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Comment by cowl | Hacker News Reader

What's up with these titles? Does noone know how to Convey an idea anymore?

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.

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It's the Malls carpark(s) that are being developed

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

If I put a porter potty in your driveway, I'm not adding a bathroom to your house and your house has not been modified, only your parking situation. The current title suggests the apartments are attached or inside.

I read the title and had a vision of a "community" built in a mail - where you would walk out of your apartment and be able to visit your local coffee bar, diner, park, grocery store, etc all within a mall. That sounded fabulous and something I would be interested in. The article left me disappointed, not much happening along those lines.

If that sounds fabulous, you would like watching Waydowntown, about a group of young professionals who make a wager on who can live inside the connected mall+office+apartment complex without going outside the longest.

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

Thanks for this. I saw this years ago on late night cable and never could remember the name of the movie.

That does sounds great. Though I'd imagine trying to retro fit plumbing for each apartment would be a nightmare

see, e.g., Roppongi Hills. I lived there for a year when I was based in Tokyo. It is very much as you describe; there are several residential buildings within a mixed-use complex that includes a large office tower, a bunch of retail, restaurants, a small supermarket, a hotel, a movie theater etc.

https://www.roppongihills.com/en/

I was just walking through a deadish mall in my city a couple days ago thinking how awesome if they had done that instead of the offices they put on the upper floors.

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.

Might be some zoning restrictions on being able to put residential in. But adding offices is easy, as it's still commercial. Which isn't to say that they couldn't try to get it rezoned, but it's more difficult.

Zoning in the United States is out of control in most suburban-and -up places. Too restrictive. It drives a lot of our ills (megacommuting, unaffordable housing, sprawl, etc) and needs to be liberalized. Like sure, I get it, don't put a tire burning yard in the middle of a playground. But surely there's a way to avoid such outcomes without stifling all land use innovation and freedom across the board.

In our town, a local abandoned mall was torn down and renovated into a strip mall situation. As part of the deal negotiated with the city, the parking lot in back was to be used for apartments. Probably to help with revenue and to support the shops. This probably was an exception to zoning. No other apartments exist anywhere near there.

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).

> I know there is a small mall in Providence RI that does this

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!

I believe that is how malls were originally envisioned. In Naples I believe there is a neighbourhood like that. In Toronto, at the Atrium on Bay, I believe there are apartments.

That’s nearly the model of the Americana development in the LA area. An outdoor mall modeled to look like a dense, walkable city (complete with trolley car!) with apartments on top. No grocery store though, and priced at 4K+/month

> where you would walk out of your apartment and be able to visit your local coffee bar, diner, park, grocery store, etc

You mean, like, a normal city?

Cities are a lot less accessible than malls, and typically maintained more poorly.

This doesn’t have to be true. Source: europe.

American cities certainly are.

I actually lived in something sort of like that for about 8 months. I lived in a high-rise apartment building that was attached to a 2-level mall of mostly Asian shops. There was a fob-protected door between the mall and the lobby of the high-rise. It was great when you needed to quickly run out to get some ingredient (from the Chinese grocery store) or hankered for a pork bun or custard cup (from the Chinese bakery) or wanted to grab lunch at a food court (of mostly, but not entirely, Asian food vendors).

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.

We've got some malls around where I live (suburban) that did actually build multi-story apartments/condo towers into the design of the mall where the residents can walk right into the mall.

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.

> who would want to buy an appartment in a mall

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.

> "who would want to buy an appartment in a mall"

I lived in an apartment on top of a mall in Singapore.

It’s awesome.

I know what you mean, but I’m pretty confident OP is talking about the wild strip mall variant that plagues the American countryside.

What if it was purposefully built that way like Emeryville's Bay Street location?

Is it that or the indoor mall with massive parking around it? I know of one of that type near me that is doing the conversion (it isn't mentioned in the article, but probably one of the almost 200 in the US doing the same)

Yeah, you absolutely can mix commercial and residential - if you're smart about how you design your building, and what commercial tenets you allow in. And, of course, you have a pedestrian-friendly[0] city so that not everything is a massive fight in traffic.

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".

The idea in the title actually makes sense if they can rezone it for mixed use. Take down the roof over the common internal areas of a mall and make that area more like a park then redevelop some defunct storefronts into condos or apartments. Get an empty large department store converted to a grocery store.

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.

Living in a colder climate state, I’m a bit surprised there aren’t any malls with apartments. To me it’s just an extension of a mixed-use building, but with more open interior space (at least on the shopping levels).

Malls wanted people with cars.

Ya'll just need to connect all the buildings together with enclosed walkways on the 2nd floor like they do in Minneapolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System

Taking the roof off is not possible, the structure is not designed for the required amount of drainage or freeze-thaw cycles.

Some malls have housing attached. Eg: Nouvelle is attached to The “Natick Collection Mall which houses some of New England's finest retailers including Neiman Marcus. Greater Boston Area's best value for location, features, and quality. You are just steps away from one of New Englands nicest Shopping Malls.”

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_Square

That's a relatively recent development. For a long time, Assembly Sq and Natick Mall were just malls.

https://betweentworocks.com/welcome-new-havens-strangest-apa...

I agree with you on the title, but when reading what was actually happening, I was disappointed.

   > who would want to buy an appartment [sic] in a mall

I wouldn't want to rent an apartment from a mall, but I'd buy one if it allowed me to build out my space any way I wanted, if the mall were indoors, and if there were at least a small amount of services available from within the mall that I would use (such as a good food court/restaurants).

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.

After the Sears at my local mall died they are now replacing it with an apartment complex. You'll be able to go from your apt into the mall without setting foot outside. It looks like the former storefront will just be another entrance. Nestled among the other shops.

Same thing here--our neighborhood mall is being completely rebuilt with office and residential space, the old Sears is completely ripped out, but a good chunk of the other part of the mall as well. It's an urban mall, so there's no attached parking lot (an underground garage).

[1] is the Dubai Marina Mall. The low building is the mall itself, the big square is an apartment and hotel complex, all built as part of the same development.

[1] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

An apartment in a mall could be quite nice. Of course, the details matter, and to make them nice living spaces might require some reconfiguration. You don't ask why someone would want an apartment in New York neighborhood with shops, bars, and restaurants. But malls are a lot like those, or could be. Remove a lot of the parking lots with apartments, replace the Sears with a grocery store...

Santana Row (in the heart of Silicon Valley) supplies a useful counterexample, an outdoor mall with apartments built above, but for most malls that’s redevelopment either way.

(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)

The river area in Branson, MO is similar. 5 or 6 stories of condos above an outdoor mall with lots of stores and restaurants.

It seems pretty cool, although many condos are quite far from parking.

Redevelopments aren't uncommon though. I remember warehouses in San Francisco being converted into lofts while living there.

While it wouldn't be what springs to mind when you think of a mall, this video shows an interesting repurposing of a mall to become residential space: https://youtu.be/HmL2l-bcuUQ

I'm absolutely certain that it's titled the way that it is precisely so that you react with "What? Unbelievable! I've got to see this!" And click on the article.

comprehension isn't what they are optimizing for. titles are optimized to make you click them. perhaps if you are as confused as you claim you were, it makes you more likely to open it to figure out what it is about.

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.

same! my first thought upon reading the headline: "I mean if food halls are moving into apartment buildings in nyc, it makes sense for it to work the other way around too!"

Yes, title click bait.

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