The dying mall’s new lease on life: apartments | Hacker News Reader

The dying mall’s new lease on life: apartments

bloomberg.com

109 pointsjseliger141 comments

"Today, people prefer to live in smaller spaces and want walkable developments rather than relying on vehicular transit. This project caters to these needs."

Kind of interesting to watch the mall trend fold in on itself. They were trying to recreate "towns" all along. I mean that's what a walkable "development" with mixed residential & commercial activity is.

Because a mall is essentially a mockup of a town. Just without the clock tower so that you don't remember what time it is.

It's been like this from the beginning, just perverted:

> Gruen had meant well. He wanted to import the pedestrian experience of modernist, European cities like Vienna and Paris into America, where the automobile was king. By creating places for community in the deserts of suburbia, he hoped to lure people from their cars and into contact with one another. The malls would be for shopping, yes, but also offer food, relaxation, and green space. In his original conception, malls would also connect to residential and commercial space, medical care, libraries, and other public spaces. Even though unrealized, this idea was not that different from today’s New Urbanists, who advocate denser, more walkable mixed-use development in cities broken up by the dominance of the automobile.

> Gruen would eventually disavow his creation, expressing disgust for how malls had exacerbated rather than ameliorated urban sprawl—not to mention exporting it globally, infecting the Old World with this land-use virus of the New.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/when-...

That is so interesting. I hate going to malls because there are so many people there. But that seems to have been part of Gruen’s original intent - to bring people in close proximity to each other. No thank you.

Shops and social places do tend to encourage people to visit. If that's not your thing, it's not going to be ideal.

agree with you / have similar feelings these recent days - but would not have 25 years ago in the same places with the same number of people - so I think we are finding it takes more than build a spaces and they will come and befriend and be merry.

Makes me remember how things were very different in malls around here back in the 90s.. not sure when it exactly changed.. but many things changed immensely - and mainly with the types of people that you would be surrounded with.

There was also a different vibe with affordability of nearly everything back then.. that had mass effects I'm sure..

Now I'm trying to decided just what time frame so many things changed where people were more rude all around (customers and employees) - and in order to get the kind of customer service these days you almost need to go to some super expensive places - and even then its not usually as genuine as it once was.

My point being that 'so many people there' I think it relative to the vibe of the people, and not necessarily just place X with Y number of humans density... for example going to a comic-(like)-con these days with 'so many people' there is a totally different vibe than being at average mall (around my part of the country/world) with same number of people in similar spaces.

/random thoughts

For those who wanted more social contact though, it definitely filled a need that wasn't being met otherwise. Many suburbs are almost completely without any sort of public gathering places other than church & school, i.e. places that don't dictate what to do and how to act. Granted the mall has its limits too, that's why there's the Mickey D's parking lot!

Even Chuck D found its charms irresistible: https://imagescdn.juno.co.uk/full/CS537052-01B-BIG.jpg

Interestingly, malls in Australia are alive and well, and do include libraries, supermarkets, medical care, and so on.

I remember supermarkets in malls back in the 80s. People smoked in malls back then and grocery stores, doctor offices.

And bowling alleys and McDonald's playgrounds, and really most restaurants had a smoking and non-smoking section, but it would still drift over and foul up the whole space.

Though I was a smoker myself I’m greatful we mostly made away with this habit and banned any indoor smoking, it stank soo soo bad, it’s surprising smoking caught up in the first place. Learned from Adam Curtis documentary Century of the Self how Edward Bernays started the whole thing up. It’s a great documentary btw

There's a whole lot that are struggling, too.

My apartment is on top of a shopping centre. There's the three major supermarkets, various electronic and fashion retail, a large doctors surgery, radiology and pathology labs, physio, dental, a bunch of pharmacies, and a whole lot of restaurants.

It's incredibly convenient for me. That said, there's been a lot of closures of various stores, and I know other people have repeatedly mentioned that sometimes it feels like a ghost town. I suspect that without the built-in client base living above, that there would have been a lot more closures of stores.

> Interestingly, malls in Australia are alive and well

So is the average person's income, in AUS.

Instead a mall became any store that can pay the highest rent. The never ending quest for the highest rent per square inch.

Loans are the driver for this quest of yours. Imagine two stores one of which can pay 100 moneys, and one of which can pay 110 moneys. Not much difference right? But if you have to pay 105 interest, then it's a huge difference.

Depending so heavily on the automobile was the key decision. Even now it might hamper many such efforts, because most malls seem to be surrounded by a huge Pelennor Field of hot asphalt and hemmed in by freeways or wide boulevards that might have pedestrian facilities as sort of an afterthought. So they really had better strive to be self-contained and offer everything someone might need.

This was mostly driven by economics.

It's cheaper to pave everything in sight vs build multi-story parking decks + greenspace.

And local zoning boards / politicians were only happy to hand out passes, as commercial taxes pay for things that get votes.

So I'd say less a willful decision than a lack of powerful opponents.

It's not even clear who sufficiently powerful opponents of that type of development would have been / are? State or federal EPA?

The problem, IMO, has always been that after the World Wars we failed to come up with regional governance for metros, so that we could not curb the worst excesses of formerly rural counties undercutting each other for an adrenaline shot of increased tax base from suburban development, without properly accounting for the lifecycle cost of infrastructure. It is also a lot harder for individual developers to lobby a single regional government than it is for them to play smaller localities off of each other.

Washington state created the Growth Management Act in 1990. For the most part, urban boundaries have stopped expanding, and coincidentally the mall being used as the poster child for this article is located in Seattle.

Well put!

It's an interesting co-evolution (or lack of) with dramatically scaled corporations, as well.

Pre-interstate, you didn't have as much consolidation of firms (e.g. local burger vs McDonald's, local inn vs Marriott). The national firms that did exist tended to be in higher-capital industries (e.g. transportation or resource extraction).

So firms grew in scale and power from the 1950s+, but government structures did not. With the end result of pitting Lilliputian local governments against nation-spanning corporations.

This has been a thing in Asia for a while (you'd see real estate booths at other malls promoting these properties) and I'm surprised it's just now catching on in the US. Malls are great because they usually have frequent-ish local transit to get people to and from the place. With the housing you can easily get a grocery store or a Target/Wal Mart to be your anchor tenant. These spaces are also being refit into healthcare facilities and churches too so you can essentially build a small town into a mall property provided you can get it all packed in there.

On further thought, I wonder what leads planners and leaders to decide that a mall should become a new-urbanist town square or an Amazon fulfillment center?

Prestonwood Town Center mall (1979-2003, RIP) in Dallas, Texas actually had an indoor clock tower! Here's a picture:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/d2/08/48d2080a4f98b94f877f...

As you can see, it wasn't just a clock, it was a kickass gigantic awesome mechanical clock. It was fun to just hang out and watch the mechanism do its thing. And it had chimes.

One of the original (and longest?) tenants of the mall was a clock shop, located in a suite right by the big clock.

Here's a (low-quality) video showing the clock at about 0m25s: https://vimeo.com/114438477

Some background is available here: https://mb.nawcc.org/threads/howard-tower-clock.33680/

According to that, the clock itself was originally made in 1915 and was installed in a clock tower in a Goodyear building in Los Angeles, but that tower had to be torn down for earthquake safety. So the clock was moved to Texas. After the mall was closed, the clock was put into storage, and some pieces may have been lost, but possibly not the important ones.

There was a naming contest, and the clock was named "D Old Timer". ("D" is sort of a local shorthand for Dallas. There's a "D Magazine".)

That is some awesome, vintage mall footage right there. Definitely giving me some 80s and 90s vibes from my early childhood. A little wild to think that this fixture of late 20th century life is on its way out. The clock tower is a nice touch!

The Monoroeville Mall (made famous for its use as the setting for the original Dawn of the Dead movie) had a clock tower in the 1970s (since removed in one of its many renovations). You can see it in the final scene of the movie after the zombies have taken back the mall and are staggering around to the upbeat mall music.

I've thought for awhile that Walmart/Target could build apartment complexes above their stores. Not sure who would want to live there, but I bet some people would.

For the right price they would sell like hot cakes

It'd be perfect for older folks, especially if also in proximity to public transport. 95% of their needs could be satisfied by a healthy walk downstairs to the store.

They do...there are two brand new urban Targets in two Chicago neighborhoods (Lakeview and Logan square) and they have amenity apartments on top with pool etc.

Especially decades ago, how many people lived in an apartment over a grocery store or something in a small town?

This is such a great idea. In Vietnam I stayed in a few AirBNB's that were 20 floor buildings: the bottom floor was grocery, gym, bank, restaurants, and the top floors were all residential, with pools on the very top floor of one swanky place. I'm seeing this in Seattle and Portland, too. Converting malls to residential has huge potential for all-in-one living.

The malls that are going bankrupt in the US tend to be those in at least somewhat downscale suburbs/exurbs. The mall that's relatively close to me had a Sears, Macy's, and JC Penney as anchor tenants. All are now closed. There is a close by busy grocery store and Home Depot.

But upscale shopping malls in elite cities were actually doing pretty well prior to the current situation.

> Sears, Macy's, and JC Penney as anchor tenants. All are now closed.

Hey coincidentally my local mall has the same! Except our Macy's is kinda open.

Also a Toys R'Us in the immediate vicinity. The complex has traded hands a couple of times in the past few years at a significant devaluation each time. The next mall over isn't much better (K-Mart among other things). There are some reasonably affluent rural/exurban communities in the area but the three nearby small cities are fairly rundown old mill towns.

> But upscale shopping malls in elte cities were actually doing pretty well prior to the current situation.

I believe that is called "Retail Therapy" but it only works if you have money to burn.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-why-behind-the-b...

As we've seen, most people don't have money to burn, as "most american's have no savings":

https://www.axios.com/americans-emergency-savings-coronaviru...

or...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-woul...

https://www.fool.com/retirement/2020/03/27/nearly-50-of-amer...

True, though many Americans have access to credit. Though that can't be sustained, it can work for a while.

Some malls have adapted to the situation by adapting to changing demographics and tastes: here's an article about malls being adapted into Hispanic-centered malls: https://adage.com/article/the-big-tent/malls-pitched-hispani...

The major issue that a traditional mall has is that the segment of the market served by Sears, Macy's, and JC Penny does not really compete well with online equivalents that involve less fuss. You need some type of differentiation, whether or not that is upscale exclusivity or niches like catering to specific ethnic needs.

And those stores also did not compete well with Walmart which AFAIK has never taken the anchor store strategy approach, although of course it is in strip malls.

Yeah, upscale department stores were saved by the fact that a standalone Gucci store would not work in most places, unlike a standalone Gap or Old Navy or Home Depot.

The big box format is also interesting, because the big boxes were not built to last and a good deal of what made the finances work was local governments of rural and new-growth suburban areas falling over themselves to provide tax breaks for jobs. This strategy didn't pan out too well when they tried expanding into urban areas using the exact same format (they are now changing it up), and now the big box stores are at the end of their useful lives and a lot are being abandoned as well.

Big box stores dominate us more than ever. Walmarts everywhere. I consider amazon to be an online big box store.

Generally speaking, today's big box stores are actually not the same physical ones as the first generation.

Walmart has not really opened new stores, mostly closing them in recent years: https://www.mashed.com/148703/the-real-reason-walmart-is-clo...

And to be clear, when I say big box store, I do mean the physical store itself; Amazon has a lot of the same market segments, but they are not themselves opening stores in large amounts.

I've seen Walmarts as anchor stores inside malls. Maybe 1/4-1/5 of them?

Another interesting design of these anchor store Walmarts is that it's even less common to have a method of entering the Walmart from inside the mall itself. You usually need to leave the mall and re-enter the Walmart from outside (I've even seen a JC Penney be replaced by a Walmart, who walled up the indoor entrance). I don't know if it's a loss prevention tactic or some other strategy, but I've found it unusual.

I've never seen a Walmart attached to an indoor mall. Maybe it's a regional thing. Your description is interesting though. The whole purpose of a traditional anchor store is to draw people inside the mall so that they visit all the little stores that they'd never be bothered to visit if it weren't for the anchor store. If you make people go outside again to enter the mall that defeats the purpose to a significant degree.

Which is fine for Walmart. Not so good for the mall.

Yeah, it might be regional. Although even the ones I've seen have been fairly rare.

Here's an anchor store Walmart that is close to where I used to live a long time ago: https://goo.gl/maps/G6xuLEHu4MMn1gBS9

You can't get into this Walmart from inside the mall.

The malls are going down because their key tenants are going under. Sears, JC Penny's, Macy's and plenty of small entities.

Malls aren't exciting enough. They're not special enough. It's a 20th Century experience that hasn't been updated in too long. At this point there's no time or money for a makeover. They're too focused on staying alive.

Where are you seeing this in Portland in a way that’s different than any other city? Mixed use ground floor with residential above isn’t that revolutionary.

This type of land use would be illegal to build new, or saddled with so much parking requirement to be financially unviable, in most of the country.

It is the historical form of the American city, but the midcentury turned its nose up at dirty noisy cities and promoted single-use Euclidean zoning to the extreme.

True: first-floor retail is as old as multi-story buildings.

What is different about it now is the large number of stores that are accessible only from inside a single building.

I was in Portland last fall and there were these buildings on the river and one had a restaurant, a coffee shop, a spin class, and a work space in the same building, with the entrances near the elevators where tenants get immediate access. I've never see in that in Boston, San Fran or NYC, where the first floor is a business, but faces the outside street. The portland thing was like its own mothership on a block, rather than a bunch of mixed used places on a mile-long street.

This is not going to be common. I have a lot of large commercial real estate clients, and they all see malls becoming distribution centers.

In the US, most malls are not in high-density, expensive areas. It's much more expensive to build 100 condos out of a mall than to just build condos. Where do you even get windows for most of the stores? A lot of space in a mall is away from anywhere that natural light can enter.

As distribution centers though, you have giant spaces, large bays for trucks to enter, and last-mile access to suburban customers.

Retailers expect to want the space, they just expect they'll want it for distribution of online sales instead of in-person sales.

Reminds me of a Canadian movie:

> The world of interconnected office buildings, apartment complexes and food courts (shot in all its fluorescent glory on digital video) is the backdrop for "Waydowntown," where young office workers Tom, Sandra, Randy and Curt, have all staked a month's salary on a bet to see who can stay indoors the longest. It's lunch hour on day 24 of the wager and everyone's pretty much reached their breaking point.

https://imdb.com/title/tt0219405/

Only 24 days? Amateurs.

Toronto's 30km PATH system [1] makes staying "indoors" less of a challenge if you can afford to live in one of the connected buildings. According to IMDB the movie takes place in Calgary.

The abandoned mall conversions feels more like the trend of converting old inner city factory buildings into lofts, except applied to suburbia.

[1] https://www.torontopath.com/

Also, Montreal has its "Underground City" (La Ville Souterraine) which is claimed to be the largest such network in the world.

"Today, people prefer to live in smaller spaces and want walkable developments rather than relying on vehicular transit. This project caters to these needs."

This is a broad statement, that clearly isn't true. If it was true, then the suburbs would not exist. Housing prices show that there is clearly a desire by people to not living in smaller spaces. After the pandemic, I tend to think a lot of people will be re-thinking their dense living conditions. This really smells like a put up job by a hopeful developer

I find this sort of funny in an “everything old is new again” sort of way. There are some up—and-coming areas around downton LA that we’re partially covered high streets (somewhat mall-like) that are having their second and third floors turned into apartments the thing is, that’s what they used to be.

It strikes me that we should consider the mall as more of an aberration which is finally fading away.

The mall always struck me as a horrible place because unlike a town square, it's only a public space to those who are there to spend money.

Not really. I spent countless hours at a mall as a kid - it was just where my parents would drop us off to waste some time while they had to go run errands.

Yes, but you know that wasn't the intended purpose of malls, it was to get kids and adults in there because the longer they're there the most likely you'll spend money.

Yeah, I think a critical part of their success was that they were fun.

Look at photos of malls from the 80s and 90s. People were there to hang out, even to see and be seen, and of course they shopped while they were there.

Malls were definitely only for peddling Shit You Don't Need by the time I was old enough to frequent them. Nothing interesting, just overpriced stores and people yelling at you from kiosks trying to get you to buy a watch.

I can think of one notable exception. Ala Moana in Honolulu. Seems like always a nice community event on the stage! Usually hula!

Worked at Cinnabon when they still made the rolls from things that were identifiably ingredients. Mall-walkers are a real thing in the mornings. They came in and walked for as long as they'd like while the mall slowly got itself ready for the day, and then they left. Nobody's checking at the exits to make sure they've spent money.

I was thinking about these being good for freelancers and startups, then I realized they'll be expensive. There was a recent thread about housing for startup employees:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655398

Liability kind of ruins any opportunity of making cheap living spaces.

Edit: did some more browsing, found this update on Zeus, a co-living startup https://therealdeal.com/2020/05/11/airbnb-backed-zeus-living...

Zeus sounds like furnished corporate apartments -- i.e. a competitor to something like Marriott Residence Inn -- rather than "co-living." (These apartments have historically been used for relocation or for when an exec or someone else needs to spend a lot of time in a location away from their home base.)

Maybe buy an old cruise ship and put it in international waters lol. That'd probably help get rid of some of the liability and zoning issues.

If you have no liability / jurisdiction then contracts with you are unenforceable. And if a customer can't get a valid contract with you, that means no customers.

Yeah, not sure how the cruise lines deal with this... I know some of them have offices in the US, some major ones pick Miami but the ships are owned and registered to off-shore nations. One of the reasons they didn't get a bailout due to COVID, they pay little taxes and then also can avoid more stricter US labor laws.

As you said, they're registered to off-shore nations, so that gives them a jurisdiction.

It’s been considered, and if memory serves, implemented a few times. I want to say someone put a ship full of migrant workers in international waters off the coast of California a few years ago.

The concept is usually known as “seasteading” - though, to be fair, that term includes a good bit of political baggage as well.

Always wanted to live in a Cinnabon!

My middle school was adjacent to a donut factory. Can confirm, it never gets old.

(whereby "never" I mean "over the span of 3 years as a voracious teenager" ymmv)

It’s all fun until the metabolism slows down :)

Worked at one. Ate Cinnabons for lunch when I forgot to bring one. I wouldn't want to make a regular thing of it, but they remained pretty good once every week or two.

The one I worked at changed from baking the rolls from things that bore some resemblance to things you could buy at the supermarket to pre-made frozen stuff two years after I graduated high school. I sort of lost interest after that.

I reckon if you don't see a mixer, a sheeter, or anybody rolling out rolls, it's probably a safe bet that their product comes in pre-made. Note that it's a strong possibility that nobody will be making rolls at a slow time like a weekday afternoon. Still, there should be signs of loose brown sugar/cinnamon mix somewhere in the cooking area if they aren't using pre-made.

Disclaimer: I don't know how this works at e.g. airports, where the food service stuff is much tighter for frontage. Also, it's been almost 20 years now since I've been on that side of the counter.

In Germany we have a slow dying of mall and similar, now accelerated because of corona.

I have considered this before when seeing some empty buildings (turned out they just moved...).

One thing I see as a problem is sunlight. Any apartment must have reasonable sources of natural sun light and many mall's are build in ways which have much less entries for sunlight. Outer walls can be changed but the "inner space" which has no contact to an outer wall is stuck.

I’d think large skylights in the public spaces could help a great deal with that issue.

In my ideal world, the mall housing would be aimed at old people and anyone with handicaps such that they're taking a greater-than-normal risk navigating icy sidewalks or bad weather in general. Imagine being able to walk to and from shopping, gyms, and third spaces without worrying about falling and breaking a hip. That is the idea which ought to sell this.

"OK, on your form you said you're sixty, but you're forty".

Seriously, I hate unnecessary bureaucracy. Ideally, we'll build enough housing for everyone, regardless if they have a handicap or not, or old for that matter.

Our society is very wealthy, we can do this. Done right, it won't be a burden for everyone, because we'll get lower cost of living and as a side effect, healthier humans.

That's quite a jump. The OP said "aimed at" which in my mind just means the picture on the front cover of the brochure has a pair of smiling seniors.

On the contrary, I just met an 81-year old guy that still runs through Griffith Park, 2+ miles every day.

In my ideal world, less old people would be decrepit. At least, I am hoping that I will be anywhere near that agile at 81.

Haha one of my uncles said cruise ships are like sleeping in the mall... but I like this idea... Have shops, restaurants, entertainment/activities office buildings and residential. I think I'd love to live somewhere where I could walk to grab a bite of eat, to the gym or some office space... A pool too. Co-working spaces be nice too if you work from home and want a separate spot to work. I kinda been interested in moving to downtown Austin since the most walkable city in Texas, but still not prefect from what I've read.

As someone who's always been in the suburbs, always kinda been jealous that most apartments seem to have pools haha. but idk if i'd like apartment life, I'd be worried about hearing other people or being too loud if I wanted to listen to music or watch tv... I guess depends on if the walls are paper thin.

Considering the footprint+location of your typical American shopping mall, office space is a really good 2nd life for this type of facility. One other possibility could be to retrofit the structures to serve as data centers. Every small town in America could have a JCPenny's worth of servers racked up for ultra-low-latency application & content delivery to the local residents.

I think every American in the lower 48 is within 5 milliseconds of a Walmart at this point. I am surprised they (and other retailers) haven't attempted to leverage this geographic capability. 5ms is certainly fast enough to fool me into thinking that a remote workstation is sitting under my desk.

There aren't a ton of good pictures that I can find, but Rackspace famously moved their headquarters into a derelict San Antonio mall in 2012:

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

Actually that has happened in my country.

The movie theater of an old mall was repurpused as a call center for a canadian company.

It brought new life to the mall.

Obviously, conversion can be somewhat tricky, but purpose built mixed use has sometimes proven quite popular, e.g. at Santana Row.

My experience of living there was limited to a few weeks in a hotel, but it certainly had its advantages.

I'd like Santana Row more if the people there weren't so obnoxious. Their pecking order seems to be determined by:

1) How rare and expensive your car is

2) Having the exhaust modified to be as loud as possible

3) Demonstrating (1) and (2) every thirty seconds

I'd observe that living in any small area whether it's a "fake town" like Santana Row or a real town like gentrified areas of many old small New England cities can get old. I worked in downtown Nashua NH--not the strip mall, the old downtown--for quite a few years. It was nice. But you maybe had a dozen square blocks of nice restaurants and interesting shops and that was it. Fine to commute to a few days a week. Less interesting IMO to live in.

Oh, so you mean like most of Europe and NYC? Ya, I guess that's a thing people are into.

(Disclaimer: I'm from NYC where this is just so bloody obvious.)

Here's a detailed examination of one mall that converted to apartments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmL2l-bcuUQ

Interesting mostly for how they weighed the marketing and economic aspects of it: "commercial renters think in terms of $/sq foot and individuals think of monthly costs"

So, instead of ugly commercial monstrosities we're going to get rows of tiny, dark apartments in a weird building that doesn't really use space efficiently. And this is a best case conversion: historic building in an urban area. Imagine how awful a suburban mall would be.

This is creative, and for "malls" built into tall midrises with strong materials like the one in the video shown, it makes sense.

However, most malls look something more like this - https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/scenery-shopping-... or https://live.staticflickr.com/4500/23555440258_4bdf03a818_b....

I wonder what the plan would be for adapting a "regular" mall to residential use.

In Bangkok, a city pretty serious about its malls, some of them have apartment complexes attached. Here's one I happened to notice that seems to have pretty normal prices:

https://www.hotels.com/go/thailand/platinum-fashion-mall

https://www.ddproperty.com/en/property/ขายด่วน-the-platinum-...

There are complexes attached to some of the high-end malls too like IconSiam, if you happen to be really rich and like malls:

https://www.iconsiam.com/en/residences

So, maybe the death of malls is not a requirement for living in malls?

Seems like a solid plan if they focus on opening restaurants, pharmacies, grocery stores, banks, registries, etc in the commercial lots.

Every neighborhood strip mall seems to succeed by proximity to the people.

If you put a good restaurant near a neighborhood with a school, it gets a steady traffic of regulars. Same goes for a little bank, pharmacy, gas station, etc.

In New Haven CT there's a downtown mall that was converted to an apartment building, but none of the commercial space was left unconverted

It felt like the most oddly gloomy place I've ever seen apartments: https://i2.wp.com/box5497.temp.domains/~betwefc1/wp-content/...

Yes, very gloomy indeed. I wonder who’ll want to live there

Sunshine City in Tokyo, Ikebukuro started out like this around 1978.

https://sunshinecity.jp/en/information/about/

The Sunshine City building is about 60 stories. The lower floors are mall. I considered renting there around 1988, but the apartments in my price range were shabby. Nearby conventional apartments were much less expensive. It appears to be very successful, but I haven't been there for 18 years. Has anyone else seen it recently?

I've seen news that some big companies have bought/leased up malls and converted them into office space.

Probably doesn't do much for suburban culture (although it's arguably better than having a failing mall in the neighborhood), but it's super good for employees since malls tend to be located very near to housing.

https://la.curbed.com/2019/1/8/18173979/westside-pavilion-go...

Works great if there’s a pressing need for office space. Many places with dying malls have plenty of abandoned retail real estate and not much in the way of new or growing office real estate needs.

I noticed the type of mall which is not enclosed is getting more popular in California. Basically a collect of stores with a shared parking lot so you can park right next to the store of interest. I think nobody wants to park and walk by dozens of stores nobody cares about.

I was kicking around the idea of trying to turn empty retail spots into co-working locations.

This work be a good halfway spot between the burbs and the congested downtowns where co-working spots typically exist. Plus you have access to amenities and you can take a walk, hangout in the main area in winter.

Thoughts?

Check Bespoke in SF. Problem: no natural light, and depression sinks in after some time due to being forced through the zoo that is a busy mall every day (also somewhat of a food desert in that area). Not a bad idea though overall.

I think it would be hard to scale while occupying small spaces. You need the scale to afford the marketing overhead in order to keep occupancy rates up.

Malls are generally just one or two stories tall and therefore a massive waste of space compared to other possible uses of the same land. Building them higher and putting housing on top is a great way to add more housing without using more land.

Most empty malls are in places where economic demand, including demand for land, is very low. Investing money to make efficient use of something that cheap is unlikely to be a profitable move.

The real waste of space is generally the ocean of parking that dwarfs the mall itself.

I wonder if there was an analysis of demand of parking space or if it was always at significant undercapacity

"Significant undercapacity" means that people don't leave when they can't immediately find a parking space (modulo maybe right before Christmas). Yes, I'm sure it's analyzed. Also adding space retroactively (especially in the form of parking garages that a lot of people don't really like) can be expensive.

Separation of land usage through zoning is a huge problem in my opinion. We'd all be better off if they just let people do whatever they wanted on their own land.

How about an outdoor 24/7 disco in your quiet neighborhood?

That's always the go-to argument (I literally had someone say "rock crushing business" when talking about this issue). The standard should be are they disturbing your quiet enjoyment of your property?

If not then mind your own damn business.

Im not for zoning laws, just gave an example of mixing zones. It’s probably better for the business as well to be in commercial zone. But if the impact was zero i wouldnt mind a business operating in my residential neighborhood: quiet, no extra trafic, etc

In the city I used to live, the state government bought up many such dead malls and turned them into office space for various agencies.

https://archive.is/jIk9w

In most municipalities, zoning will restrict the ability of developers to make changes of use like this.

Bulldoze and subdivide would be more sensible I'd think.

Lack of sunlight might be a problem

I know I'm commenting on the site and not the story -- maybe this is against the spirit of HN -- but hasn't Bloomberg lost credibility here ever since "The Big Hack"?

Are we still okay with them? Are we just okay with them as long as it's not a tech story? If so, is this an example of Gell-Mann Amnesia? [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeches_by_Michael_Crichton...

Option 1 is people forgot, option 2 is they reserved judgment, finding it inconclusive, and option 3 is they don't regard Bloomberg as a monolith.

At least, those are the possibilities that I can think of, and I think they could plausibly cover most people.

> some developers are betting that empty malls can mix housing with stores and community space.

it was developers and city councils who caused this mess in the first place.

no one wanted to separate home and work / business / industry.

no one except developers and auto manufacturers.

Personally I like the suburbs and my cars.

Your car rides on public roads and the car you drive impose a cost on everyone else.

Public transit also imposes a cost on everyone else -- most of it is subsidized by taxes and will never be profitable.

Public roads and public transit are both funded by taxes, so I don't see why it would be right to use one but wrong to use the other.

I think you could make an argument for the cost-effectiveness of transit and walkability compared to car culture. It lowers the base economic hurdle to be productive in society and is more environmentally friendly to boot.

I think it's fine to enjoy public roads and driving a car as a personal activity, but I think it gets too much public funding as "the default" in North America. I'd rather my tax dollars go to a train line than a highway lane.

Most public transportation is partially subsidized in the US. Car owners are paying taxes to support public transportation via income tax, sales tax and/or a gas tax.

Roads and highways are also subsidized. Fuel taxes and vehicle fees would have to be raised substantially for drivers to pay their own way.

+1, me too.

I do, if done right I guess. In my previous house, it definitely wasn't urban, but not what you'd think of as suburban, either. Lotsa smallish houses in neighborhoods with good yards on both sides of a central road, which had tons of small shops. You could walk to get basic groceries, vet, eye clinic, donuts, couple restaurants. It was very quaint and to me, perfect. However, I currently live in some monstrosity of a neighborhood that requires driving at least five minutes to get anywhere. This isn't the future, and I don't understand how people can stand it.

Lots of people wanted suburbs where they could live in quiet neighborhoods in detached homes with yards. That's why they exist and continue to be built. People also wanted to drive cars rather than take public transit.

That was not a conspiracy by the auto manufacturers, it was just what people wanted. Ask around most suburbs and you'll learn that it is still what most people want today, especially once they have kids.

I think suburbs are going to rise in status after the pandemic, especially if working from home becomes more common. People will want space, and they won't care about being located far from downtown if they don't need to commute. Plus, nobody really wants to use public transit during a pandemic and it will be a long time before people trust it again.

I prefer never going outside and getting everything delivered, but that also naturally privileges the suburbs because door delivery is so nice vs. dealing with mail rooms or meeting couriers downstairs. D:

Some would call this a house arrest.

Sounds like a reasonable sort of holiday to me.

> People also wanted to drive cars rather than take public transit.

Do they? Or do they because of really shitty broken public transport. I know many people in Berlin who had or could have a car but dropped it because it is totally not worth it having one.

(Through yes it's not a conspiracy, just very bad investments into public transport/infrastructure and a lot of lobbying often crippling approaches to improve public transit infrastructure.)

> I think suburbs are going to rise in status after the pandemic [..]

Even more a reason to interleave "non loud" industry with homes because then the people which can't work from home don't need to travel far.

> Plus, nobody really wants to use public transit during a pandemic

Even more a reason to interleave things as with that much shorter distances to work are possible and as such can reach it their work place by food or bicycle. Not a option in some climate areas but very well an option in others like in Berlin.

> nobody really wants to use public transit during a pandemic

Actually in many EU countries where public transit is normal it's still used. A bit less but still used frequently. People just wear mask and make sure to wash their hand when arriving. Furthermore I'm not aware of any Corona hot-spot caused by public transit, even through e.g. Berlin does much less for disinfecting trains then what I have heard what is done in some US cities.

So my guess is that you might be right wrt. the US, but it's not a fundamental thing but more of a problem with cultural context, history and perspective.

> Do they? Or do they because of really shitty broken public transport.

Yes, they do. The reason why people don't use private cars and opt for public transit is typically related to cost of ownership and / or inadequate infrastructure for moving cars into, out of, and around the cities efficiently given current usage. A car is better than public transit in basically every way except maybe safety (although public transit users have their own safety concerns).

Cars are point to point as opposed to having to make connections; cars operate on demand as opposed to running on an arbitrary schedule; cars enable living in a greater variety of locations as opposed to proximal to a transit hub; cars enable privacy as opposed to having to deal with other people; cars are more comfortable than public transit; cars allow you to move cargo which is infeasible on public transit; cars are much more efficient for medium distance (intra-state) travel than public transit; cars keep you out of the elements which public transit frequently does not ....

In reality public transit is required to allow cities to scale efficiently, but many use it because they have to, not because they actually want to.

> > some developers are betting that empty malls can mix housing with stores and community space.

> it was developers and city councils who caused this mess in the first place.

I never understood why the US and some other countries have such a strict separation between normal business/work areas and many EU cities do not have such a strict separation and it just works very well.

Sure some industry which causes a lot of noise or other pollution is not allowed interleaved with housing and industries which need a lot of space tend to be outside of the city because of land cost.

But everything else can nicely interleave.

For example Berlin it's not uncommon to have small shops on the ground floor, some offices or doctors on the first floor and apartments above that. While many new buildings sadly don't have this anymore they still interleave shopping males, doctor houses and offices with apartment blocks.

That’s common in many places in the US, especially in older areas like New England.

Nice to hear.

Imagine you park on the street and don't pay for it. Now imagine I open a restaurant next door. Diners park on the street. All of a sudden you can't mooch off of public land to store your private property! Time to go shout at your planners about traffic and parking!

What strange invective. Residents of a city who own private property pay property taxes, sales taxes, and fuel taxes to build and maintain roads. The people they are "mooching off" are themselves.

Likewise, if your city has set you up with some amenity like parking, and you plan your property purchase around it, and they take it away to give to someone else, it's quite reasonable to get mad — even if the use of that amenity was not specifically deeded to you as private property. There may be other concerns in a city to which they must yield, but it is hardly as if they are entitled freeloaders.

Why is it I can fill my garage with junk and park on the street, but not park in my garage and plop a hot tub in the street?

Americans learned that they can use zoning laws to put restrictions on their neighbors’ properties, mainly to keep their own property values high.

Unfortunately, American city planners have a lot of bad ideas of what a city should look like. For some reason, stadiums are unreasonably popular ( http://www.hatrack.com/cgi-bin/print_friendly.cgi?page=/osc/... ).

Oops: wrong link. It should have been http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/printer_friendly.cgi?page=/ess... .

Most of the US (including most US cities) dont have strict separation. Every US city has multiple dozens of buildings of mixed live/work spaces. (These are inherently expensive to build and operate, and therefore expensive to rent, so there aren't lots more of them, only because there aren't enough wealthy residents to justify it)

And even many affordable neighborhoods of 1960's-looking-suburbs and such, have lots of dental offices / daycare centers / insurance offices / chiropractors / photography studios / private tutors / etc in them. Most people never notice, because they look like any other random ranch house. But they exist, and are permitted by zoning.

Historically, some places in the US have family-housing-only zoning laws, not to enforce a "strict separation", but to protect housing affordability or protect public transportation. If you could put 'anything' on that land, it would cost more, preventing people from being able to afford to live there. And if you could put 'anything' there, you might build a superstore or a theme park or similar (which would block other residential residents from using the public transportation network)

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Berlin has strong renter protections, rent control (freeze + cap), more widespread alternative forms of public transit, and substantial public housing. So the threat of private equity breaking the whole town is a little bit less pressing. The vast majority of America has nothing even remotely close to that. Zoning protections like these are basically the only thing preventing housing prices and transportation availability from being even worse in the US.

I’ve gone from a 750 square foot apartment (single), to a 3000 square foot house (married with a step child and then divorced), back to a 2300 square foot apartment (Married two stepchildren), back to a 3100 square foot house (married one son had moved out by then). I will never live in an apartment or any other attached dwelling again.

- my mortgage is $2200 a month - soon to be $2600 when I refinance to a 15 year.

- we have a separate guest suite with a bathroom for when my parents visit or if they have to ever move in with us.

- a separate room that is now a study/studio for my wife’s online fitness classes

- a bedroom converted to an office now that I work from home hopefully for the rest of my career.

- a bedroom that we converted to a cardio room with a treadmill, elliptical, stationary bike and weights.

- a bedroom for my son

- a master suite for us.

- a decent size family room and kitchen.

Especially with Covid, this has been a lifesaver. I can’t imagine being stuck in an apartment right now.

Even before my recent job change to working remotely for $BigTech and was just making an average salary for a software architect locally (east coast). The house was only 2x household income. In other words, any run of the mill developer could have afforded it.

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