Malls adding apartments to offset dwindling numbers of shoppers
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
America has been over-retailed for a long time. Retail per square foot around the world looks like this, in decreasing order
US - 23.5 sq ft of retail per person
Canada - 16.8 sq ft
Australia - 11.2 sq ft
UK - 4.6
Japan - 4.4
etc.
US stores got here by taking on more debt than they could handle, expanding aggressively, and then collapsing under the burden. When the big box stores and department stores went bankrupt, they often took whatever mall they were anchoring down with them. The question has always been not if this would happen, but how quickly.
Source: https://i.insider.com/5bb37815ac0a6314735194e8?width=1300&fo...
Meanwhile, a reason for the mall explosion was because real estate developments, especially commercial malls were heavily subsidized by taxpayers in the 1980s (might have the decade off). Those still exist at a smaller scale, but not enough to justify their levels, even back before 2008.
Because in the UK, there’s something that looks suspiciously like a giant American mall in the center of nearly every town. They just call it the High Street.
If you included all the sidewalks, road surface and parking for every downtown in the UK, you’d probably get a number that looks like the USA in the table above.
The last decade or so though they realised ah, that's not actually a sane plan, and the city council started demanding they provide a plan that can actually work before issuing permission, so e.g. the big mall in the city centre had originally planned a huge extension full of new stores, they realised there is zero demand for that, so they pivoted to it's a nice cinema, plus restaurants, and some residential on the side.
Meanwhile the last mall site went from "We're building a new mall" to "A new mall... and residential space" and then "A residential block, also there's some retail on the ground floor" as they realised that retail space is not going to move. Residential isn't as profitable, but "£5k profit selling a £200k new home" is a better deal than "Ongoing loss on a £1M retail space you can't sell".
The UK government changed planning laws some years back to encourage commercial to residential conversion. If you wanted to build a new residential building with shitty paper walls between homes, third rate insulation and not enough elevators, you'd get told "No". But if you want to convert an office block that is now useless or a shop that hasn't been rented for years, that already exists so the planning restrictions are fewer, maybe you put a little bit of extra insulation in, you run some extra plumbing, but you don't need to meet new home standards, and people get a "new" home that kinda sucks.
The result is that a lot of what you're talking about as "High Street" (the US has "Main Street" filling the same role) was converted to housing. There's a row of shops not far from me, ten years ago the upper floors once used as office space or for storage became housing, this year the shops closed and are boarded up, they'll tear that out and make them into more housing. A pub I used to go to regularly was converted to nasty poorly put together flats in the same period.
Our giant American malls have a ton of roads, sidewalks, parking and enclosed interior space (which is still not within a shop)
I think profit per-capita is a better metric. It's harder obtain that metric of course...
Whichever country (given income equality and ignoring cultural disposition to consumption patterns) a human would need approx' same amount of goods, whether grocery, clothing or other such, and those items would occupy exact same space in all countries.
Not at all. Consider a toy store in Manhattan(or Tokyo) vs. one in Des Moines. The former would be naturally compact due to the expensive real estate while the latter could be far more expansive. By extension country-wide retail square footage can be expected to vary by density (in addition to other cultural factors).
I still remember visiting one of the Fifth Avenue ones as a kid. Because yes, apparently you can build something as big as a department store, but all toys. :)
I have visited it once I think, but that was way before having kids. Feels like it would be a two-day exploration marathon now with our two boys. Hopefully travel will make sense at some point again.
Store layout and the space allotted for each product differs between places, in other words. I'm going to assume things like shelf height does as well. When these things are in the back room, they don't take up space in the same way as the sales floor. Also, it is quite possible that many retailers simply do not have the same sort of selection as they do elsewhere: If you sell fewer things, you don't need so much space.
This would have the side effect of including varying levels of foot traffic (in revenue) and real estate price (in cost), which seem the two biggest differentiators.
This allows them to have smaller back rooms, fewer warehouse deliveries, and to restock only once a day.
Note that compared is key above. Real estate and labor are both more expensive in dense cities, but comparatively real estate is more important to optimize and so you pay the higher labor. Even though labor is cheaper in suburbs you sill optimize that because real estate is so much cheaper.
The three are all more or less related though.
The model worked until it apparently didn't. If Amazon and online shopping hadn't happened, we'd still be going to the malls.
A large number of retailers fell not to online shopping, but instead to lowering quality of service and goods. Sears, Circuit City, JC Penny, and Kmart each have analogous stores and former competitors that remain and are doing well.
Outside of disposably fast fashion like Shein, it's usually more convenient to try clothes on shotgun fashion. In person.
Fragrance, jewelry, luxury goods. All better done in person.
Home Depot is peerless and will never be replaced with an online equivalent.
Touching and trying things on is an experience that just can't be matched online (sans metaverse, if it actually delivers).
Amazon is aggressively expanding physical retail presence. They're focusing on convenience, which is probably the biggest reason people avoid shopping in person.
People love shopping. And if the shopping experience is modern and fun, and interspersed with drinking and dining, they love doing it with friends. It's a social activity too.
If malls morph into "live-work-play" hubs like this old sears factory [1] or this entirely new construction in that mold [2], they'll absolutely flourish.
Genuine question, does this still hold true? I'm asking because I've also read it (relatively recently) in other places and it struck me, because I personally dread shopping, and I didn't think I was the only one with those type of feelings.
And ignoring old recluse people like me (even though this pandemic has transformed many of us into recluse people), I had the impression that spending your free time with friends at the mall had died out as a cool thing do to in the late 2000s-early 2010s (when the Mall Cop movies were premiered, they were more a testament to a period that had just ended).
You're not. There are plenty of people that hate shopping, just as there are plenty of people that hate watching sports. Probably a disproportionate number of both groups are on HN.
It still has huge broad appeal, though, especially among women.
I certainly know a fair number of women (admittedly, the grandparent commenter would probably not call them "young") who regularly shop as a recreation and social activity. Mostly with other women from their family and circle of friends. They often shop for half a day or more, without buying anything. Usually not at "The Mall" - instead they're walking a denser shopping district, or driving around to strip malls, estate sales, antique shows, etc. Probably not grocery shopping together, but they may do the Farmer's Market.
I figure that it's the women's version of a few older guys going out and playing golf for hours. Humans spent quite a time as hunger-gatherers, and still enjoy exercising their old software.
I don't particularly like shopping. I go in, I look for something I want, I see something I like, I buy it, I leave. The satisfaction of having the thing(s) that I want trumps all other concerns, so I optimize a path to there from where I am which means spending as little time in-store. Sometimes I browse, just to see what is available, but not too much.
My girlfriend is... way different. She can spend hours, browsing around, examining the merchandise, evaluating the color or style or fabric or thread count for linens, looking for things to "call out" to her (the joke goes that you go to Target and Target tells you what to buy), chatting with sales staff, and of course ensuring that as many things we need, might need, or want are bought in that one go as possible. The shopping experience is just as important as obtaining the things. Plus, during the pandemic, retail locations were her primary spot for "people bathing" (akin to Japanese "forest bathing"), fulfilling a need she has for contact with random other folks.
This is anecdata, but I'd say yes, there are types who love and need to shop, and I'd be willing to guess that there's a bimodal distribution with strong gender correlation.
Trying things on without the anxieties of mailing returns and what happens if a return gets lost or rejected etc. is amazing.
Waiting in line for 30 minutes+ because a typical American mall store is understaffed and has maybe one constant cashier is not fun.
It depends on how much you like the discovery vs. how much you hate the waiting. Some people who are big, tall, and petite don't get the joy of discovery, for example, due to limited in-store selections.
Amazon happened because having a mall with ~20-50 shops for a few thousand people regionally is so big of a waste of resources compared to having one warehouse that is shared by all the shops close to the folks. Of course this was enabled by ubiquitous online presence. Algorithmically curated catalog. It wouldn't have worked with a big paper catalog shipped to people every week/month.
This. That is part of what makes strolling through European city centers fun as well: the mix of shops, restaurants and cafes with sidewalk/outdoor seating to eat and drink, watch other people. The latter is harder to replace by online stores and experiences.
I think there's a lot more at play than just online shopping for why malls are declining. Off the top of my head here's a few theories, and I'm sure there's many other good reasons.
* Customer service experiences at many stores have been declining as companies cut costs and people don't stay in this kind of career for a long time. I'd be willing to pay more to have a knowledgeable expert give me an in-depth explanation for why TV X is better than TV Y or why Game Z is the best first person shooter on a particular console or why clothes from Brand D are made much better than others, but in most cases it certainly feels like the store staff doesn't know too much about what they're even selling. Maybe this is a bit of nostalgia speaking, but I remember going to Electronics Boutique as a youth and having fun opinionated conversations with the staff: it was clear they enjoyed games and actually knew about them firsthand.
* I have to be delicate about how I phrase this, but let's just say that some malls have to walk a no-win tightrope between feeling welcoming to the community and keeping some like homeless troublemakers at bay.
* Most products in an average person's price range feel the same just about everywhere: it's a lot of mass-produced plastic junk that's designed to fall apart anyway. If many products are manufactured overseas and there's not much difference between what you get in a store versus online, what's the point?
* As far as Covid goes: malls are again in a no-win situation. Some people are very scared of Covid to the point that they don't want to shop in person unless everybody is masked, and even then they're nervous. And some people despise masks with the passion of a million suns and don't want to subject themselves to that. There's just no way to make everybody happy.
That’s part of what makes them expensive but it also cuts into the pleasure part. It’s one thing to enjoy trying clothes on in person but having to sit in a car for an hour (which in the LA area is often each way, not just round-trip) takes the fun out of it. This is especially true now that there are more recreation opportunities at home.
Teenagers are also a big market, but that devolves to who has a non-working parent to drive them, which is less common than it used to be. Transit can help but it’s often an afterthought and many parents offer teenagers less range than they used to.
According to https://www.strongtowns.org/, the "big mall with parking lots" infrastructure is much more expensive than the "small shops in mixed residential" infrastructure. So I would expect it was going to fail anyway, eventually, just more catastrophically, as the costs would be offloaded to local municipality and it would just all blow up all at once (as can be seen around Detroit, for example).
For some people clothes shopping is best experienced in person. For others its nicer to do online.
I like almost everybody else used to go shopping for clothes but now I mostly shop online. I get vastly expanded selections and with easy returns it is for me more convenient.
I do know percentages but just to pull a number out of thin air if just 20% of shoppers moved a majority of their clothing purchases online a lot of retail shops could not afford that drop in sales.
Some malls can change into your example 1, but others in other locations won't have the overhead to do it.
Although men's clothing is also moving in this direction. US men's sizing used to be just straight up inches, but now they've started doing the size inflation thing, so a US size 33 jean is no longer 33 inches waist.
So as much as I hate shopping, for clothes I'll only ever shop in person.
I know if I repeat buy clothes I can get the same size.
Online shopping decreased the demand for retail but not all the way to zero. So it makes sense that some should fold and others should stay.
It created larger and larger stores, cut/lost the company culture and then was acquired by Amazon.
It is now for the most part a shell of what made it an attractive space to shop. Coupled with the online grocery expansion, a sector predominantly made on very small margins and vast competition only exacerbated its fall.
A cycle of markets I suppose. But, not the only path they may have taken. To me this parallels the rise and fall of US malls.
I don't go to a physical store expecting to be able to get any useful information from a sales person.
Given that the only thing that the shop has given me is the ability to view and touch the physical product, I don't feel any guilt in then ordering online if the physical store can't supply or deliver the product immediately or in a way that is beneficial to me.
Or take Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace Hardware, and the now defunct Sears. It's nice to have people on the sales floor that know about the various tools, paints, and home improvement projects. Even in the YouTube era where you can get project ideas and tutorials, having someone physically present to ask questions or bounce ideas off of helps tremendously.
United States: 14,614
Canada: 10,953
Australia: 9,239
UK: 6,495
I still believe anchor stores can take down an entire mall, but I don't believe it's inevitable based solely on the sq ft per Capita numbers.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/741827/retail-sales-per-...
Edit: spacing
The US is a very rich country. Unfortunately there are so many almost mandatory luxuries built in to the American dream that it quickly eats up all that income.
> [...] on average US residents produce the most
Of course that is true.
> It's expected that US spending is the highest.
And of course there is a connection here. But you are not necessarily rich, when you spend more. By definition you are rich when you have more.
Americans often do not get more for spending more (see healthcare and others) so after spending they would actually often be poorer.
Americans also tend to spend even if they actually do not have anything to spend.
Mostly because there are some mandatory luxuries, like having a car, student debt, health insurance, ridiculously expensive housing. Or just "the new iphone".
> Americans often do not get more for spending more (see healthcare and others) so after spending they would actually often be poorer.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
> And of course there is a connection here. But you are not necessarily rich, when you spend more. By definition you are rich when you have more.
I mean, the economic surplus is spent, on what is of course critical, but the vast riches produced year by year is there. As the link argues, lifestyle choices determine where that surplus is allocated to.
That is such a brilliant phrase!
One contributing factor might be local tax policies. American politicians are all about bringing jobs to their local area, and so have been willing to cut very generous tax breaks in return for, say, opening a store that provides jobs. However, American metropolitan areas have very fragmented local areas, so suburb A and suburb B and suburb Z across town are all doing this. This basically encouraged a lot of these commercial developments to throw up cheap buildings that wouldn't last long; once it was showing its age they'd just take the next suburb's tax break and start over. You can only repeat this trick so much, though.
The other part is property taxes and zoning rules either encouraging or outright mandating low density development.
https://eeg.tuwien.ac.at/commonenergy/gla-per-capita-shoppin...
That being said, the US is by far the country with the most retail per capita.
High up residentials,
Large malls and offices mid level,
MTR (subway/metro) underground.
No need to drive, noise isn’t a problem built w/the right technology/materials, super convenient.
Here’s one of the more expensive examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Square_(Hong_Kong)
I just think in America it is too car centric and not dense enough to line the incentives up for it to happen here. Land is cheap enough that malls will just build outwards and create giant moats of parking lots around them to kill walkability, and public transit ridership is too low because everyone is driving cars so service can never reach the standards in Asia. Its a shame because feels so much worse than what has been achieved in Hong Kong.
It's mostly North America (both US and Canada at least; no idea about Mexico) that seems to have outlawed this style of building, and enforced extremely car-dependent suburbs, big box stores in a wasteland of parking lots, and dangerous stroads to connect them. I've heard that the main thing that's driving American cities to bankruptcy is the cost of maintaining inefficient suburban infrastructure.
There isn't a single city in the entire history of the US that has gone bankrupt because its suburban-style infrastructure was too expensive. What's driving cities to bankruptcy is pension costs; infrastructure is a tiny fraction of most cities budgets and is dwarfed by schools, police, and other services.
I've also heard from too many sources that a lot of US infrastructure is crumbling. Of course it's possible that all those people are wrong and you are right. I wouldn't know.
Infrastructure spread so thin have an enormous overhead. (Roads need to be paved, pipes leak, even cabling is a problem, see the again electric grid, also how most US addresses are only served by one ISP, heating/cooling each house separately).
On "main streets" in many towns, there have been apartments above stores since the beginning of the towns, and still are in many cases. Malls came about as a result of sprawling suburbs.
I suspect those apartment renters would be easier to attract if there was a more diverse range of goods on offer as in other countries, including full-size grocery stores. That would create a more complete immediate neighborhood and remove the need to drive out regularly for essentials.
Where you do see this, it’s in areas with more foot/bike/transit biking and the stores tend to be upscale since they can afford the higher real estate costs.
There are four ways of providing suburban style shopping that I can think of:
* malls
* strip malls
* big-box stores
* big-box stores which oppose a strip mall
I think malls main advantage over the other archtypes is that it makes it easiest to evaluate multiple stores before committing to your choice. That is handy for clothes and gifts.
For anything else, that isn't handy. As a shopper, why then go to a mall drive to a mall, pay for parking, and then spend a few minutes navigating to get to your desired store when you could instead go to the same store in a strip mall, park for free, and enter the store in less than a minute after leaving your car?
Malls in Australia often have grocery stores and pharmacies to generate foot traffic. The mall/strip-mall distinction is purely artificial. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to distinguish CVS and Walgreens in the same mall, the same way you can make a distinction between H&M and Zara.
It was at one point the largest mall in the US. And, now is one of the few places supporting a diverse community of young people from around the city. And, also, a place that has become a focus because of the car break-ins that are plaguing the city, depending on what news sources you read.
The owners were going to sell it and people were excited about the opportunity to reconsider an extremely large space in a major urban area. Then, the owners decided to turn it into apartments and condos.
This will save the ice skating rink, and that's good. But, in the COVID era when public spaces are so hard to find, I wonder how that will impact people who don't own their own large houses, and I'm somewhat sad malls are moving in this direction, even though I hate going to them myself.
But cities need bars, restaurants, nightclubs, theatres, cinemas and so on, and Friday night is prime time for them (when there's not a pandemic)
If malls-with-added-housing are to become the walkable urban neighbourhoods of the future, you'd expect them to move in that direction.
And then add apartments near all that to create a desirable and appealing premium rental environment.
All of this was while the mall was plenty busy. It’s just the direction they were moving to adapt in a changing world. Some mall management is a lot more forward thinking that others and that had to be kept in mind. Poorly managed malls fail quickly.
Americans are not against it, philosophically. It is a simple consequence of economics of scale allowing big stores such as Costco and Target and Home Depot and Kroger to be able to offer better pricing and selection.
If you allow for everyone to own a large personal vehicle, via parking minimums and sufficient road capacity, then everyone has large personal vehicles because they have very high utility. And once you have the vehicle, the marginal cost to use it is near zero, so there is a lot of incentive to drive to a big box store and save money rather than shop at a smaller store downstairs.
Those stores arose because smaller more convenient commercial space is banned. And once going to the store means a drive, hunting for a parking spot, and walking, you start to minimize your trips to the store, and buy a lot more at once to minimize the basic hassle of doing it by car.
And once each trip becomes more infrequent and larger scale, then the bigger stores start to make sense, because you are never going to be walking by their store front and quickly grab something, they try to get every last dollar from you on your trip by providing a huge array of products, requiring more space.
These sorts of code and zoning are legal inventions within the past century, and they tend to be seemingly minor technical changes, but they have absolutely huge negative repercussions. I'm not advocating for elimination of zoning and codes, but rather of quick change of them to promote more walkable neighborhoods rather than prohibition of them. Elimination of all planning departments would probably be better than having them, but the best outcomes would be from radical reform of planning to be more centered on the needs of all parts of communities, rather than the most conservative of neighbors.
This in turn means only large developers can afford to redevelop. And it’s only worth their time if they can do a massive project. So instead of human scale stuff, we get massive multi-block size buildings.
Like this block in Reston VA[1]. The lots surrounding it are all a slated for similar buildings - the existing mid-rise are mostly mid-80s through mid-90s builds.
The new building is bad because it’s unnavigable. As you approach, it’s just a giant blob. There’s a CVS pharmacy in there, but try to find it - it’s not easy. Parking is a mess. And heaven help if you need to walk to the building. Oh, no bike racks either, aside from a subscription bike room for subway users (nothing on the main retail levels).
1- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Re...
And I'm not against redevelopment. I'm glad my area is turning these massive open parking lots into mixed-use buildings. I just wish they were building them in a more organic urban style. I live within walking distance of several of these projects, but rarely walk to them because I have to cross too many 6-8 lane intersections and massive swaths of asphalt parking lot (with distracted office workers hurrying to-fro).
At least for modern buildings.
The details of the multifamily structure don't seem to matter very much. If it's got shared walls and no yard, it's antithetical to the American Dream. Neighbors will perceive it as "for" either a higher or lower class, never for them.
I may be drastically underestimating the cost of such a project. But the real estate for centrally located malls is likely to continue increasing in value.
What’s _really weird_ to me is new developments that are designed to look like walkable town centers, but are actually open-air shopping malls in the exurbs of cities with hollowed-out centers that were thriving and walkable a single generation ago.
These new, faux town centers come with two things the real ones didn’t: massive parking garages, and condos on the third floor with non-functional Juliet balconies that overlook the chain stores.
Can someone explain the different type of malls here please?
[0] https://www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/mecenatpol...
What you propose is, and was, illegal to build. The very good idea of allowing residential next to commercial space was anathema while the suburbs were being built, as was allowing residential buildings that allowed any destinations that one could walk to.
We have squandered a massive amount of our land by laying out residential property on winding roads with cul-de-sacs, intentionally blocking the possibility of walkable density ever developing.
This century, we are starting to realize that forcing car use for every single trip is really bad for our health and happiness.
Unfortunately this seems to be a strict conversion from store -> apartment which kinda disallows the upstair/downstair dynamic, and also prevents the 'single rent for multiple uses' deal which kinda enables the mixed zoning spirit.
I wonder what levels of entrepreneurship could be enabled by opening up zoning in the west? I felt like a shopping centre conversion would be perfect as it is a locus of activity, density and business planning. I wonder if in the developing world mixed-use zoned homes/business are more expensive than typical residential zones?
People are not exactly asked to live in a parking lot but no matter how much you invest on specific grounds, you cannot redevelop the entire environs of the "mall area" which are typically in commercial zones not exactly designed for people to live in.
Hence it is plausible that these redevelopments will end up being undesirable, low cost housing that will be occupied by those have to be there rather than want to be there (unable to afford something more "residential").
Essentially a downgrade option for the increasingly tenuous "middle class"
Fashions change, the competitive landscape changes, etc. Also, the investment/debt cycle changes things.
Malls should probably be designed with this in mind. EOL & redevelopment needs to be assumed from the start. For more permanent places to put retail, you probably need something different to a mall. Main streets, squares and/or other template with more municipal planning involved.
Add to that a new mall, better, bigger and cheaper a similar distance away and the old one starts to decline
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrightSunGaming/videos <- a youtube channel recording abandoned buildings, among them many abandoned malls, some torn down and partly rebuilt as other stuff, some still standing, in their full glory (just with anything worth stolen, from copper cables on.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/04/john-lewis-...
In a particular one, a journalist is compelled to investigate, write, and publish a story regarding some implications of this transport booth technology in order to help "clear his name" of some possible legal charges. In one scene, the guy is walking down a few streets crowded with new "temp" housing and shops and micro-industry and foot traffic where there once would have been nothing but vehicle traffic and empty parking spots and delivery-only zones and such. "These folks have caught on quicker than the rest of us", the guy considers.
IRL with dead malls laying around for ~30 years, every time I've passed by I've had similar marbles rolling around in my head.
This is common in asia and I would love a grocery store at the base.
The question that should come to mind might be "what happens to retail workers employed in malls?" Will they all be exerting themselves optimally in Amazon warehouses? Will they vanish from the workforce?
The market is speaking loudly. Society does not seem to have an answer.
My first reaction on reading the title was: "who would want to buy an appartment in a mall". Ofcourse when you read it you understand that NO, Malls are not adding appartments in their space, Malls are being demolished and appartments are being constructed on their space.
It's just a normal Redevelopment project.
from the article
"marking the start of construction of a new 309-unit apartment complex on a parking lot at Santa Ana’s MainPlace Mall"
making the title correct, they're adding apartments to a Mall
edit: from the other response to this post that has pictures. It looks like the Mall has been modified into an appartment block
You mean, like, a normal city?
I know there is a small mall in Providence RI that does this (more like a strip mall if I remember correctly).
I also believe there are condos above one of the malls here in Boston but I am not entirely sure if they have their own entrance or if they have direct access to the mall.
The residents were so upset they initiated a recall of council members and revoked the apartment portion of the deal (after the company had already built the mall).
It's not just any small mall -- it's literally the first/oldest indoor shopping mall in the US! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Arcade
Sadly it didn't seem very lively the time I visited last year. Nice architecture and a few cool stores though!
Not quite the same as stepping out of your apartment into a mall, but close.
I wasn't super thrilled with the high-rise itself (tenants were very noisy), but I quite like that aspect of it.
It's an odd thing in the suburbs, someone has to really value the mall, because the units can be quite expensive compared to single family units in town, and there's certainly more financial risk in owning a unit attached to the mall if the mall starts to fail.
If it wasn't expensive and crappy, I'd totally do it. We're at the mall twice a month anyway, the mall has the best local stores, there's fun extras for the kids (carousel, arcade, a gym) and adults (bookstore, coffee shops, etc), it's heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer so you don't have to carry coat+hat+mittens+boots everywhere, there's a decent food court with some variety and it's cheap, it's the only place nearby with a reliable bus stop (and it's also mostly enclosed and protected from weather), it's got great ADA-appropriate accessibility, and it's got lots of parking and convenient freeway access, so visitors can stop by easily with no fuss.
Of course, these apartments will be like $2500+/month and be tiny. But like, hypothetically if they built family-appropriate condo-style housing at family-appropriate prices on a mall, I'd totally do it.
I lived in an apartment on top of a mall in Singapore.
It’s awesome.
Most Americans here - especially those who live on the west coast - are going to see "apartment" and "mall" and assume that means having to negotiate thousands of incoming and outgoing cars every time you want to leave the building.
[0] In practice, "pedestrian-friendly" also means "car-hostile".
I say all this as if I'm playing simcity or something. I bet its easier/less expensive to just demolish all the structures than try to deal with something built to commercial code/permits and convert it to residential. For instance the amount of plumbing (sewage + water) required for a mall is hardly as much as needed for a 100-200 unit residential development.
https://www.luxuryboston.com/Nouvelle-Natick
Also around New England those new “outdoor malls” have housing and business space attached. Basically a real estate company owned neighborhood.
> who would want to buy an appartment [sic] in a mall
Where I live, about five months out of the year are so cold it's miserable to get motivated to go out. It's too cold and snow makes getting places painful. Having a space, like a traditional "flat" which is wide open and would allow me to construct a living space (which would usually mean buying a place rather than renting it) would be awesome, especially in such a "crappy environment" that an old 80s/90s-era mall has to offer. I'd love the retro aesthetic and I could make some interesting use of it.
I can't see this sort of approach actually happening, though. If it could, and the price was reasonable, I'd buy in.
[1] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
(Of course if you like mixed use neighborhoods and don’t care for the overproduced generic pseudo-fanciness of that particular development, you can always just move to New York or something)
It seems pretty cool, although many condos are quite far from parking.
you can at least be certain that your confusion started this large thread in this forum, which almost guarantees the article got more views from it.