One aspect of shopping malls I feel is vastly underappreciated is how they fulfilled the needs of those of us on the spectrum or who are otherwise antisocial. Shopping malls let us immerse ourselves in socializing people without having any responsibility to engage directly with individuals. I found it quite blissful to be in a crowded space and feel like a social participant without expending any "social battery" to do so. These days I still visit my local mall around Christmas time for the feeling. I find it sad today's teenagers don't get the same experience.
The lesson I'm taking away from this is if the U.S. wanted to support its increasing senior population and improve the loneliness epidemic [1] _and_ obesity epidemic, buying up malls and retrofitting them into public community spaces would be a huge step in the right direction.
On one hand, it's practical and seems to immediately offer a minor amount of relief for a very small number of people. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
On the other hand, the urban design that caused the social fabric of the country to fall apart will remain, causing the problem to continue unabated. You need to fix this before the people get old to have any meaningful wider impact on the population.
Seems like some form of surface-level McCivics vs. actually building up lasting civic institutions that can endure and strengthen the community throughout all life phases.
Building up lasting institutions is only going to happen from the ground up, starting at the local level. I tend to doubt it can successfully be imposed from the top down - especially not by the government.
A fantastic group in this space is strongtowns (.org). The essays on their site have really opened my eyes to the particularities of American infrastructure which make life in those places ... suboptimal. I'm particularly fond of the "stroads" essay https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad, and share the term with people IRL, who also seen tickled by it.
I think the anti-mall narrative is generally misplaced.
Suburban malls were a mitigation of sprawl but are somehow viewed more as a direct symptom. Strip malls continue to thrive, and the form where there are residences atop the commercial storefronts does little to improve the need to flit from parking lot to parking lot like consumerist pollinators. In Austin, there’s a huge amount of development at the mixed-use outdoor Domain, some calling it a second downtown. Yet, the thing is peppered with crowded roads. And, it does little to escape triple digit temperatures. It isn’t much of an improvement.
Enclosed urban shopping areas have been around for a long time, from covered arcades and indoor markets to underground malls in cities.
The PATH system in Toronto and RESO in Montreal create decentralized malls that are also ways to navigate a city on foot. Their creation was likely due to harsh winters more than concern about pedestrian traffic mixing with vehicles. They are, admittedly, kind of ugly and sometimes claustrophobic, but they are functional. I know there are underground malls in Manitoba cities for similar reason, but have never been.
I love transit oriented developments like the little villages along the MAX light rail in Portland, but I don’t think there’s any where near enough momentum to spark a fully transit based pattern of development like there has been in Japan. (Some possible reasons/differences are covered in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235214652...)
Not from the US, but: NYC has crowded roads crossing right through downtown. So does Paris and many other famously "walkable" european cities.
I think while traffic is certainly relevant and it's always an improvement if it can be reduced, it's not what blocks an area from becoming walkable. It's more how much space the area affords for pedestrians next to the traffic: Can you get from A to B without detours and without danger? Can you cross the busy roads? Are there enough spaces to get away from the traffic?
I agree, it is doing much better, it has hotels, large office spaces and housing. What it’s really missing is a larger car free area. The roads aren’t well designed for the volume of traffic they carry: busy crosswalks at four way stops. The drivers are also tense and frustrated and on the edge of road rage when it’s really busy.
Malls are generally dependent on anchor stores drawing traffic. And a lot of the historic anchor stores--in many cases department stores--have gone out of business or downsized. One pretty dead mall near me had a Penney's, a Sears, and a Macy's.
The real lesson of mall walking is that it came about because in many places there's literally nowhere else you can walk. Non-Americans may be vaguely aware that America has a sickness of car dependency but may be unaware of the extent of it.
I present to you the 26 lane Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas [1].
Non-Americans may not realize just how large these cities are geographically. I believe one end of the Houston metro area to the other is almost as far as London to Birmingham.
Many Americans live in the suburbs. This is complete car dependence. Children in particular often can't go anywhere without being driven.
It's actually depressing what a soulless barren dystopia most of the US actually is.
Growing up in northern New England, a lot of mall walkers chose it not because we have too many freeways or lack bike paths, hiking areas, or nature trails, but because walking outdoors can be unpleasant in the dark, frigid, snowy, and often-slippery depths of winter. An icy path may not be a huge deal for someone my age, but the risks are greater for an older person falling from a standing height (e.g.: one in three adults age 50+ dies within 12 months of getting a hip fracture).
I imagine people in very hot climates appreciate being able to exercise in air conditioning, and you can also schedule it with others (say, every Tuesday and Thursday at 10am) regardless of inclement weather. But I would guess a lot of it has been supplanted by going to the gym (there are a lot more gyms, at least around here, than there were a couple decades ago).
I agree about Texas. When I stayed a night in Amarillo I was astounded not only by the fact that everyone there drives a giant tank, but that there weren't any sidewalks, even though my hotel was within walkable distance of various stores, etc.
>Growing up in northern New England, a lot of mall walkers chose it not because we have too many freeways or lack bike paths or nature trails, but because walking outdoors can be unpleasant in the dark, frigid, and often-slippery depths of winter. An icy path may not be a huge deal for someone my age, but the risks are greater for an older person falling from a standing height (e.g.: one in three adults age 50+ dies within 12 months of getting a hip fracture).
This sounds to me like a matter of infrastructure - street lights and plowing + puttin gravel on walking infrastructure.
>I imagine people in very hot climates appreciate being able to exercise in air conditioning, and you can also schedule it with others (say, every Tuesday and Thursday at 10am) regardless of inclement weather. But I would guess a lot of it has been supplanted by going to the gym (there are a lot more gyms around here than there used to be).
And this also sounds to me kind of like a matter of infrastructure - planting trees to provide shaded paths and cooler microclimates could remedy this issue. This one is less solvable though on account of the ongoing climate catastrophe, but it can at the very least be improved.
Those infrastructure improvements sound great, don't get me wrong, but walking in a snowstorm in windy 10-degree-Fahrenheit weather would still be considered unpleasant by a lot people even with good plowing and lighting. (I hike and run all through winter, but some people just want a comfortable place to walk.) Maybe climate catastrophe will "help" "solve" that issue, but in the meantime I think a lot of folks around here will continue to walk in malls and gyms when it's cold out.
>Those infrastructure improvements sound great, don't get me wrong, but walking in a snowstorm in windy 10-degree-Fahrenheit weather would still be considered unpleasant by a lot people even with good plowing and lighting. (I personally hike all through winter, but some people just want a comfortable place to walk.) Maybe climate catastrophe will "help" "solve" that issue, but in the meantime I think a lot of folks around here will continue to walk in malls and gyms.
The key to this is that there's no 10F snowstorm every day. It's perfectly feasible to optimize for the case where it's a simple and pleasant snowy day.
I don't think the climate catastrophe is likely to remedy the problem of unpleasant weather up north, unfortunately. It's liable to just get more extreme.
In Texas, walking outdoors can the unpleasant or outright dangerous in summer or frankly winter (in Amarillo certainly). We drive giant tanks because distances are vast here between towns and cities - also because gas tax is low.
Not all suburbs are complete car dependence. Plenty of kids biked in their suburbs in the '80s and '90s. In the '90s I would alternate between biking and walking to and from a school that was 2.5 miles away. And within that 2.5 miles there was plenty of things for me to do.
Since then, I've lived in about 7 different US suburbs. All had things to do within about 1.5 miles of where I lived, and I wasn't exactly aiming for mobility.
This last year, I walked my kid to elementary school every day. It's a 10 minute walk. My 3 neighbors, whose kids go to the same school, drive them.
I lived in a subway like you describe. The slightly newer suburbs didn't have sidewalks, and had non-leveled, unmowed (easy to twist your ankle in your 20's) green space moats between each housing subdivision and shopping strip mall.
The poor folks had to cross a narrow, 4 lane car bridge to get to work. There was a bike fatality on that bridge every six months or so.
This was in a city with above average transit and bike trails for the US, but most housing was still gratuitously car dependent.
Maybe because you're not out right before or after school?
I know that at least where I live in Ontario, if you live within 3 km (elementary) or 5 km (secondary) of the school you are not entitled to bus pick-up. Maybe some parents drive their kids, but most kids walk, and a few bike. Also, if you live farther away than that, the bus stop could be as far away as 0.5 km where the bus picks up a lot of kids at one time (unless you live on a busy highway, in which case it will be at your driveway).
Related: late last night I sent an email to my city councilor to see about getting bike lanes added to some of the roads in the neighbourhood of two schools. One of my arguments was that it would make it more viable for kids to bike to school. I've had this thought years ago, but only now did I decide to actually see if I could get it done. To my surprise, the councilor and the mayor responded early this (Saturday) morning, both in agreement and said they would add it to the agenda for discussion and invited me to send further comments to their Master Transportation Plan that will soon be meeting (I believe this is something they do every 10 years). We'll see if it actually gets done, but I'm hopeful.
That's not an actual picture of the road in the article. I'm also not sure one should count the feeder or access road as a part of the freeway. If you can't go freeway speeds it's probably not a freeway.
While that picture doesn't belong with the article (it's not the Katy freeway mentioned, if indeed it's a genuine photo at all and not a photoshop job), the real thing in Texas seems dystopian enough in its own right: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7847495,-95.5325233,3a,75y,2...
It is absurd to say there is no place to walk in the suburbs. People just walk on the suburban streets. Most suburban streets are obviously not the highway. I just got back from a walk in the suburbs and passed 5 other people out for their morning walk. I don't think I even passed a car.
My impression of mall walking is that it was largely used by people when the weather was bad.
One thing missing in a lot of suburban places is the ability to walk to do chores.
Out of curiosity, what destinations do you have within 15 minutes of walking? Can you buy milk? Go to the bank? Have access to a coffee place? Etc.
It’s nice to have walking paths, but so many new developments in the US seem to actively make walking a poor option (beyond exercise). The roads in many of these areas even if there is a store nearby are upwards of four or five lanes across, and then the stores are setback behind huge parking lots without much protected walking from the street to the store.
> One thing missing in a lot of suburban places is the ability to walk to do chores. ... what destinations do you have within 15 minutes of walking? Can you buy milk? Go to the bank? Have access to a coffee place? Etc.
This represents in part a terminology clash, I think, and I think it impacts the discussion a lot. "Suburb" means different things in different parts of the country. I live on the edge of what you'd call "suburbs" around Boston, and yes to all of these; my morning routine is to walk about 7-8 minutes down to the nearest convenience store for a morning beverage and maybe a bagel. It's next to my bank, across the street is a coffee shop and a couple of nice bars. Maybe five minutes past that is a liquor store, an Indian food market, and my auto mechanic.
I can be in downtown Boston, by train, in 30 minutes, but unless I throw on a backpack and walk 2.5 miles round-trip I'm not going to the hardware store or to a full-size grocery store. Which I do, when I have the time, but here's where the overlap with more conventional "suburbs" happens: when I'm walking somewhere, nobody else is. It's totally doable and totally reasonable, even in bad weather, but the locals don't have that mindset, so they don't do it.
Much of what folks like Strongtowns talk about is actually represented pretty well in my New England town, but we're the "burbs" because we're outside the city proper. On the other hand, I've been to places like Des Moines, IA, and the suburbs are just car parks as far as the eye can see.
> One thing missing in a lot of suburban places is the ability to walk to do chores.
Within 15 minutes walk of my very suburban house there are two supermarkets, two pharmacies, many restaurants (some fast food but also real restaurants), multiple coffee shops, movie theaters, library & post office, hardware stores, other misc stores, multiple banks & credit unions and other things I'm forgetting to list.
One question I've asked in these threads in the past is where are these suburbs where you can't get to anything except by driving half an hour? I'd be curious for specific place names that I can look up in maps to get a sense of what they're like. Because having mostly lived in suburbs, I've never experienced that. There's always walkable destinations in all suburban areas I've seen. Could someone post a few addresses of these unwalkable suburbs?
I've also lived in a rural area, and yes there a car was essentially a must to go anywhere. I could and did sometimes walk (was young and bored) but it was more than an hour walk to anywhere. But that was definitely rural, we had many acres of forest, certainly not a suburb.
Perhaps it's a terminology issue. No one in the visible map frames of the Charlotte links would consider themselves to live in a 'rural' area. Sure, their neighborhood might be pleasant and quiet, and there's abundant tree cover, but the mapped path is alongside houses the entire time. The linear density is high. In a rural area, there exist lots with generous road frontage that interrupt the linear sea of homes.
Yes, there is certainly terminology ambiguity on what "suburb" is.
To me the huge lots, big setbacks of houses away from street and major forest cover, isn't a suburb. The new link you posted seem more like farmland, not rural housing.
To me a suburb is where houses or townhouses (but no highrises) are packed next to each other in small lots.
But yes, it would be useful to have more specific definitions of housing densities instead of dumping everything that's not farmland or Manhattan into "suburb".
This is a bizarre take. Most suburbs I’ve seen is actually amazing for walking in.
Sure if there is no sidewalk it sucks, but if you walk where people live usually there is a nice walking path, minimal traffic, lots of families around. I’ve lived in dense urban centers and walking can suck with the crowded sidewalks, always having to cross streets with cars, the noise.
People aren’t walking in malls because of car culture. Usually they walk in malls because it’s too damn hot/cold outside.
I think the point about suburbs promoting car dependence over walking is more about walking somewhere
Sure, it can be nice to go for a walk around the neighborhood, but mostly only in a loop, there is no destination. One of the reasons I moved where I live is due to the walkability. I'm technically in the suburbs of a medium sized city, but happen to live close enough to a small retail center that I can walk to shop for groceries, get a hair cut, go to a pharmacy and many other things.
It's really nice to be prompted to go for a nice walk instead of hop in a car when I need to run an errand.
This is true in certain American suburbs, but definitely not all. Older and less affluent suburbs, in particular, often have abysmal walking infrastructure.
They recently (past ~5 years) installed new ADA-compliant pedestrian crossings from which you can walk...nowhere. But you can circle the 4 corners of the intersection all day!
(Incidentally, the restaurant on the SW corner of the intersection is amazing!)
Yeah, I'm not sure the right terminology for the type of urban landscape it is.
There's uninterrupted development for a 30 mile stretch between McAllen and Harlingen, with densities ranging from suburban to exurban. So not quite typical American suburbia, but similar sprawl and car uber-dependence.
The suburbs my family lived in were quite hostile towards pedestrians, as the lack of sidewalks had two primary outcomes:
1. People just rarely walked
2. As a result of 1, drivers became unaccustomed to pedestrians and adjusted to a driving style that assumed no pedestrians
I absolutely don't really fault the drivers too much, as it's reasonable -- the road is for cars and in most situations with roads it's not expected to have pedestrians except at crosswalks.
But it's not universal that suburbs are pedestrian friendly. Especially growing up in the midwest, even suburbs with sidewalks were not very pedestrian friendly. Despite laws requiring maintenance and upkeep of the sidewalks (including snow shoveling during winter), it's not feasible for able-bodied persons to walk across many suburbs because of how awful the upkeep of the public sidewalks are, neverminding people persons with disabilities or injuries.
The heat is inconsequential -- where I live now, since about May it's been 34º or higher real temperature (feel is close to 40º or higher), and yet everyone is accustomed to it and still out and walking. It's easily changeable, but the main difference is the city has many walkable elements, many small parks with shade, public fountains to cool off, and so on. Getting to a shop to get a cheap bottle of water (or beer, why not?) is a matter of walking 50 meters in any direction; the last US city I lived in, even though it was better than _many_ US cities, it was still almost 2 Km to get to the nearest store that had anything small to drink/refresh yourself (and you had to cross an 8 lane road that fed into I5, so it was pretty busy).
My takeaway as a US native is that US cities really did get ruined by the influence of car culture, and the cities are exceptionally hostile towards pedestrians. Even the quaint suburb-style cities ( < 500k population) which advertise their closeness and small town feel are ostensively pedestrian hostile just due to poor planning which prevents you from getting around by foot or by reliable, cheap, and safe public transportation.
There might be two separate assertions under discussion. One is that it is typically difficult in a suburb to get to a landmark destination (e.g. to the grocery store, to the gym, to a coffee shop, and to work) just by walking, without a car.
This is true. At the same time, suburbs with low rates of crime are typically nicer to walk around without a destination in mind. It’s typically easier to go outside for a jog or run in a suburb than in downtown, as there are fewer cars on the road and other pedestrians on the sidewalk.
Yeah, people tend to take the worst suburb setup and compare it to the best city setup. The reality is, there's a lot in between.
I live on the coast in a suburb about a 1/2 hour outside the downtown area. The long edge of my suburb is banked by a river with neighborhood supported docks, and large green spaces along the river. There's a grocery store at the entrance to the neighborhood (along with cleaners, bars, etc...) that people walk and ride bikes to. There are other large green spaces where kids play sports plus there's tennis and basketball courts, golfing, pools, etc...
I'm not saying where I live is perfect, but as I started with, people like to take the worst mid-west suburban hell and compare it to the best city like NYC. When I see these discussion what I hear is all the more reason why people are migrating to the coasts.
> At the same time, suburbs with low rates of crime are typically nicer to walk around without a destination in mind.
I have to disagree here. In the suburbs there is nowhere to go and nothing to discover. Walking around the city I see new people, restaurants or other businesses that I find interesting. The suburbs where I grew up were always the same thing.
> The suburbs where I grew up were always the same thing.
Hence the title of the book The Geography of Nowhere:
> The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is a book written in 1993 by James Howard Kunstler exploring the effects of suburban sprawl, civil planning, and the automobile on American society and is an attempt to discover how and why suburbia has ceased to be a credible human habitat, and what society might do about it. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good: "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."
I have been in plenty of suburbs without sidewalks or almost worse where there are bits and pieces of sidewalks that don’t connect to each other. Walking on the road is possible, but can be quite dangerous in such places.
> One is that it is typically difficult in a suburb to get to a landmark destination (e.g. to the grocery store, to the gym, to a coffee shop, and to work) just by walking, without a car.
> This is true.
Could you post a few map links to suburbs (not rural) where you can't walk to, say, a grocery store or a coffee shop?
> People aren’t walking in malls because of car culture. Usually they walk in malls because it’s too damn hot/cold outside.
People (most) are walking in malls entirely due to car culture. No one where I live in Chicago is going to the mall to walk - because they walk every day just by default to get things done.
When you use a car to go literally everywhere, you don't have that exercise baked in. It's difficult to commute here and walk less than a mile a day, usually much more. When I lived in the suburbs this might be measured in hundreds of feet.
Very few people go walking for the sake of it, regardless of location or weather. If you're not walking on a daily basis simply for practical reasons - odds are you don't walk regularly at all.
The rest is subjective - but I highly prefer "pleasure walks" in the city as well. After a month or two in the suburbs you've seen literally everything there is to see within a 1 mile radius of your home, and it almost never changes. A living city is a much different experience, and it's rare a walk won't result in some novel discovery or meeting a neighbor. This personally motivates me walking new routes far more than the endless sterile lawns in the suburbs.
Not to mention how insanely anti-pedestrian many suburban populations are - you will absolutely be harassed unless you are on designated walking trails in my experience. I did live in one inner-ring suburb that was a far better experience, but I feel most here would consider that to be light urban vs. suburban.
While the streets are quiet, it’s really not fun to walk in neighborhoods where every house looks the same, and where there’s no visual variety.
Personally I find a 15-minute walk in my suburban neighborhood feels much longer than a 15-minute walk in the town where my college was located.
The other extremely irritating part is the completely ass-backwards design of suburban neighborhoods that makes walking to places much longer than necessary. Eg: there’s a grocery store literally right behind my house, but without a door in my backyard, it would take me 5+ minutes to walk there.
None of the houses on my street have easy access either. The point of that anecdote wasn’t that everyone should have backyard doors, but rather that the street design should make it easy to get to places, and not require circuitous routes that make life difficult for pedestrians.
Nice places for a walk: the forest, a river bank, a park, walkable (zero car) city center. Poor places for a walk: anywhere there are cars, anywhere that is indoors. I get that there are places with inhospitable climate where it's too hot even in a shady forest or too cold even with the right clothes. Those places just don't have truly nice places for a walk.
> Critics say that the road will simply attract more traffic, but the way in which it is managed means that traffic is dispersed and therefore means there is less congestion than your average motorway.
What's the incentive for a UK construction talent agency to defend it? I don't actually grok any road traffic science aside from repeatedly seeing induced demand[0] mentioned; is there any truth in that?
> […] induced demand[0] mentioned; is there any truth in that?
RAND Europe 2018 study for the UK Department for Transport, "Induced travel demand: an evidence review":
> The objective of this study was therefore to review the empirical evidence on induced demand, with a view to understanding the size of the effect and where and under what conditions it occurs. In practice, measured induced traffic effects will depend on the time period over which they are measured, the geographical area and whether short-run or long run effects, particularly on land use, are included. While the impact of background growth is not included in this review, empirical studies of induced travel need to control for background traffic growth, as well as traffic changing route (reassigned traffic).
[…]
> The evidence reviewed in this study supports the findings of the SACTRA (1994) report that induced traffic does exist, though its size and significance is likely to vary in different circumstances. It was not possible to obtain any qualitative understanding about the composition of induced traffic in terms of new trips, redistributed trips, transfers between modes and trips associated with new developments. There remain wide variations in the quantitative evidence that make it difficult to draw conclusions about the magnitude of the impact of induced demand from road capacity improvements on the Strategic Road Network. However, we draw some tentative conclusions:
> The increase in traffic volume that arises after opening of new road infrastructure, is often attributed to ‘induced demand’. The objective of this study is to provide empirically derived insights in this phenomenon, in the amount of induced demand and in the benefits that adding road infrastructure has for users. Based on multivariate analyses of detailed data in The Netherlands from 2000-2012, it is concluded that the amount of induced demand in total is relatively low and that the relatively large increase in traffic volume during peak hours on roads that were congested before adding lanes mainly has been caused by shifts in route and departure time. The benefits of the new infrastructure for users have been calculated in terms of savings of travel time and travel time reliability. Implications for cost-benefit analyses of road investments have been reviewed.
Living in Katy is hellish when you don't drive and want to hangout on the weekends as a broke college student:
A. you are surrounded by aliens (cars) who look at you strangely for not riding a car
B. There's not a place to hangout and talk to people in the street
Note the pattern of dark heavily driven lanes - that is the most used slow lane copied again and again. See other comment pointing to reddit discussion.
There are plenty of locations that actually have reasonable parks and so forth where a lot of people just don't want to walk outside for a decent chunk of the year.
Yes, parks are areas outside. There are other walkable outdoor areas in many places too of course. However, fairly large swaths of the US are very hot or hot/humid in the summer or cold/snowy in the winter. You can still go outside of course but it may not be the best conditions for a pleasant walk.
I used to live in US suburbs, but now live in Tokyo - a lot of older postwar-constructed neighborhoods especially on Chuo Line from Nakano-Kichijoji have covered shopping arcades (shotengai) that are well connected to transit (as one would expect from Tokyo) and really nice to be in - it's like halfway between the accessible/controlled nature of malls (though without air conditioning), and a normal urban setting.
Separately, my suburban hometown in the US seems to be leaning into urbanism, with a (n artificial-feeling) human-scale city development with nice outdoor shopping and mixed use development (apartments, office, and retail space) in the middle of a parking lot and strip mall-dominated wasteland. It feels like that area is boomeing, seems like a trend of these urban islands in the deep suburbs is getting popular (presumably to the detriment of the nearby city itself).
Meanwhile the malls are getting either destroyed, repurposed into other stuff like warehouses, or remain open but have the weirdest niche shops which I don't really understand how they survive. I never liked the feeling of being in a mall, it just feels like a weird commercial dystopia to me when I'm in them, but never thought of them from the perspective of inclusivity and accessibility. Guess the biggest flaw is that they tend to be inconvenient to get to, in places that are inaccessible to start with.
Europe is pretty small - just pick a small subset of the US that meets your needs and enjoy it. The US has a huge variety. If a small section is good, you don't need the rest to change.
You also have to know them well enough to avoid the shady areas, not look muggable, not be female, not be small, not carry anything that looks remotely valuable, and only walk during daylight hours or else you're taking a significant risk (though all of that didn't save me from random verbal abuse when walking around the city or taking public transit nonetheless). And you have to be cool with places being totally filthy, and regularly cross 6-lane roads on a regular basis (yes, most of SF is like this). Plus you have to have a thick skin to see the abject horrors of homelessness and drug addiction everyday and convince yourself, "yup, this is normal and totally fine".
Yeah, that was fine for me when I was a 20 year old, relatively large man who didn't know that the rest of the world has much more hospitable places for pedestrians and human beings generally, but no thanks today. Kinda depressing that at least from a walkability standpoint it's about as good as it gets for the USA.
> Anderson, sitting in for a day, observes the largely male population commenting on ladies’ dress and appearance, reading the paper, and, in one case, getting served coffee by a woman acting as mall “wife.”
Wut
Couldn’t find references on the Web… what is a mall wife?
Our mall has 4 busses an hour and it is becoming a non-profit center as stores fade away, the Hospital moved in COVID testing and vaccination and will be moving in more medical officers, other kinds of NGOs such as toy banks are moving in. (E.g. there is no ‘toy store’ to compete with it, no ‘pet shop’ to compete with the SPCA, etc.
From what I've seen malls are consolidating. The good ones continue to do well and get even nicer, while all the others slowly die as people make the trek to the good mall. There is no room in the market for average.
It will be interesting to see what happens to them as they die, as they are quite unique pieces of real estate.
That would be pretty interesting. Are they mixed use spaces? It would be kind of cool to have an apartment with shops you can just walk to, like a little town square.
It would be quite ironic to live in an old mall, while then needing to drive to get anything.
Seems like an amazing opportunity to build a pedestrian-centric community. Include a grocery store, coffee shop, gym, and some green space, with automobile infrastructure exclusively below ground or on the periphery. The idea being that you don’t need a car for most of your daily needs. Doesn’t sound half-bad to me if I’m a renter (which I was for most of my adult life).
Where I live there is a shopping plaza that does quite well overall with a very busy chain home improvement store and supermarket. Some other stores like Starbucks that seem to do very well also. But the central mall anchored by largely defunct department stores is effectively dead.
At the same time , as you say, there are vibrant shopping malls within 30-45 minutes.
> After police officers removed elderly Korean Americans from a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens — managers claimed the group overstayed their welcome, buying only coffee and french fries
Before you judge McDonald’s… this is a thing in Asia. Talk privately to someone who works in a Shanghai Walmart, IKEA, and so on, and you will learn that massive groups of these freeloading aunties can shut down any business with a free place to sit for hours. They will buy as close to nothing as possible, are rude to employees, and are not averse to clotting up a business for half the day or more.
Sounds vaguely comical but it’s severely not fun if you’re an employee or prospective paying customer who just wants to park the kids, grab a bowl of noodles and rest your dogs for a few minutes.
Since when job should be fun? Who cares they are rude? It's not like there is some law you must be nice to employee, especially if they are bothering you.
Lived in China for years and yes, IKEA in Beijing is occupied by families enjoying bedrooms and living rooms, sleeping there, hanging there, but I've never seen it as issue and never seen any conflicts, that's just how it works there and I can understand these people considering temperatures in China and some of them not having AC (or saving money).
By your logic you could complain about Chinese/Asians not giving tips or bringing their own drinks to restaurants. These both may seem outrageous to American SJW, but I find it as European actually very nice and logical behavior. Why should I be giving any tips to someone getting salary, do you give tips to policeman, clerk in supermarket or McD staff? Doesn't business ear enough money from the food I order that they need to rob me on drinks as well? Well, I might as well eat at home, if they like it more, if they have problem with me bringing my own drink.
I love your attitude, seriously. Many, many people would actually be happier in life if they knew their job doesn’t owe them everything.
My use of “not fun” was meant to be understatement, a gentle Way of saying that working conditions are highly unpleasant. And while I don’t feel everyone’s jobs have to be fun, I do think it’s my moral obligation not to darken anyone’s days if I can avoid it.
> By your logic you could complain about Chinese/Asians not giving tips or bringing their own drinks to restaurants.
And don’t worry, I find those practices to be just as unpleasant. My wife and I laugh about it routinely.
> Why should I be giving any tips to someone getting salary, do you give tips to policeman, clerk in supermarket or McD staff?
You may have chosen the wrong hacker news person for this discussion. It’s illegal to give tips to policeman, but I regularly give tips to both clerks in the supermarket and McDonald’s.
> Doesn't business earn enough money from the food I order that they need to rob me on drinks as well?
Preach, brother! The whole concept of tips is alien to me because if it’s inconsistency in the application. I am a generous tipper but I am completely baffled as to why I should tip some people versus others. But what I do know is that everyone loves to get tips. And if I can afford it, why not make the day a little bit better?
> Well, I might as well eat at home, if they like it more, if they have problem with me bringing my own drink.
Judging from the rest of your message I think that’s a great idea
Yes-- for far too long we've been putting up with these insufferable American SJWs and their reflexive defense of the private property rights of megacorporations to refuse service to loiterers?
I unironically love this definition of SJW and vow to use it in all future HN posts where I can shoe-horn it in.
