Malls could be the best co-working offices. Ample daytime parking, baller food courts, medical facilities, hair dressers, dentists, cafes, movie theaters, entertainment, etc all under one roof.
No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world. Just one giant homogenised hermetically sealed world.
It wouldn't be "best" for many people.
Maybe "convenient" for bosses who don't like how much productivity they lose when a Meat Flavoured Productivity Unit has to go get a haircut or imbibe sustenance....
For example: I used to work at GoogleX's "San Antonio station", which was a converted shopping mall, and it had great lighting, even on lower floors.
With multiple employers in same building, you'd also have many more socializing options -- including random colleagues who drop by to run errands.
Besides, what would you suggest instead -- let them turn into suburban blight?!
Even if suboptimal, revitalizing the mall as a co-working space sounds like a less-bad solution to me. Still open to practical alternatives though. ;)
If they really cant find the money sell it to developers to make condos or single family homes.
They left the major anchor stores (Target, Von Maur, Hobby Lobby), turned most of the center of the mall into parking lots, and put up a few multi-store strips around it, and it went from empty to having thriving businesses that have mostly all remained the past 16 years.
This guy has more details and took some pictures of the mall just before they closed it:
Provide the right financial incentives and a developer should be able to do it on terms favorable to the city (vs getting little/no revenue from a derelict mall complex).
Or RoboCop. You choose.
At $400/square foot to build a mall, and $XY/square foot/year to maintain it, the only thing that makes financial sense to grow in one is black market marijuana.
Being able to go for a climate-controlled one-kilometer walk every lunch break is a real luxury for a lot of people, it's way better than a cell in some high-rise near the highway. The mall could have a hackerspace too!
It has potential.
Assuming that everyone has a comfortable and spacious home with a desk&chair area is, well, a bad assumption.
A bunch of people I know are now working significantly more time from a couch, in a clearly non-ergonomic position. We will see and hear about the real damage 5 years from now.
I couldn't agree more, the transition for me was trivial - I'm a developer who plays games, I already had a nice chair, two 27" 4K displays and a fast desktop so for me my hardware/comfort improved - for my partner work issued her a just about passable laptop and..well that was it.
With the lack of space I used a spare 27" monitor I had putting it on the boys desk with a decent external mouse/keyboard and we bought him a gaming chair - that way my partner can use his room as an office while he's at school/his fathers but yeah it's not be great for her.
We are moving next year and my only criteria for the house is at has to have either a large brick built garage or a concrete garage and space for an office pod in the garden, working from home around a near-teenager was challenging (and frankly that's just gonna get worse) and long term not something I want - I need quiet solitude to work most comfortably.
I assume you're moving out of the city and into the suburbs or similar?
I wonder if the last year of WFH will actually make suburban sprawl worse in the short- to medium-term? Lots of people moving out of city flats into suburban homes for just the reasons you mention. I can't blame them, but it's probably not sustainable either. [and easy for me to say, as I already own a suburban home]
I know a bunch of people who were in urban apartments who have moved to larger places a number of hours out. There's a huge spike in real estate prices outside of cities now.
I'm in the UK but in the north earning a southern developers salary so that gives us a lot of options.
"long term" they won't be a near-teenager, or even teenager. ;). I do understand the quiet solitude for work issue though.
Our employers did at provide additional monitors (both of us already had suitable laptops), which was nice and better than many received.
My brother works from home now and he's either in his living room or kitchen and my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office but prior to that worked from her dining room.
I've worked from home for a few years and have an office (spare bedroom we didn't use) so it's no big deal for me.
I'd love to see a large-scale survey around home office working.
This is an interesting change happening in many places now and I wonder how it will impact the higher end of the market (and expectations) in a long term. Some people in larger houses recently went from 4 bedrooms with lots of space to 1 bedroom, 1 nursery, 2 offices. (yes, nice problem to have in practice, but still interesting)
It's not for everyone! Even for me, if there was a mall in my area, which had coworking, an attached hackerspace and, let's say, a gym? I would pick up a minimal "grab a desk" coworking package.
Why not? Sometimes being around people is nice. Sometimes there's lawn work or construction happening near my house. I could make a thermos of coffee and a protein shake first thing in the morning, head to coworking, get some stuff done, hit the gym, have my choice of food court meals, and head home for a shower and a quiet afternoon at home. Or call it a soft half-day and spend the afternoon working on something with circuit boards, or just shooting the breeze with the hackers.
Gosh this is sounding really nice! Anyone finds a setup like this, let me know!
So it’s not cyberpunk when people work for dying big box stores, but it is when OP works in a WeWork located in the same mall?
I think it's a US thing. Many malls have significant sun-light, though not for the stores (I think this is done on purpose so that you are not distracted and focus on the goods). This could be re-purposed, however. Concrete walls get removed and replaced by glass.
Malls in the US are like that. But not everywhere
(I'm gonna be honest, US malls are not the greatest)
Americans absolutely freaking love their cars and have no desire to change the drive-thru lifestyle. I can't convince my parents not to feel pity on me when I'm overseas without one, they don't understand and can't understand that I am not merely indifferent, I hate the burden of a car and living in the inconvenient cities that pop up as an result of mass car ownership. The preferences of my friends in their 30s make it clear to me this American preference is not changing within our lifetimes. The lifestyle I want is only available, for the most part, in Asia. A recent long stay in Paris was even quite a surprise for me, I found the population density way too low to enjoy the convenient walk everywhere lifestyle easily found in Shanghai, Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul etc.
(Unlike some other countries.)
1. Usually already located at a crossroads; you want a mall at a busy junction to attract custom
2. Usually already a local transit hub, since they tend to be a major concentration of jobs
3. Are separated from any pesky residential neighbors by major roads and/or large swathes for parking
4. Have a lot of land in the form of said large swathes of parking
These characteristics actually make them ideal for densification into a more walkable oasis; they already have some mixed uses, and the parking lots are developable without much fuss from neighbors. And you can do the whole thing in phases.
A bunch of malls in the Seattle area are getting redeveloped in this manner.
#3 is a negative. The separation from housing makes them LESS suitable for office space.
Put the two together, and even if the mall is redeveloped into nice office space with room to walk around, people outside the mall have to drive to do so. For people on the other side of those major arteries, they literally have to drive 1-2 blocks to walk around the mall (or former mall).
None of which is to imply we shouldn't redevelop malls into mixed use "urban" hubs. But, we shouldn't assume that redeveloping the mall in isolation will succeed. The surrounding area might need significant changes to fully utilize the former mall zone.
Neighbors in single family suburban homes are more likely to be NIMBYs and block development, so insulation from them is a feature, not a bug.
Also are Americans really unhappy with suburbia?
On the whole it might be slightly trending to the latter.
Yes and no.
I'm an avid cyclist, so follow local traffic and infrastructure plans and related political/governmental issues. I live in a fairly dense suburb about 40 minutes outside DC (near Dulles Airport).
From what I can see, there is a subset of people who love owning a yard and having some of their own space for kids or gardening or whatever. And they like having a garage to store all their crap (and occasionally a car).
But, within that group, there is often a sort of despair (probably too strong a word) about the rotting infrastructure that surrounds them. Potholed roads, bridges literally crumbling, too much traffic, etc. This group pushes hard for more road construction, more sprawl, etc despite studies that mostly show more infrastructure doesn't help (demand always catches up). And they don't want to fund it via taxes.
There is another group that lives in the suburbs by necessity. Jobs are out here, costs are manageable, etc. They'd move to a city, if it were easier/affordable. I fall into this group. I actually sold my single-family home a few years ago and bought a smaller townhouse in a denser neighborhood so I could walk more places. Cost was the same and I enjoy the downsized home/yard, ability to walk/cycle for coffee or beer, and walk to work (thought that last bit was dumb luck on an office move).
And the vast majority are somewhere in between. Mostly ambivalent. Maybe some notion of the "American Dream" (big colonial home, white picket fence, etc), but content somewhere in the middle.
tl;dr - Americans like the cost and convenience of the suburbs, but much of that comes from indefinitely deferred infrastructure investment (though a massive chunk of suburban residents don't actually realize just how badly that spending is being deferred).
Like the center of a neighborhood would be a coworking center and a park, it could be surrounded on each side by a subdivision, and the corners could be commercial/services. That way you'd be able to easily walk to your job if you wanted, and head home to let out pets or have lunch, no problem.
It would require pretty much everyone to move to coworking for it to be viable, though, and you might find out you don't like spending so much time with your neighbors.
Jobs are different since you generally don't work at the nearest one.
And of course we're obese, many people couldn't walk to accomplish errands if they wanted to.
I don't think I've ever been to a city where they decide they don't need cars on their major streets. All of our cities presuppose that enough people will need to drive through it, and everything is much more spaced out because of it.
I'm sure Europe is similar.
Like here's one of Harajuku: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VXKHlhJzd0
https://patch.com/massachusetts/natick/see-inside-natick-mal... "This condo building was built in 2008 overlooking the Natick Mall. For just $925,000 you get sweeping views, 3 bedrooms, and access to all the shopping you can do (if you have any cash left over)."
But massachusetts has a weird relationship with Malls. I visited the Wayfair Offices, which sit above a really high end mall (Copley Place) in Boston. When I visited there was a pretty long line in the mall to get up the escalator to get onto the office floor...
https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/4/22213102/epic-games-buys-ma...
That sure gives me the impression that they're tearing down the mall structure and probably parts of the parking lot, and then building new buildings.
But the best part is the proximity to the 9/11 memorial. The bottomless reflecting pools gargantuan in size where the former twin towers once loomed. Nothing quite focuses the mind like a few minutes at that historic work of public sculpture.
>>> Americans do more of their shopping online and gravitate to specialty brands and discount chains
The phenomenal rise of mobile shopping apps like PLT, DePop, Nova, and Shein provides a remarkable case study in instant commerce. One, the merch is so cheap, even teens can afford to wear an item just once. Two, the auxiliary market around creating digital content by fashion influences perpetuates the virtuous cycle. The compensation of course coming in the form of promotions, gift cards, commissions ...
Ultra-fast Fashion Is Eating the World
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/ultra-f...
> The film centres on a group of office colleagues in downtown Calgary, Alberta, who bet a month's salary on who can last the longest without going outside by using the system of covered walkways that connect the buildings. The film takes place over one lunch hour on day 28 of the month-long competition.
The luxury malls in cities that would support more co-working space--though ask WeWork how things are going--are mostly doing better.
I thought the idea was brilliant. The mall had a ton of space in which the company plonked a bunch of cubicles that everyone (including the CEO) used, plus many other amenities. On some days there would be delicious food trucks outside.