It's not just malls. NYC storefronts are emptying out as-well due to high rents and inflexible landlords, not to mention the convenience of delivery to apartment, office or pick-up location. This map captures some of those vacancies.
By the way, I've noticed increased turnover and empty storefronts in many little town centers and strip malls in NJ/NY state, which is bad for residents and local tax revenue. In my town, people are actually angry at property-owners who seem to have no qualms about leaving stores empty for many years and rebuffing people with entrepreneurial ideas. I always wondered how they benefit from this...
If it's anything like NYC, they (I'm assuming you mean landlords) benefit through tax write-off. They can write off the lost income while they wait for a (hoped for) higher paying tenant.
Balance sheet valuation of the property? Accepting a lower rent might require a write-down of the asset, perhaps even putting the real-estate investor under water if they're leveraged?
This made me believe that the OP was talking about a loan, contracted from another private entity (like a bank), so that the real-estate investor renting the place at a sub-threshold price would have meant that the initial estimation on which the real-estate investor had received the loan were not met anymore in case of a refinancing (and most of these types of projects get re-financed from time to time).
That's because their property's value as an investment vehicle has vastly eclipsed its value as something that humans can use.
"Complex problems don't have simple solutions. It could be a series of sticks: a vacancy tax, an increase in tenants' rights through guaranteed leases and binding arbitration over rent increases (as outlined in the Small Business Survival Act). Or it could be carrots: tax breaks to small businesses to help ease the pain of high rents, or streamlined registration and a reduction of regulatory hoops for certain types of retail tenant. [...]"
And some possible solutions to fix this complex problem
After that is the development stick. Tax property at a minimum based on the surrounding average property tax rates. This will encourage proportional investment in areas and prevent hold-outs who are waiting for some hypothetical from sitting on a community asset forever.