Out-of-business shopping malls

[Jazzy]

What should happen with the properties of out-of-business shopping malls?

 

[Lamb]

Some of the buildings are still good to use, but for the most part, malls are dead. Could there be a revival in the future? Sure thing. For now, I suppose it depends on the companies owning the land and buildings to know what they have in mind. It's not something we could force them to do if we wanted to, say for instance, let the homeless live in there.

 

[tango]

What should happen with the properties of out-of-business shopping malls?

I guess a lot depends on who legally owns the property.

A problem with malls is what else to do with the buildings. Something designed to host a small number of huge retail outlets and a larger number of small outlets doesn't obviously lend itself to much else. When one of the flagship stores moves out of a mall the recurring problem is finding another retailer who wants a space that large - there are only so many companies that can take a space once occupied by a Sears or a Macys or some such.

Short of bulldozing the building and starting over the space doesn't lend itself readily to housing. Other public uses that could use a chunk of space would include a gym, casino, library etc but even then the common areas still need to be maintained, and any of those uses can only take up so much space. It would be an ambitious gym or casino owner that would want an entire abandoned mall, and it's hard to see the public sector having the funds to successfully turn it into a library.

 

[Albion]

Short of bulldozing the building and starting over the space doesn't lend itself readily to housing. Other public uses that could use a chunk of space would include a gym, casino, library etc but even then the common areas still need to be maintained, and any of those uses can only take up so much space. It would be an ambitious gym or casino owner that would want an entire abandoned mall, and it's hard to see the public sector having the funds to successfully turn it into a library.

That's right. And the suggestion that some stores could be made into lawyers' offices, photographers' studios, beauty parlors, or the like, doesn't seem to work well because the people do not enjoy walking a relatively long distance into and through what looks like a deserted parking deck or abandoned factory...in order to get to the kind of little store or office we're talking about.

What I've seen is half-deserted strip malls becoming active again as all these kinds of businesses choose them over the megamalls. Parking is a snap, the rents are lower, and the businesses are able to flash their names to passers-by, unlike the situation with the big malls.

 

[tango]

That's right. And the suggestion that some stores could be made into lawyers' offices, photographers' studios, beauty parlors, or the like, doesn't seem to work well because the people do not enjoy walking a relatively long distance into and through what looks like a deserted parking deck or abandoned factory...in order to get to the kind of little store or office we're talking about.

What I've seen is half-deserted strip malls becoming active again as all these kinds of businesses choose them over the megamalls. Parking is a snap, the rents are lower, and the businesses are able to flash their names to passers-by, unlike the situation with the big malls.

About the only redeeming feature of abandoned malls as some kinds of offices is the ease of parking. If you can get studio space very cheaply I can see it having some attraction to a photographer or similar, especially if parking is also very easy. But as you say, once it's abandoned past a certain point people don't want to walk through an abandoned and dimly lit parking structure. Even if everything is on one level once it's dark that kind of place feels eerie, especially to women on their own.

I'm not sure how well suited those structures are to any business that requires some sense of privacy. You wouldn't want to be meeting with your lawyer in an office with paper-thin walls such that people in the next unit could hear your business, and you wouldn't want to be working on anything that required concentration if you're constantly subjected to the canned muzak from a nearby unit.

At least in a smaller mall you can put a few units near each other so there's a sense of community, without also creating the sense that there are five units operating in this enormous space that nobody else wanted. I can't help thinking of the early episodes of Cobra Kai on Netflix, when the dojo opens in a run down strip mall.