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Comment by projectramo | Hacker News Reader

I remember learning that in the 90s some companies had this useless asset: gas pipelines that spanned the country, but had dried up and were not being used.

Other companies had a problem: how to acquire the rights to lay fiber from one end of the country to the other.

Some very smart person realized you could lay the fiber in the old pipes.

Question: what can be done with all that retail space? Is there a new use of space that will come up?

Related question: what are the properties of malls that we might use? (parking, close to residences, easy to walk through)

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It could be a whole new flavor for YC or other incubators - don't come to SF and fight to find housing... come to the new Coding Mall - offices are in the East Wing, apartment in the West Wing, demos and sales kiosks in the former Sears, VC offices in the former JC Penney, and everyone meets up in the food court (which is still running, btw, to keep everyone fed) for informal discussions.

I would move into such place.

Living in such place I would be plagued by zombie attack nightmares...

Not to worry. The real zombies are the people who used to shop there. Now they’re at home, clicking on the apps you’ll build for them.

Just hire Ving Rhames to provide security. Problem solved.

That’s a great idea.

Station F with apartments?

Arcology!

I'm so glad we opted for the William Gibson distopian future. A Mad Max apolocalyptic hellscape would have been terrible for my skin.

Except instead of a bunch of bright lights and shady characters, there’s a Bowlmor, Coldstone, and a kind of neat eye glasses store. No offices or living spaces YET, but “luxury” (overpriced) apartments and townhouses are just down the street.

Zoning makes this prohibitive in most of America unfortunately

They could go the Uber route and completely ignore all laws and regulations and get away with it somehow.

Welcome to the "office". Your workday will consist of 7 hours 59 minutes of accounting spreadsheets, and 1 minute of rearranging these gumballs on display next to the entrance. If anyone asks, you work at a gumball store :)

Zoning is a matter of negotiation with the city council. If you are going to bring literally dozens of new employers and hundreds of jobs to a struggling smaller town, and revitalize their old mall, I can just about guarantee they will cooperate, including developing a new zone just for the project if needed.

It's not that easy. Having highly restrictive zoning that makes this sort of thing a big pain in the but is going to be a fairly good indicator of whether or not the government has a "we tell you what to do, you don't negotiate with us" type of attitude.

If you're dealing with a struggling smaller town, as codingdave said, and they take that attitude, well, there's another struggling smaller town right next door...

I'd be surprised if it's not that easy in most jurisdictions. Failing/empty malls are a huge waste of space and an eyesore. I can't imagine a city council not jumping at the opportunity to turn one around even if it meant leasing some of it as office space.

Finland tends to have very restrictive zoning, but they still managed to turn old public hospital stone throw away from city center to startup office space (https://maria.io/). I'm sure there are some local governments where they don't want something like that (likely with attitude similar to "we don't want any changes"), but generally speaking things that bring jobs & capital are very welcome almost everywhere.

In Indianapolis, one defunct mall was turned into datacenter space [0]... so you could have it all in one place.

[0] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/30/lifel...

Rackspace's HQ in San Antonio, Texas was an old mall.

https://blog.rackspace.com/get-an-inside-look-at-the-rackspa...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/realestate/commercial/rac...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzXDRBp68W4

Unfortunately, converting that mall has has done nothing for the local area. It's minimal jobs and still a blighted area. birds eye view: https://binged.it/2y6nRsi

crazy guys video, it still mostly looks like this: https://youtu.be/xkHcWDNn_4Q

Perfect match for WeWork

I'm not sure I'd want to live in an old mall, but I could see them being purposed for office space. Parking is already taken care of, and most have bus routes already in place. The existing food court would be ready for new tenants. Other types of tenants could fill where other retail (e.g. clothing, toys) once occupied, such as a gym/fitness company, FedEx/UPS offices, office supply stores, etc.

Some malls just make everything bigger spaces and have them accessible from the outside - basically converting to a hybrid shopping center / mall.

Yep, never understood why they don’t convert malls into office spaces. Then again, in the Bay Area (at least South Bay) there are TONS of empty office buildings for rent. I’m guessing that they all just want too much. Maybe it’s a zoning thing with the malls? Seems like they could do it with the one in Cupertino. For being Silicon Valley, sometimes this place really fails to impress with innovations like that. Instead, we have scooter startups.

Sometimes malls are converted to office space. According to the documentary, Making of Riven, Cyan repurposed a strip mall as office space while they were waiting for the construction of a real office. They originally started out in some guy's garage after finishing Myst and crammed 12 people in there, then moved into the strip mall -- which they said was "like heaven" by comparison, but they didn't just stay in the strip mall because it was still too small for all the staff they wanted to bring on.

Love too live in the VC mall, "The Company Town, But Tech!™".

Yeah convenient as having your residence, work, and some shopping in one building would be, it's got paid-in-scrip written all over it. Also where do you meet new people? Where do you go on dates? Malls are rarely walkable from other places.

See: any big-tech corporate campus

I was in Cleveland over the weekend and got a quick tour from the director of small business development. They turned one of their Arcades (malls) into a small business incubator. It made for a quirky shopping experience. There was a peanut cookie shop next to a handmade bow-tie store. Parts of it felt like walking through Etsy. The tour concluded with several business that had spun off into their own locations. It seemed like a great use of a historic space that from the sound of it was full of run down tourist trap stores.

Which mall was this? Randall? Parmatown? Tower City? Arcade sounds like one of the old downtown ones....

I think it is this one: http://www.flashstarts.com/ Looks like it is near Tower City

It's probably the 5th Street Arcades https://www.5thstreetarcades.com/

It's really a fantastic space, and it was basically empty just a few short years ago.

That said, its model is not necessarily a solution to suburban mall decay, as it was already part of a dense downtown with a growing residential population and a captive workday population that often uses the arcades as a walkway between Euclid and Prospect.

Many malls will never recover as the US simply has too much retail square footage. Along with that, they're not so great with property tax efficiency, where historic main street districts easily outperform them. There's a Strong Towns article out there somewhere about the subject (probably this one: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/23/bon-ton-gone)

It is facinating how the shopping mall model from 70/80s has been on a decline for the last 20 years: https://www.economist.com/node/10278717

See Rackspace’s offices.

>Question: what can be done with all that retail space? Is there a new use of space that will come up?

If they can't attract traditional retail tenants, some dead-mall owners have resorted to transforming them into community event centers, offices, or even apartments.[1] I don't know about the profitability of apartments but the community centers do not make enough money relative to the expenses of property taxes and upkeep. The mall is still dying.

The other option is for a new buyer to purchase the mall solely for the land value and demolish the buildings. Two malls in my area were demolished. One was replaced by a Wal-Mart supercenter with some adjacent strip malls sharing the same large parking lot. Another mall was razed and replaced by a Target store. The Wal-Mart and Target have drawn more shoppers than the dead malls they replaced. This is the free market telling us that the locations were commercially viable but the retail configuration (the indoor mall) was worthless.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/7-dead-shopping-malls-that-found-surpris...

Those examples tell me that people don't want to buy as much expensive products anymore; they prefer cheap stuff.

Especially if the expensive products are the same low quality as the cheap stuff.

Zoning can be an issue - there's an abandoned mall in Cupertino that's probably half a mile from the new Apple HQ. And to say it's prime land is an understatement - the entire area is desperate for new housing. Current proposal is for 2,400 housing units on the land.

But previous zoning proposal that were ballot initiatives got defeated (hurray democracy) and it's required a state bill to force the city's hand for zoning. (https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/02/community-reacts-to-d...) But still no agreement between the city and the developers.

I'm sure most malls will be trivial to rezone as cities would rather have something paying taxes rather than nothing but that's not the case everywhere.

Residential vs. non-residential zoning always tries to tilt towards non-residential, because it has a better potential of return.

Although both pay property taxes and both require utility services like water, sewer, and waste collection, non-residential properties attract both in-town residents and outsiders from other jurisdictions, who then typically spend some money in your town. Meanwhile, residential attracts new residents, who may or may not take jobs in your town, could be spending money in other towns, but need high-cost social services like public schools and community programs in your town.

Or even worse, they transfer their Prop 13 to a “replacement property”: https://blog.yonathan.org/posts/2017-10-transferring-prop13-...

That explains why Edinburgh allowed the St james centre to exist right in the city centre instead of keeping the existing housing stock there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Centre. The whole thing has been pulled down and a mixed development should be take its place in the next few years (alreayd underway).

I remember traveling to work to the valley for the first time and driving by Apple HQ just to see it and then, going to the steakhouse near that mall (OMG was it good). I went by that mall and was thinking

"WTF is this doing here with all this insanely expensive land and such!?!?!"

I would half expect the bulldozers to show up with 10 minutes notice or something. I was driving around all amazed by "OMG I know all these cool companies!" .... "What the hell...."

Was it Alexanders steak house? If so I did the same thing (drive by Apple HQ to see it and stopped at Alexanders).

Yup Alexanders! So yummy!

I know that mall. The usual happened; developers wanted to build lots of housing and no infrastructure. The builder had recently reneged on elderly housing units in another development and were not believed about building a park on top of the structure.

Building density housing is cheap compared to building the schools, parks, fire, police stations, and transportation to support the new density housing.

> Building density housing is cheap compared to building the schools, parks, fire, police stations, and transportation to support the new density housing.

Are developers expected to build those? Don't cities build roads, schools, parks, and police stations with the tax income from the people who live in the houses?

Can't collect tax income until people live there. Can't build fire stations or bus lines where there's no room.

We've had this problem with developers as well - they want to build mega high-rise apartments with no parking whatsoever and force the city to deal with it, despite the city struggling to fill current transportation demand.

Crazy when apartments in the city have no parking and you have to factor in an additional $300/month for a parking space that might be a 10 minute walk from your apartment. It’s like US cities maybe aren’t actually the best in the world or something.

Yeah, and to be clear, we’re talking “luxury” apartments here, not anything single-family. Bay Area developers ALWAYS pull this: promise “affordable” housing and only sometimes get stuck accepting affordable housing programs into their otherwise-expensive apartments. Examples of the developers who lost: https://www.lowincomehousing.us/CA/santa_clara.html

Btw: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines "affordable" as housing that costs no more than 30 percent of a household's monthly income.

> Are developers expected to build those?

Sure, maybe. Offering to build them for the city is a great way to build goodwill for your project.

If you want to see the ridiculousness of building in the Bay Area, however, you only need to compare this project with another large project proposal somewhere else:

https://chicago.curbed.com/2018/5/11/17340660/the-78-related...

This is nearly the exact same size parcel as the mall in Cupertino. But they are proposing 10,000 housing units and 13 million square feet of development (5x as much). The article calls it "surprisingly low density". But the plans include a new transit station, new roads, many acres of public space, etc. What it will come down to, though, is that the city will say "if you build this, we'll build that". The elementary school that will serve this development is already under construction. So it's likely that the developer will pay for at least half of the train station - it would be significantly more expensive than a school because it is underground at that point.

> Building density housing is cheap compared to building the schools, parks, fire, police stations, and transportation to support the new density housing.

And to close the circle, Prop 13 makes it impossible for towns in California to tax residents enough to pay for the required parks, schools etc. There is an obvious solution (repeal Prop 13, and bump local property taxes enough to cover the infrastructure the new residents will need) but it's politically infeasible.

Cities don't want housing. They want other cities to fund residents, while they extract their pound of flesh from business offices.

I don't think the question is if the space can be used, but whether or not there are legitimate uses of the space that can also make up for ongoing maintenance costs of such large structures.

I honestly don't think it can. I've seen them turned into office spaces, but it's really not an efficient use of space and the lack of sunlight/windows just makes it depressing.

As far as demolishing goes, most malls really aren't in areas where the space for parking is needed. If they are, then that land is probably highly valuable anyway.

Rackspace purchased a mall a few years back and transformed it into an office space I've found pleasant during visits. Natural light in their space is mostly from above but there aren't exactly scenic surroundings anyways.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/realestate/commercial/rac...

I hadn't heard of that, but that is really cool use of the space. That actually looks a lot like the facility I work in, but our's was built for the purpose.

That is definitely proof that good space can be built out of it, but are there enough companies who want to build spaces like that compared to the number of dead malls? There are a lot of dead malls. The ones I've seen are much more corporate-like.

The land is probably more valuable than the building configuration. It's a little different from the pipe example in that way. You can't easily tear up the pipes and do something else with the pipeway, but you could demolish a mall and build an entire live/work district.

Pipelines offer uninterrupted right-of-way continuity from point to point. Shopping malls are distinctly noncontinuous, and better resemble ports (which is what they are).

That's the tricky bit in physically-routed infrastructure: pipelines, canals, rail, expressways, media (vs. transmission-based) comms links. None of them abide well with airgapping.

The comms-transport link goes back at least to the rail era when telegraph lines sprang up along them. You might have heard of one such venture: the Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, better known as SPRINT.

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra...

A delivery-based fulfillment service, say, Amazon, might have interest in some (though hardly all) of these as local distribution hubs.

Yeah the land is valuable. The building (and sea of parking) on it is built using last century thinking.

Rezone and densify, and build a mixed use walkable community of residential commercial and office.

Some comment here on HN a month or so ago clarified this for me. It's more efficient to have a delivery truck go around to ten different houses than it is to have each of ten different vehicles drive from their houses to a central location.

Now if only there were some way to do that with people, not just with stuff (cough mumble public transit cough).

“But I don’t want inner-city crime coming to MY neighborhood!” See also: why BART doesn’t go down the peninsula to San Jose like it was supposed to. Original BART system plan: https://io9.gizmodo.com/5866928/a-map-of-san-franciscos-subw...

Apartments on the second floor, it's worked in some places, but mostly where the mall was already centrally located http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall-...

I'm surprised no one has proposed a vertical farm yet. You've got plenty of storage/shipment zones, diverse levels of sunlight, an intricate climate-control system, and plenty of parking to expand/convert into a solar farm. Then you maintain the food court as a locavore destination

Return on farming basically return on acreage, which means it’s directly tied to the cost of the land. There’s no real way to make a farm economically viable in a high land value area. Going vertical would make the land even more expensive

When i was between the ages of 18-21 in the middle of the 07+ economic crisis i noticed all these "abandoned" car dealerships in my area... grocery stores, etc.

I always thought a good repurposing of these buildings would've been:

-Skate parks or other athletic venue (maybe a gym if the building was the right size?)

-Clubs/Dancehalls

-Concert Venues

-Intermittent Rental for Parties/Weddings things of that nature (you setup you break down, just an empty building to host a party)

I guess the rental idea could be used for a number of practical purposes if one had an idea that they thought it would be good for.

One example of this: there's an animal shelter north of Atlanta that used to be a car dealership. http://bgarchitects.com/project/atlanta-humane-society/

yeah in my hometown-Houston there was already a popular nightclub from the 90's (The Roxy?) that was a reused car dealership or some-such so it wasn't too out of the box to be done...its just nightclubs are one thing... healthy athletic alternatives for kids is another (which was my primary idea)

edit: this is a moot point now, but back in the late 90's and early 00's Houston had a serious lack of skateparks which is no longer an issue. Luckily im now an adult and dont really have the time to make use of them like i would've as a kid

We have tons of abandoned big-box stores. There's a old Builders Square in our town that's been empty for...20 years? We have a Pep Boys that's been empty for at least 15. New stores go up, these just sit with 'for rent' signs in front of them. How this is financially possible I don't even know.

On the Bay Area peninsula we saw :

a.) San Antonio/El Camino outdoor mall rebuilt as mixed used retail/residential

b.) Sunnyvale Town Center mall - mixed use retail/residential?

c.) Cupertino Vallco Mall - in litigation/negotiation for mixed use retail/residential

d.) some 50 year old movie theaters with huge parking lots on the edge of existing Santana Row mixed use development were torn down recently to make room for more mixed use development

Adults-only entertainment venue. Fill it with bars, bowling alleys, hookah lounges, marijuana dispensaries (where legal), dance clubs, adult bookstores, places that rent rooms by the hour, other places where you can sleep it off more cheaply with maybe less privacy. Car keys deposited at the door into a machine that won't release them until you pass a breathalyzer.

> Car keys deposited at the door into a machine that won't release them until you pass a breathalyzer.

So, basically, "don't bother coming here because you can't leave"?

You'd need to make sure it was either accessible by public transit, or that there's cheap and effective semi-public transit like Lyft or taxi cabs - and it has to be cheap and effective for two trips, since you'll have to come back to pick up your car in the morning.

Those things already serve most shopping malls. The idea was that the venue would provide everything people needed to keep them happy until they sober up, but they would of course be free to leave by means that don't involve DUI.

> The idea was that the venue would provide everything people needed to keep them happy until they sober up

Then they should offer up sleeping accommodations, too.

While I know that in most places, you legally can't serve someone who's already intoxicated, in practice few people go to a bar to get slightly tipsy. If I'm going for a night out, I'm not going to be ready to drive again until morning.

Agreed. That's why I suggested two different types of sleeping accommodations: A nice one for occasions where you're not necessarily alone (or sleeping), and a more bare-bones one for when you just want a place to crash.

Give the people what they want!

I think that probably works better in theory than practice. In the real world it's going to be sleazy and run down in a few short years. I'd also like to be at the city council meeting where you propose adding hooker hotel rooms in the original plans.

> I think that probably works better in theory than practice.

Probably, but it's fun to think about.

> In the real world it's going to be sleazy and run down in a few short years.

Sleazy is desirable to a point, but it's easy to go too far in that direction. And getting run down is a definite concern. It's entirely possible that the economics required to keep the place safe and hygienic would price out a lot of customers, and it would struggle to do enough business to stay afloat. Which is actually not so different from the current situation, but at least it's interesting.

> I'd also like to be at the city council meeting where you propose adding hooker hotel rooms in the original plans.

We're gonna have to do it in a very progressively liberal area, or get Kevin Bacon to do it.

No matter how progressive an area is the city council is full of crotchety old people.

In Bay Area cities, most of the "crotchety old people" are "progressives". The non-"progressive" seniors bailed for other states.

> We're gonna have to do it in a very progressively liberal area

In my experience, liberal areas are only permissive when it comes to national policy. When it comes to changing anything significant about their "historic" neighborhoods, you're going to fight tooth and nail with everyone. They'll find an endangered bird species that nests near your old mall to slow down development.

In downtown San Jose, there was a hookah lounge and a large billiards space on the same block. Both failed.

In contrast, the failed Borders across from AT&T Park became a bowling space.

Small commuter apartments and/or mixed space.

[1] https://youtu.be/HmL2l-bcuUQ

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mall-of-the-future-will-hav...

I would think zoning laws would get in the way there. You'd have to get the area re-zoned from commercial to residential. Which gets into whatever the local politics of that happen to be.

A local mall in Natick MA recently lost one of their anchor stores (JCPenney) and replaced it with a Wegman's, which the first I saw a supermarket as an anchor store. I would love to know how desperate they must have been or how sweet of a deal they gave Wegman's to make this happen.

If I had a Wegman's I'd go to the mall. They're in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, but seem to have something against Connecticut. :(

On the malls note, the Chapel Square Mall in downtown New Haven got turned into apartments before I moved here. It's weird and seriously depressing looking, though I haven't seen the interior courtyard area myself. There has to be a better way to do it than this:

https://betweentworocks.com/welcome-new-havens-strangest-apa...

If anyone's curious to see the location on google maps/satellite, this is just behind the Omni New Haven hotel, the row of skylights is easy to pick out.

Wegman's are further south as well. There are multiple in Virginia (NoVa, Richmond, Charlottesville).

Yeah, I listed just the nearby states. Connecticut + Rhode Island are a hole in the middle of PA/MA/NY/NJ. They're even expanding to multiple locations in North Carolina, but nothing around here.

I think my closest one is >2 hours away in Woodbridge, NJ. Used to live in PA and had a Wegmans, so it bums me out. Stop 'n Shop isn't the same.

Having a supermarket as the anchor in a mall is fairly common in Europe.

Wegman's attracts a pretty affluent type of shopper, doesn't it? The one in Taunton has Round One, a massive bowling alley/billiards area/video game arcade/karaoke center as its anchor. Which is a lot of fun but probably would have been considered an undesirable tenant a while ago (although I guess in Natick you guys did have Game Underground for a while).

The Taunton mall is actually kind of fun. The run-down nature means that there are funky little stores you wouldn't see in a more upscale mall. But on the other hand it's also half-shuttered.

We need community spaces. Now more than ever. But the whole corporate mall situation is really bad - I’d rather see farmers markets, a grocery store and drug store, maybe some local food vendors (Bangkok style single vendors?). Someplace people actually want to hang out - not just to shop.

Hmm, there is usually lot of open space for tables and chairs in a mall -- throw in some free wifi and turn what was a problem for starbucks into an attraction...

One of the things that I would complain about Bangkok, at least from what I saw, they have sidewalk vendors: but it's really crunched for space. At times it felt like homeless tent, homeless tent, food stand, homeless tent, food stand. (Again this varies about where you're at)

It might in some ways be closer to repurposing an old military installation because of the way mall interiors are designed to be intentionally confusing, disorienting e.g. [0]. It’s a highly specialized facility, in which the layout is optimized to serve a heavily researched purpose.

[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer >

Exactly, turning them into parking spaces comes to mind in areas where parking is awful. Museums or even a botanical garden. It's hard to feel bad for landlords who throw in the towel before thinking outside the box. I'm sure online retail giants wouldn't mind buying more warehouse space in prime locations either.

I don't blame a mall operator for not wanting to invest huge sums of money in renovations in order to run an entirely different, probably much less profitable, kind of business.

Much less profitable than owning an empty building?

No, less profitable than not owning it.

Owning an empty building can be cheaper than owning a building that requires maintenance and more insurance because it's in use.

Retail could turn their model on it's head. Rather than consumers coming to the mall, retailer has micro depot and delivers to local customers. The only question is whether or not you can make use of all the parking. If not, then probably not capturing the entire value of the existing infrastructure.

Many of China’s ghost malls were transformed into incubator workspaces over the last few years, including the one next to Microsoft’s office in Beijing. I’m not sure how successful they were, but since the mall was subterranean I wouldn’t think it would be a good place to code.

Many are moving towards entertainment. Restaurants, games, that sort of thing. It's a bit hard, though, as those typically don't need as much space as retail, and if they do they can't afford the rates retail could.

Build Houses, just a thought.

Rackspace uses a bunch of abandoned mall space, as I recall.

The best AR theme parks :-)

The executive branch of the government has found a use:

concentration camps for children

Downvoted because I didn't provide a source?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senator-jeff-merkley-barred-bro...

Coworking space?

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