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".

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