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Comment by Ijumfs | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, not the poor poor commercial real estate developers! Anyway all the malls died like decades ago. Have you been to a mall lately? As far as I can tell the only people who go are folks engaged in drug transactions and busloads of tourists from SE Asia.

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This isn't just malls. This is concerning ALL retail/commercial real estate, a lot of which has still been heavily used.

Behind this is a lot of overvalued debt, which is at risk. Large institutions essentially treat this debt like dollars and have a bunch of their holding spread across a bunch of mortgage-backed securities such as these. Effectively, debt needs to be written off, and as such, "dollars" will disappear. This could result in some serious deflation.

Sadly the RE people will be fine. They were sitting on a lot of cash, and they're now converting retail spaces into high-tech distribution centers.

The people who will be screwed are retail workers.

The implication is that this, along with the rest of the current collapsing state of the USA is going to just exacerbate poverty and local decline across large parts of the country.

Malls are also a place to walk, shop, and play for families during winter. In colder areas it's often dark sooner so outdoor activities are more limited.

Here in Australia, the big shopping centres (aka Malls), get their biggest crowds in summer. Xmas helps but also there is often a contiguous 3-7 day stretch of >40C(>104F) maximums with sweltering overnights in the cities.

Not everyone has aircon.

Not looking forward to that if COVID is still kicking our arse.

They used to be. That all stopped in the 1990's.

It’s still done over here in the Virginia Tri State (including what Amazon is trying to force us to call Liberty Landing). It’s just that all the malls are outdoors “town centers”, so people still go out for ice skating, like music, winter beer festivals, fireworks, and movies but we do it in the freezing cold.

I think the idea of a indoor mall was great, but it’s a big building that’s hard to maintain.

Maybe future societies will just have geodesic domes around town centers to get the best of both worlds.

Maybe for you. I'm not much of a mall-goer, but every once in a while, I find myself in one of few that are (or were, pre-COVID19) still thriving, and they seem very much alive in this respect.

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