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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I still think a dead mall would be a great startup incubator - each small group gets its own office, tons of shared space to interact with each other, food court for local restaurants to cater to everyone, some big anchor spaces for the larger companies (or even a local data center), and even some built-in back offices for the property managers.

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A good use of a dead mall is a Community College. A little ugly, perhaps, but workable. You have parking and large rooms already built out.

They did this with a sort of mixed indoor/outdoor mall in my city, it turned out well and about a third of it is still a shopping center with GameStop, Subway, clothing stores, etc. - it appears to be doing pretty well

I feel like malls have potential as massive culinary incubators, with the tired chain clothes store replaced with massive arrays of experimental restaurants and bars. This is anecdotal, but every 1-2 weeks I go to a mall I work near for lunch, yet for the two years I have been doing this I have yet to purchase any non-food merchandise (though I got close when browsing one of the bookstores).

I could get behind this. But it has to be different from current mall fare. I hate chain restaurants. Food courts tend to be sandwiches or fried crap passed off as ethnic.

When I lived in Boston there was a place in Chinatown called the Eatery. When you walked into the main room it had probably 15 different stalls, all with different types of Asian food. Everything was made to order. A mall converted into something like that I could get behind.

Sorry to say, the restaurants you despise are there because most people prefer them. There are fancy malls with fancy food courts for rich people, like Seattle Armory.

People in the US prefer inexpensive. They have a certain price point they don't want to go beyond. The Eatery I described was as far from "fancy" as possible. Dishes were under $10 and were rich in vegetable and protein content. They were also very flavorful. Eating flavorful food does not make it "fancy".

How fast food proliferated in the US goes beyond "fancy"/"not fancy".

Food trucks serve this role in a few American cities (Portland, Austin). Nothing like the hawker stalls of Singapore, but fairly diverse.

Unfortunately the greatest concentration of food carts in Portland has gotten shut down. The land is being developed into a condo :-(

Food trucks locally have acted as incubators for restaurant ideas. If successful then they open a restaurant.

I like the idea of a restaurant incubator much better. People could start out real small, maybe rent out a dining room for a single night each week. Have a big kitchen that could support multiple dining rooms.

Instead as the large department stores close locally we're getting go kart tracks, mini water parks and other kid attractions.

One in my city got acquired by the local community college and stores were turned into classrooms

It'd be interesting to see more ideas like this take fold (not specifically startup related, but just "rethinking what this space could be used for")

The Silverdome (former home to the Detroit Lions) was a skating rink on the weekends for a year or two. I've heard ideas of turning malls into senior living -- which would be a little funny[0]. As a guy who hates cold weather, I'd love to be able to walk to a restaurant without walking outside in February. I'm not sure if that would really work "in practice" (that was kind of the idea of the mall in the first place -- adding my bed to it doesn't really make it better and has a lot of downsides for the small upside).

I'm not really sure what the answer is[1]. I look at the 80s mall by my home and it's surrounded by 50 restaurants, on an intersection of an 8-lane and 6-lane road with thriving businesses all around it. Were it not in an excellent location -- the businesses bordering it area all doing very well; it helps that it's a mile and a half away from a brand-new, modern, mall and and a bunch of other popular retail/restaurants -- it would be abandoned like the rest. But it can't be doing anywhere nearly as well as a Walmart, Ikea, Meijer, Costco, BJs, or any other indoor retail establishment that would take that much property. In its current state, it hurts the businesses around it and abandoned -- all the same and its, at best, losing a lot of money.

[0] Aside from the two 80s malls in my area being surrounded by 2-3 retirement homes already, anyone who's arrived at one of these places in the 90s prior to the stores opening will remember the middle-aged and elderly men and (mostly) women "mall walking".

[1] Well, aside from the market answer -- which is, "abandon it because we can't make money on it" and "let the taxpayers deal with the blight". I have no problem with the former, but the latter frustrates me

Looks like it is happening [0][1]

[0] https://www.secondwavemedia.com/metromode/features/dearborn-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNTb-ikPKvo

The idea of mixed-use spaces has strong attractions.

That's what we used to call "downtowns" or "high streets".

Retail, yes, but also offices, banking, government services, daycare, healthcare, recration, churches.

Concentration, density, access, variety.

Beijing tried this with a dead mall across the street from Microsoft Beijing. It felt like a dank place to run a business though. This isn’t the only one, Chinese cities have made a huge effort in trying to turn ghost malls into incubators so much that it has become cliche.

Google is currently converting the Westside Pavilion mall in west LA into office space. It doesn’t look that bad from what I’ve seen, but the lack of natural light would bother me.

I think that's (sort of) happened at Allegheny Center Mall in Pittsburgh. It's not a startup incubator, but a bunch of the retail space has been converted to office space.

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