strolling through European city centers fun as well: the mix of shops, restaurants and cafes with sidewalk/outdoor seating to eat and drink, watch other people. The latter is harder to replace by online stores and experiences.
Ironically, the US enclosed mall model was created by an Austrian (Victor Gruen) who wanted to replicate in the US the feeling of Vienna's Ringstrasse shopping/dining district. His early designs for malls were much more multi-use and even had indoor parks where people could rest from shopping.
> The model worked until it apparently didn't. If Amazon and online shopping hadn't happened, we'd still be going to the malls.
I think there's a lot more at play than just online shopping for why malls are declining. Off the top of my head here's a few theories, and I'm sure there's many other good reasons.
* Customer service experiences at many stores have been declining as companies cut costs and people don't stay in this kind of career for a long time. I'd be willing to pay more to have a knowledgeable expert give me an in-depth explanation for why TV X is better than TV Y or why Game Z is the best first person shooter on a particular console or why clothes from Brand D are made much better than others, but in most cases it certainly feels like the store staff doesn't know too much about what they're even selling. Maybe this is a bit of nostalgia speaking, but I remember going to Electronics Boutique as a youth and having fun opinionated conversations with the staff: it was clear they enjoyed games and actually knew about them firsthand.
* I have to be delicate about how I phrase this, but let's just say that some malls have to walk a no-win tightrope between feeling welcoming to the community and keeping some like homeless troublemakers at bay.
* Most products in an average person's price range feel the same just about everywhere: it's a lot of mass-produced plastic junk that's designed to fall apart anyway. If many products are manufactured overseas and there's not much difference between what you get in a store versus online, what's the point?
* As far as Covid goes: malls are again in a no-win situation. Some people are very scared of Covid to the point that they don't want to shop in person unless everybody is masked, and even then they're nervous. And some people despise masks with the passion of a million suns and don't want to subject themselves to that. There's just no way to make everybody happy.
From a customer service standpoint, customers are less likely to be repeat customers when everybody in the entire building is trying to sell them a credit card on top of their purchase. My grandmother, who between she and her husband never took out a line of credit for anything in their entire lives, got so fed up with the practice that she started wasting their time by agreeing to sign up for a card every time she checked out at any department store. Of course she was always declined because was an 80 year old with a credit score of 0.
Some people love shopping but it’s far from everyone and you’re leaving out another major factor: the staggering inefficiency of car travel. American malls use huge amounts of space for car storage (which has no entertainment value) and they’re frequently surrounded by traffic jams.
That’s part of what makes them expensive but it also cuts into the pleasure part. It’s one thing to enjoy trying clothes on in person but having to sit in a car for an hour (which in the LA area is often each way, not just round-trip) takes the fun out of it. This is especially true now that there are more recreation opportunities at home.
Teenagers are also a big market, but that devolves to who has a non-working parent to drive them, which is less common than it used to be. Transit can help but it’s often an afterthought and many parents offer teenagers less range than they used to.
> If Amazon and online shopping hadn't happened, we'd still be going to the malls.
According to https://www.strongtowns.org/, the "big mall with parking lots" infrastructure is much more expensive than the "small shops in mixed residential" infrastructure. So I would expect it was going to fail anyway, eventually, just more catastrophically, as the costs would be offloaded to local municipality and it would just all blow up all at once (as can be seen around Detroit, for example).
I think that analysis is flawed. Expensive is part of the experience. If the expensive experience is bringing in enough people it doesn't matter that a cheaper way to do it exists.
Well I think its more that consumers shift behaviour.
For some people clothes shopping is best experienced in person. For others its nicer to do online.
I like almost everybody else used to go shopping for clothes but now I mostly shop online. I get vastly expanded selections and with easy returns it is for me more convenient.
I do know percentages but just to pull a number out of thin air if just 20% of shoppers moved a majority of their clothing purchases online a lot of retail shops could not afford that drop in sales.
Some malls can change into your example 1, but others in other locations won't have the overhead to do it.
Men's sizes have the fortune of being more standardized than women's. Fit is also more important for women, as women have more things they need to fit around (you can have a dress that is the correct shoulder width but doesn't fit the bust, pants that fit the waist but not the butt, etc.) and the fits are a tighter on many clothes. And even worse is that different brands are inflating sizes at different rates for different fits as well. This doesn't even get into other things, like material feeling (the label only tells you so much) or things that you can't easily tell online with women's clothing like nonfunctional pockets.
Although men's clothing is also moving in this direction. US men's sizing used to be just straight up inches, but now they've started doing the size inflation thing, so a US size 33 jean is no longer 33 inches waist.
Sizes don't seem to follow any standard. I have shoes from size 10 to 12, depends on the brand and model. Shirts I mostly wear Large, or Medium, but I have Smalls and a few XLs. They's all the same physical size to fit me, the label is just semi random.
So as much as I hate shopping, for clothes I'll only ever shop in person.
> A large number of retailers fell not to online shopping, but instead to lowering quality of service and goods. Sears, Circuit City, JC Penny, and Kmart each have analogous stores and former competitors that remain and are doing well.
Online shopping decreased the demand for retail but not all the way to zero. So it makes sense that some should fold and others should stay.
I'm too tired to find sources right now, but the popular thinking is that each of these retailers sank due to bad service. They had leadership changes that suddenly wanted to cut salespeople (while their competitors didn't), or source cheaper parts (Sears Craftsman and appliances). This was at a time when the businesses had seemingly healthy margins and glowing prospects.
Whole Foods Market was a leader in employees benefit's, compensation, and innovation for a time. The drive for growth as a private company was followed by it moving to a public company.
It created larger and larger stores, cut/lost the company culture and then was acquired by Amazon.
It is now for the most part a shell of what made it an attractive space to shop. Coupled with the online grocery expansion, a sector predominantly made on very small margins and vast competition only exacerbated its fall.
A cycle of markets I suppose. But, not the only path they may have taken. To me this parallels the rise and fall of US malls.
This is a very good point. If I go to a physical shop to touch and get a feel for the product, generally it's after a lot of online research into the product range.
I don't go to a physical store expecting to be able to get any useful information from a sales person.
Given that the only thing that the shop has given me is the ability to view and touch the physical product, I don't feel any guilt in then ordering online if the physical store can't supply or deliver the product immediately or in a way that is beneficial to me.
Tech isn't very alien to us, but for the average Circuit City or Best Buy customer, that's another story.
Or take Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace Hardware, and the now defunct Sears. It's nice to have people on the sales floor that know about the various tools, paints, and home improvement projects. Even in the YouTube era where you can get project ideas and tutorials, having someone physically present to ask questions or bounce ideas off of helps tremendously.
The unfortunate thing is that most workers in big box stores don't seem to know anything about the products they are selling beyond the dot points right there on the label. They can how ever do a fine job at selling you the latest greatest in finance package, so I suppose that is something.
When the market dries up it's the weakest, marginal companies that fail. Maybe Circuit City could have survived with better service, but that would have doomed someone else.
It's expected that US spending is the highest. Just as with healthcare, the US average individualized consumption is the highest, because the on average US residents produce the most.
The US is a very rich country. Unfortunately there are so many almost mandatory luxuries built in to the American dream that it quickly eats up all that income.
The discussion is about retail so I'd exclude healthcare and education. Retail-wise, with relatively low sales tax(no VAT, typically 5-10% sales tax) and highly competitive options we do have cheap abundance in the US. Isn't one of the main criticisms that we waste the most energy per capita? Fuel is cheap, electricity is cheap, electronics are cheap, food is cheap and portions are massive. When I travel the only thing I find comparatively cheaper in other countries is human services. So in places like Southeast Asia or Latin America you can afford a maid and a driver on an upper middle local salary but would still pay more for an imported cell phone than an American.
> Americans also tend to spend even if they actually do not have anything to spend.
Mostly because there are some mandatory luxuries, like having a car, student debt, health insurance, ridiculously expensive housing. Or just "the new iphone".
> Americans often do not get more for spending more (see healthcare and others) so after spending they would actually often be poorer.
> And of course there is a connection here. But you are not necessarily rich, when you spend more. By definition you are rich when you have more.
I mean, the economic surplus is spent, on what is of course critical, but the vast riches produced year by year is there. As the link argues, lifestyle choices determine where that surplus is allocated to.
How do those numbers compare with land value in those countries? My impression is that a lot of things are built bigger in the US because there's plenty of space so land is cheap.
Depending on where you are, land is not actually that cheap where these suburban stores exist. The suburbs of New York and the suburbs of Cleveland look very different in terms of land price.
One contributing factor might be local tax policies. American politicians are all about bringing jobs to their local area, and so have been willing to cut very generous tax breaks in return for, say, opening a store that provides jobs. However, American metropolitan areas have very fragmented local areas, so suburb A and suburb B and suburb Z across town are all doing this. This basically encouraged a lot of these commercial developments to throw up cheap buildings that wouldn't last long; once it was showing its age they'd just take the next suburb's tax break and start over. You can only repeat this trick so much, though.
This is probably more due to population density and GDP per capita. The US has the most space and the most money per person, so one would expect lots of retail per person there.
I always thought the abundance of malls was by design of affluent suburban dwellings (unlike Europe where suburbs are usually mid-lower class dwellings), plus sprinkle of the old American entrepreneurship. That commerce is going virtual and suburbs failing was always my reasoning.
The way it is done in Hong Kong (and other Asian cities like Tokyo to an extent) feels way closer to town centers that predate cars, where there is a lot of foot traffic and walkability which imo makes such a better experience.
I just think in America it is too car centric and not dense enough to line the incentives up for it to happen here. Land is cheap enough that malls will just build outwards and create giant moats of parking lots around them to kill walkability, and public transit ridership is too low because everyone is driving cars so service can never reach the standards in Asia. Its a shame because feels so much worse than what has been achieved in Hong Kong.
Those town centers have survived cars in many places outside North America. In Netherland it's very common to have houses above shops, and in newer developments, either parking or public transport below ground, while the ground level is mostly for pedestrians and bikes.
It's mostly North America (both US and Canada at least; no idea about Mexico) that seems to have outlawed this style of building, and enforced extremely car-dependent suburbs, big box stores in a wasteland of parking lots, and dangerous stroads to connect them. I've heard that the main thing that's driving American cities to bankruptcy is the cost of maintaining inefficient suburban infrastructure.
It's not illegal to build what you describe in the US. I can think of dozens of such developments in cities all across America. Even our most suburban cities have tons of areas where there are apartment buildings with retail on the ground floor and parking either in the center of the building, underground, or in a central garage. Have you ever visited the country? Reading blogs and internet comments is not an accurate way of determining what a country has.
There isn't a single city in the entire history of the US that has gone bankrupt because its suburban-style infrastructure was too expensive. What's driving cities to bankruptcy is pension costs; infrastructure is a tiny fraction of most cities budgets and is dwarfed by schools, police, and other services.
I've seen convincing arguments to the contrary. That most post-war suburban development was financed by debt, and long-term infrastructure maintenance was never properly accounted for, and turning out to be way too expensive.
I've also heard from too many sources that a lot of US infrastructure is crumbling. Of course it's possible that all those people are wrong and you are right. I wouldn't know.
It's not normally totally illegal, but a surprising amount of land outlaws this kind of development. As an example, 70% of land in Seattle is zoned for only single family homes.
It isn't outlawed in most places, it's just that profit-driven property developers, often building outside city limits threw up malls quickly so they could rake in the greater immediate profit from retail spaces vs housing. They'd have been permitted in most of the USA to include apartments from the start if they'd deemed it profitable enough.
I'm hardly an expert on this, but I've heard that many places in the US have quite restrictive zoning laws that don't allow mixing residential and commercial buildings, require massive parking lots, only single family homes, and lots of roads.
It's too car centric but its externality will eventually topple that.
Infrastructure spread so thin have an enormous overhead. (Roads need to be paved, pipes leak, even cabling is a problem, see the again electric grid, also how most US addresses are only served by one ISP, heating/cooling each house separately).
Also, there is no public transit in a lot of America. You drive your car to a mall that might be a good distance away in a lot of the country, so you need the vast parking areas. Or you did, before online shopping, pandemic, etc.
On "main streets" in many towns, there have been apartments above stores since the beginning of the towns, and still are in many cases. Malls came about as a result of sprawling suburbs.
US malls seem to have a strong aversion to carrying anything other than gifts and clothing for some reason.
I suspect those apartment renters would be easier to attract if there was a more diverse range of goods on offer as in other countries, including full-size grocery stores. That would create a more complete immediate neighborhood and remove the need to drive out regularly for essentials.
It basically comes down to sprawl: for the better part of a century the American model has been oriented around someone driving in a car, usually solo. That encourages businesses like grocery stores to favor big facilities because they don’t pay the extra cost of the roads, cars, etc. and their customers are probably driving anyway. Why pay mall retail space pricing if you don’t have to?
Where you do see this, it’s in areas with more foot/bike/transit biking and the stores tend to be upscale since they can afford the higher real estate costs.
I think that's because those items are the only ones that work to a mall's advantage.
There are four ways of providing suburban style shopping that I can think of:
* malls
* strip malls
* big-box stores
* big-box stores which oppose a strip mall
I think malls main advantage over the other archtypes is that it makes it easiest to evaluate multiple stores before committing to your choice. That is handy for clothes and gifts.
For anything else, that isn't handy. As a shopper, why then go to a mall drive to a mall, pay for parking, and then spend a few minutes navigating to get to your desired store when you could instead go to the same store in a strip mall, park for free, and enter the store in less than a minute after leaving your car?
Malls in Australia often have grocery stores and pharmacies to generate foot traffic. The mall/strip-mall distinction is purely artificial. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to distinguish CVS and Walgreens in the same mall, the same way you can make a distinction between H&M and Zara.
Lloyd Center Mall in Portland, OR was in the news recently.
It was at one point the largest mall in the US. And, now is one of the few places supporting a diverse community of young people from around the city. And, also, a place that has become a focus because of the car break-ins that are plaguing the city, depending on what news sources you read.
The owners were going to sell it and people were excited about the opportunity to reconsider an extremely large space in a major urban area. Then, the owners decided to turn it into apartments and condos.
This will save the ice skating rink, and that's good. But, in the COVID era when public spaces are so hard to find, I wonder how that will impact people who don't own their own large houses, and I'm somewhat sad malls are moving in this direction, even though I hate going to them myself.
I was at Lloyd Center on a Friday night recently. At 7:00 the place was dead, other than the skating rink. The food court was shutting down. If that’s what it’s like during what should be prime time for a mall, no wonder it’s shutting down.
There's a also a pandemic going on which (at least in areas with high community spread) you'd hope would have some people reconsidering going to a shopping mall if they can avoid it. I wouldn't expect most retail spaces to be getting as much traffic as they might otherwise.
I actually owned a mall store a few years ago and mall management told us all about the development plans. They look to demolish a big box space on one end and then create an outdoor green space, amphitheater and area for standalone restaurants and shops on the property.
And then add apartments near all that to create a desirable and appealing premium rental environment.
All of this was while the mall was plenty busy. It’s just the direction they were moving to adapt in a changing world. Some mall management is a lot more forward thinking that others and that had to be kept in mind. Poorly managed malls fail quickly.
Zoning laws and automobiles, IMO, have a pretty negative environmental impact. It only makes sense to me that you'd have people living next to the goods they consume and where they work. Sure, there are commercial manufacturing industries that you might not want in the middle of residential neighborhoods. But, your local tax or accounting firm? Who wouldn't want to be within walking distance of their store, work, garden and gym?
I don't understand why Americans are so against human scale housing: where there's retail on the bottom floors and apartments (condos) above. But also where the development is well connected to adjacent parcels and into an overall city general plan. Perhaps it's because they simply aren't aware a different pattern is available.
>I don't understand why Americans are so against human scale housing: where there's retail on the bottom floors and apartments (condos) above.
Americans are not against it, philosophically. It is a simple consequence of economics of scale allowing big stores such as Costco and Target and Home Depot and Kroger to be able to offer better pricing and selection.
If you allow for everyone to own a large personal vehicle, via parking minimums and sufficient road capacity, then everyone has large personal vehicles because they have very high utility. And once you have the vehicle, the marginal cost to use it is near zero, so there is a lot of incentive to drive to a big box store and save money rather than shop at a smaller store downstairs.
Those economics are the result of the system set up by politics and laws, which mandate car dependency and outlaw walkable neighborhoods.
Those stores arose because smaller more convenient commercial space is banned. And once going to the store means a drive, hunting for a parking spot, and walking, you start to minimize your trips to the store, and buy a lot more at once to minimize the basic hassle of doing it by car.
And once each trip becomes more infrequent and larger scale, then the bigger stores start to make sense, because you are never going to be walking by their store front and quickly grab something, they try to get every last dollar from you on your trip by providing a huge array of products, requiring more space.
In my part of the USA, there are no laws outlawing walkable neighborhoods. Small, convenient commercial space is not banned. However, renting or leasing a small shop space in our quaint, cute, walkable downtown is _expensive_. It is cheaper for a business owner to rent space in the malls, most of which are located outside city limits, not subject to city tax, and much cheaper to lease a storefront in. All the malls, the Wal-Marts, the strip-mall-shopping-centers full of big-box stores, they are all built outside city limits, because there is far less red tape, less taxes, etc. The cute downtown wanted to preserve their old-fashioned cuteness all through the 80s and 90s, and they did so. The result is that everything went just outside of town for a long time, and the downtown stores slowly lost more and more business to the big boxes as more and more residents who live downtown drove their cars outside town to shop, and eventually began to move to new developments outside of town.
That's fantastic. It sounds like it might be a small rural town? Those are often great. But it sounds like even though they didn't outright make commercial space illegal, like is commonly the case, they still put up enough "red tape" to have nearly the same effect as zoning making commercial space illegal.
These sorts of code and zoning are legal inventions within the past century, and they tend to be seemingly minor technical changes, but they have absolutely huge negative repercussions. I'm not advocating for elimination of zoning and codes, but rather of quick change of them to promote more walkable neighborhoods rather than prohibition of them. Elimination of all planning departments would probably be better than having them, but the best outcomes would be from radical reform of planning to be more centered on the needs of all parts of communities, rather than the most conservative of neighbors.
The country I'm living in has both lower level retail and higher level residential housing (mixed use) ... And big box stores. Sometimes in the same building. It's not a one or the other choice. And the stand alone malls are connected by mini busses to residential areas.
Zoning (and cars). Most developed areas have some version of single use zoning. Changing that takes time and money (lawyers, political campaign contributions, etc).
This in turn means only large developers can afford to redevelop. And it’s only worth their time if they can do a massive project. So instead of human scale stuff, we get massive multi-block size buildings.
Like this block in Reston VA[1]. The lots surrounding it are all a
slated for similar buildings - the existing mid-rise are mostly mid-80s through mid-90s builds.
The new building is bad because it’s unnavigable. As you approach, it’s just a giant blob. There’s a CVS pharmacy in there, but try to find it - it’s not easy. Parking is a mess. And heaven help if you need to walk to the building. Oh, no bike racks either, aside from a subscription bike room for subway users (nothing on the main retail levels).
And to be clear - I'm referring to the building on the right of the highway in that photo.
And I'm not against redevelopment. I'm glad my area is turning these massive open parking lots into mixed-use buildings. I just wish they were building them in a more organic urban style. I live within walking distance of several of these projects, but rarely walk to them because I have to cross too many 6-8 lane intersections and massive swaths of asphalt parking lot (with distracted office workers hurrying to-fro).
Multifamily housing is for poor people, or for very specific and unsymapthetic cohorts of rich people like San Francisco tech bros and New York investment bankers. Normal, relatable American families live in detached houses.
The details of the multifamily structure don't seem to matter very much. If it's got shared walls and no yard, it's antithetical to the American Dream. Neighbors will perceive it as "for" either a higher or lower class, never for them.
If you design for cars you will never get that: instead, you will get malls instead of city blocks. Or malls with an apartment block on the same lot but the residents still can't walk anywhere except to that one mall.
Yeah, I thought the whole point of malls was that it's actually walkable between the stores, without getting mauled by a car or dying of thirst the long trek between two parking lots.
I think the point was to make you walk past a bunch of stores to get to the one you wanted, increasing your chance of buying something else (Whether food or merch). In strip malls and freestanding buildings, you go into the store you want, get your stuff, and leave.
I could be wrong, but it seems like the cost to demolish a mall and completely rebuild is dwarfed by the value of the real estate. I don't particularly want to live in a former mall, but I might be interested in a condo in the same location. Just demolish everything and have developers create new living spaces from scratch. Malls are mostly parking lots anyway.
I may be drastically underestimating the cost of such a project. But the real estate for centrally located malls is likely to continue increasing in value.
As long as the places are nice and suit my needs I wouldn't mind an apartment in a converted mall. To be honest though there are a ton of available condos and rental options I can afford. What we really need more of in many areas are decent rental units affordable for people making closer to minimum wage and a converted mall might be a really nice place for that, especially if it can help build and support small communities where folks can get to know and help each other while offering easy access to stores and jobs.
The supermarkets around me here in Belgium are also being rebuilt with apartments on top, Colruyt at least. It just seems logical, otherwise it's a waste of space.
What’s _really weird_ to me is new developments that are designed to look like walkable town centers, but are actually open-air shopping malls in the exurbs of cities with hollowed-out centers that were thriving and walkable a single generation ago.
These new, faux town centers come with two things the real ones didn’t: massive parking garages, and condos on the third floor with non-functional Juliet balconies that overlook the chain stores.
If you're comparing "faux" town centers to century old walkable town centers, then they do seem lacking. But in most of North America, the alternative to "faux" town centers isn't original town centers. The alternative is miles of stroads flanked by strip malls, or islands of big box shopping malls surrounded by an ocean of parking lots. In this context, the open-air shopping mall as town center is a net positive. Especially when combined with apartment buildings or townhouses as is also happening in some new developments.
I read somewhere that many franchise restaurant chains make more money off real estate appreciation than on sales. For favourably located malls, I guess this could also end up applying if housing prices continue to rise.
In Germany Aldi has torn down and rebuilt hundreds(?) of their shops during the last few years. Most of the new buildings now have appartments above the super market. In Berlin alone they built 2000 appartments without using any extra land.
First time I saw a mall-and-apartment-complex in Seoul a few years back[0], it seemed simultaneously weird that someone would choose to live where you literally exit into a shopping center every day, and for those who did—surprising to not see them wandering about in slippers and pajamas.
This is something I always thought would be really cool. Every time I go through a dead mall I wish I could turn a defunct store into an apartment. It would be the aspects of city and suburban living combined.
It's crazy to me that more malls didn't already include residential spaces. It makes perfect sense to me: bottom couple of floors for shops, and a few floors' worth of apartments on top. Good for businesses (residents = likely customers), good for residents (far easier to buy stuff when you live above a mall), win/win. Hell, throw in some offices and warehouse/workshop spaces and you've got yourself a little micro-city going.
I think this speaks to the abject failure of US planning policies. Very few people realize just how highly constrained all land use is.
What you propose is, and was, illegal to build. The very good idea of allowing residential next to commercial space was anathema while the suburbs were being built, as was allowing residential buildings that allowed any destinations that one could walk to.
We have squandered a massive amount of our land by laying out residential property on winding roads with cul-de-sacs, intentionally blocking the possibility of walkable density ever developing.
This century, we are starting to realize that forcing car use for every single trip is really bad for our health and happiness.
This is something I've been kinda wanting. A mixed-use zoning in a contemporary shopping centre. Something akin to shop downstairs - home upstairs which is common in most developing countries I've been to.
Unfortunately this seems to be a strict conversion from store -> apartment which kinda disallows the upstair/downstair dynamic, and also prevents the 'single rent for multiple uses' deal which kinda enables the mixed zoning spirit.
I wonder what levels of entrepreneurship could be enabled by opening up zoning in the west? I felt like a shopping centre conversion would be perfect as it is a locus of activity, density and business planning. I wonder if in the developing world mixed-use zoned homes/business are more expensive than typical residential zones?
In my country we've had one mall turned into a four star hotel few years ago. I think that this is better than leaving the building to be abandoned. For another mall at outskirts of our capital city there was even talk about converting it to jail.
There is an implicit assumption of substitutability of land use in this conversion that is interesting whether it holds or not:
People are not exactly asked to live in a parking lot but no matter how much you invest on specific grounds, you cannot redevelop the entire environs of the "mall area" which are typically in commercial zones not exactly designed for people to live in.
Hence it is plausible that these redevelopments will end up being undesirable, low cost housing that will be occupied by those have to be there rather than want to be there (unable to afford something more "residential").
Essentially a downgrade option for the increasingly tenuous "middle class"
Malls, seemingly, aren't a forever thing. Some malls might have "old market square" longevity to them, bit that's the exception. Most have 2-3 decades of prime followed by several more of decline and/or other kinds of changes.
Fashions change, the competitive landscape changes, etc. Also, the investment/debt cycle changes things.
Malls should probably be designed with this in mind. EOL & redevelopment needs to be assumed from the start. For more permanent places to put retail, you probably need something different to a mall. Main streets, squares and/or other template with more municipal planning involved.
Yep, plus people change... what was once a nice middle class neighbourhood in detroit, is now three crackhouses and hundreds of destroyed houses... people still livng there don't have money for expensive stores, and malls close down.
Add to that a new mall, better, bigger and cheaper a similar distance away and the old one starts to decline
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrightSunGaming/videos <- a youtube channel recording abandoned buildings, among them many abandoned malls, some torn down and partly rebuilt as other stuff, some still standing, in their full glory (just with anything worth stolen, from copper cables on.
Similarly in the United Kingdom, John Lewis (big department store type shop thing) is also building rental properties on their land and optionally furnishing them things from John Lewis.
I've been waiting to see this type of thing since reading Larry Niven scifi stories involving his transport booth technology. A transporter booth on every street corner type of thing [think "phone booth" in 1970s Superman days].
In a particular one, a journalist is compelled to investigate, write, and publish a story regarding some implications of this transport booth technology in order to help "clear his name" of some possible legal charges. In one scene, the guy is walking down a few streets crowded with new "temp" housing and shops and micro-industry and foot traffic where there once would have been nothing but vehicle traffic and empty parking spots and delivery-only zones and such. "These folks have caught on quicker than the rest of us", the guy considers.
IRL with dead malls laying around for ~30 years, every time I've passed by I've had similar marbles rolling around in my head.
One reads this article and thinks "would I want to live in one of these apartments?" Or possibly, one considers a conveniently-located store that will close.
The question that should come to mind might be "what happens to retail workers employed in malls?" Will they all be exerting themselves optimally in Amazon warehouses? Will they vanish from the workforce?
The market is speaking loudly. Society does not seem to have an answer.
What's up with these titles? Does noone know how to Convey an idea anymore?
My first reaction on reading the title was: "who would want to buy an appartment in a mall". Ofcourse when you read it you understand that NO, Malls are not adding appartments in their space, Malls are being demolished and appartments are being constructed on their space.
If I put a porter potty in your driveway, I'm not adding a bathroom to your house and your house has not been modified, only your parking situation. The current title suggests the apartments are attached or inside.
I read the title and had a vision of a "community" built in a mail - where you would walk out of your apartment and be able to visit your local coffee bar, diner, park, grocery store, etc all within a mall. That sounded fabulous and something I would be interested in. The article left me disappointed, not much happening along those lines.
If that sounds fabulous, you would like watching Waydowntown, about a group of young professionals who make a wager on who can live inside the connected mall+office+apartment complex without going outside the longest.
I was just walking through a deadish mall in my city a couple days ago thinking how awesome if they had done that instead of the offices they put on the upper floors.
I know there is a small mall in Providence RI that does this (more like a strip mall if I remember correctly).
I also believe there are condos above one of the malls here in Boston but I am not entirely sure if they have their own entrance or if they have direct access to the mall.
Might be some zoning restrictions on being able to put residential in. But adding offices is easy, as it's still commercial. Which isn't to say that they couldn't try to get it rezoned, but it's more difficult.
Zoning in the United States is out of control in most suburban-and -up places. Too restrictive. It drives a lot of our ills (megacommuting, unaffordable housing, sprawl, etc) and needs to be liberalized. Like sure, I get it, don't put a tire burning yard in the middle of a playground. But surely there's a way to avoid such outcomes without stifling all land use innovation and freedom across the board.
In our town, a local abandoned mall was torn down and renovated into a strip mall situation. As part of the deal negotiated with the city, the parking lot in back was to be used for apartments. Probably to help with revenue and to support the shops. This probably was an exception to zoning. No other apartments exist anywhere near there.
The residents were so upset they initiated a recall of council members and revoked the apartment portion of the deal (after the company had already built the mall).
see, e.g., Roppongi Hills. I lived there for a year when I was based in Tokyo. It is very much as you describe; there are several residential buildings within a mixed-use complex that includes a large office tower, a bunch of retail, restaurants, a small supermarket, a hotel, a movie theater etc.
I actually lived in something sort of like that for about 8 months. I lived in a high-rise apartment building that was attached to a 2-level mall of mostly Asian shops. There was a fob-protected door between the mall and the lobby of the high-rise. It was great when you needed to quickly run out to get some ingredient (from the Chinese grocery store) or hankered for a pork bun or custard cup (from the Chinese bakery) or wanted to grab lunch at a food court (of mostly, but not entirely, Asian food vendors).
Not quite the same as stepping out of your apartment into a mall, but close.
I wasn't super thrilled with the high-rise itself (tenants were very noisy), but I quite like that aspect of it.
We've got some malls around where I live (suburban) that did actually build multi-story apartments/condo towers into the design of the mall where the residents can walk right into the mall.
It's an odd thing in the suburbs, someone has to really value the mall, because the units can be quite expensive compared to single family units in town, and there's certainly more financial risk in owning a unit attached to the mall if the mall starts to fail.
That’s nearly the model of the Americana development in the LA area. An outdoor mall modeled to look like a dense, walkable city (complete with trolley car!) with apartments on top. No grocery store though, and priced at 4K+/month
I believe that is how malls were originally envisioned. In Naples I believe there is a neighbourhood like that. In Toronto, at the Atrium on Bay, I believe there are apartments.
If it wasn't expensive and crappy, I'd totally do it. We're at the mall twice a month anyway, the mall has the best local stores, there's fun extras for the kids (carousel, arcade, a gym) and adults (bookstore, coffee shops, etc), it's heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer so you don't have to carry coat+hat+mittens+boots everywhere, there's a decent food court with some variety and it's cheap, it's the only place nearby with a reliable bus stop (and it's also mostly enclosed and protected from weather), it's got great ADA-appropriate accessibility, and it's got lots of parking and convenient freeway access, so visitors can stop by easily with no fuss.
Of course, these apartments will be like $2500+/month and be tiny. But like, hypothetically if they built family-appropriate condo-style housing at family-appropriate prices on a mall, I'd totally do it.
Yeah, you absolutely can mix commercial and residential - if you're smart about how you design your building, and what commercial tenets you allow in. And, of course, you have a pedestrian-friendly[0] city so that not everything is a massive fight in traffic.
Most Americans here - especially those who live on the west coast - are going to see "apartment" and "mall" and assume that means having to negotiate thousands of incoming and outgoing cars every time you want to leave the building.
[0] In practice, "pedestrian-friendly" also means "car-hostile".
Is it that or the indoor mall with massive parking around it? I know of one of that type near me that is doing the conversion (it isn't mentioned in the article, but probably one of the almost 200 in the US doing the same)
The idea in the title actually makes sense if they can rezone it for mixed use. Take down the roof over the common internal areas of a mall and make that area more like a park then redevelop some defunct storefronts into condos or apartments. Get an empty large department store converted to a grocery store.
I say all this as if I'm playing simcity or something. I bet its easier/less expensive to just demolish all the structures than try to deal with something built to commercial code/permits and convert it to residential. For instance the amount of plumbing (sewage + water) required for a mall is hardly as much as needed for a 100-200 unit residential development.
Living in a colder climate state, I’m a bit surprised there aren’t any malls with apartments. To me it’s just an extension of a mixed-use building, but with more open interior space (at least on the shopping levels).
Some malls have housing attached.
Eg:
Nouvelle is attached to The “Natick Collection Mall which houses some of New England's finest retailers including Neiman Marcus. Greater Boston Area's best value for location, features, and quality. You are just steps away from one of New Englands nicest Shopping Malls.”
I agree with you on the title, but when reading what was actually happening, I was disappointed.
> who would want to buy an appartment [sic] in a mall
I wouldn't want to rent an apartment from a mall, but I'd buy one if it allowed me to build out my space any way I wanted, if the mall were indoors, and if there were at least a small amount of services available from within the mall that I would use (such as a good food court/restaurants).
Where I live, about five months out of the year are so cold it's miserable to get motivated to go out. It's too cold and snow makes getting places painful. Having a space, like a traditional "flat" which is wide open and would allow me to construct a living space (which would usually mean buying a place rather than renting it) would be awesome, especially in such a "crappy environment" that an old 80s/90s-era mall has to offer. I'd love the retro aesthetic and I could make some interesting use of it.
I can't see this sort of approach actually happening, though. If it could, and the price was reasonable, I'd buy in.
After the Sears at my local mall died they are now replacing it with an apartment complex. You'll be able to go from your apt into the mall without setting foot outside. It looks like the former storefront will just be another entrance. Nestled among the other shops.
Same thing here--our neighborhood mall is being completely rebuilt with office and residential space, the old Sears is completely ripped out, but a good chunk of the other part of the mall as well. It's an urban mall, so there's no attached parking lot (an underground garage).
[1] is the Dubai Marina Mall. The low building is the mall itself, the big square is an apartment and hotel complex, all built as part of the same development.
An apartment in a mall could be quite nice. Of course, the details matter, and to make them nice living spaces might require some reconfiguration. You don't ask why someone would want an apartment in New York neighborhood with shops, bars, and restaurants. But malls are a lot like those, or could be. Remove a lot of the parking lots with apartments, replace the Sears with a grocery store...
Santana Row (in the heart of Silicon Valley) supplies a useful counterexample, an outdoor mall with apartments built above, but for most malls that’s redevelopment either way.
(Of course if you like mixed use neighborhoods and don’t care for the overproduced generic pseudo-fanciness of that particular development, you can always just move to New York or something)
While it wouldn't be what springs to mind when you think of a mall, this video shows an interesting repurposing of a mall to become residential space: https://youtu.be/HmL2l-bcuUQ
I'm absolutely certain that it's titled the way that it is precisely so that you react with "What? Unbelievable! I've got to see this!" And click on the article.
comprehension isn't what they are optimizing for. titles are optimized to make you click them. perhaps if you are as confused as you claim you were, it makes you more likely to open it to figure out what it is about.
you can at least be certain that your confusion started this large thread in this forum, which almost guarantees the article got more views from it.
same! my first thought upon reading the headline: "I mean if food halls are moving into apartment buildings in nyc, it makes sense for it to work the other way around too!"
Tysons Corner, VA and Reston, VA are good examples of how things should be. Mixed use development with retail, commercial, residential, public transportation, and plenty of parking.
America has been over-retailed for a long time. Retail per square foot around the world looks like this, in decreasing order
US - 23.5 sq ft of retail per person
Canada - 16.8 sq ft
Australia - 11.2 sq ft
UK - 4.6
Japan - 4.4
etc.
US stores got here by taking on more debt than they could handle, expanding aggressively, and then collapsing under the burden. When the big box stores and department stores went bankrupt, they often took whatever mall they were anchoring down with them. The question has always been not if this would happen, but how quickly.
Source: https://i.insider.com/5bb37815ac0a6314735194e8?width=1300&fo...