This seems like a woefully incomplete analysis. The same basic evolution happened in manufacturing and for largely the same reasons. Boutique job shops replaced by industralized mass production facilities replaced by abstracted labor and infrastructure in offshore contracts.
Boutique stores worked downtown because there was no better option, not because it was great. Who wants to drive downtown to get shoes or a tie? Going in and out of building after building, dealing with traffic, trying to keep your packages out of the rain, etc. sucks.
Malls took over because you could socialize, you were out of the elements, there was a mix of attractions and shopping, it was comfortable and safe to walk everywhere. You also didn't have to deal with driving in and out of downtown, they were almost always right off of some major highway.
But malls aren't great either. There’s been zero innovation in the business model since the beginning. Relative to the Internet, the selection sucks, prices suck and the logistics suck. Shopping is an event rather than an impulse. Back when you could download your entire Amazon order history, my chart of orders and spending nearly had an expoential curve in it from 2006 to 2018 as the superior (to me) experience gradually drained my business away from brick and mortar.
And guess what's back? Boutique shops. My daughter opened up an Etsy store when she was 14 and has sold custom sculptures and stickers to people all over the world. No way she could have done that downtown or in the local mall.
> Who wants to drive downtown to get shoes or a tie?
I had a hard time understanding the meaning of this sentence, and its context. The idea of "driving downtown to go shopping" is backwards to me. You live downtown, and walk a few meters to the shop.
Then I realized that you may be from the USA, where your cities seem to be turned inside out. You are indeed a funny country.
People do live downtown in US cities, but at least since the 1990s when that became popular again after city crime rates fell (for reasons which are still being debated today), these housing options (generally condominiums and rowhouses) tend to be very expensive compared to living in the suburbs. So only the upper middle class/upper class can afford it. It's not that unlike the situation in other countries. Living in the center of London or Paris isn't cheap either.
Meh, the US is still kind of odd. European cities tend to be wealthy in the center and less wealthy as you go out.
US cities, at least the ones where downtown has turned around, have a donut-shaped wealth distribution; rich downtown, blighted inner-city and inner-ring, outer wealthy suburbs.
it's also just harder to rebuild and renew any downtown infrastructure, wherever located.
in the UK, town centre development has been hindered particularly by the effects of having caused a diverse small business and retail environment to grow around central developments, whose owners have fiercely opposed any disruption that could be created by heavy works, regardless of the importance to their ultimate survival.
consider where the central mall provides the only large scale car parking availability for the surrounding areas, like in my home town and the situation in Windsor afaict whenever I visit, which has a large town centre retail district without any suitable parking for the sprawl of retailers outward from the centre complexes.
edit splitting to avoid confusion after accidentally posting early :
concluding without the argument I originally intended, I suspect that the data is so poorly collected and used that we could very likely find many new ways to revitalise our town centers getting plenty of sensible fresh investment to pursue models we've been simply overlooking
The reason US cities are inside out is because of something called “white flight” and “redlining” that has happened as a result of slavery and racism unfortunately.
It’s a really sad story that’s helped make the poor even poorer.
I’m not from the USA but the statement makes perfect sense to me. I’m not quite sure what you imply with your point, that everyone where you are from lives “downtown” or that people where you’re from can always just walk to an equivalent.
> everyone where you are from lives “downtown” or that people where you’re from can always just walk to an equivalent
Both, really. From all the people I know, there's only one person who cannot walk from his place to a nearby bakery. And in that case it was a conscious decision to "become isolated" and buy a house in an unlikely place. Walking every morning to buy bread for breakfast is a deeply entrenched cultural thing. I cannot really imagine living somewhere where this is not possible. Most of urbanized places are indeed downtown.
Bakeries aren't generally found in malls. Malls are for items like shoes and socks -- items you get a few times a year, perhaps, not every day. Malls will have cafes that sell baked goods, but you probably wouldn't go there for your daily bread.
Sadly, bakeries in America are rare. Your daily bread comes from the supermarket. Much of it isn't baked on site, and it's designed to keep for several days. We don't have a tradition of daily fresh bread, which is too bad for a lot of reasons.
But Americans have plenty of food options so don't weep too much for us. If you want decent bread, it's available in many places, including many of those supermarkets and chain bakeries like Panera. It's not magnificent bread, but it's good. Magnificent bread is also available; it's just not a priority.
Americans do have a pretty dysfunctional relationship with food, and we'd be a lot healthier if we fixed it. But the mall isn't really part of that. That's more about the supermarket than the mall, and those are separate niches.
The town in this article is a small/medium sized town in rural central Minnesota. The majority of people in this area will live in the surrounding country side and the "down town" isn't much more than a few blocks of buildings and side streets straddling a major highway.
So for most people in the area, going anywhere besides a recreational walk, requires getting in a car.
I don't believe this situation is unique to United States with regards to similar towns.
How delightful! There are clothes, jewelry, music, furniture, hardware, electronics, cosmetics stores all within a few meters of your home? Eyewear, bookstores, mobile phone, candle shops and gift stores? Coffee shops, cinnabon, movie theaters and stores wholly dedicated to hats, mattresses and overpriced tea? All within a short walk?
That’s incredible! The mall near me that has all of that requires a few thousand meters of storefronts in 5-6 buildings just to pack all of that in.
> How delightful! There are clothes, jewelry, music, furniture, hardware, electronics, cosmetics stores all within a few meters of your home? Eyewear, bookstores, mobile phone, candle shops and gift stores? Coffee shops, cinnabon, movie theaters and stores wholly dedicated to hats, mattresses and overpriced tea? All within a short walk?
Exactly. Most small towns in the suburbs of Paris are just like that if you live within 1km of the center.
EDIT: It's nothing particular to France either. If you go to any city with more than, say, 20.000 or 30.000 inhabitants in western Europe (at least the countries that I know), it will be quite similar.
Americans are not very introspective/knowledgeable of their own economic, political, and infrastructural structure.. so they'll be pretty clueless of what the rest of the world is doing
Ha! didn't notice the snark on my first read. What can I say? Just come here and take a walk ;)
EDIT: no need to take a plane... if you need some proof, look at this google maps/street view link: https://goo.gl/maps/iDirDFH16d8xMvwx9 All the things that you mention on your "snarky" message can be indeed found on the couple of pedestrian streets that you see here. Except for the cinema, but there is a theatre (now closed due to covid). If you want a cinema you need to walk less than 2km to the one in the next town.
How are those local stores holding up against online delivery? I can't see Amazon displacing the boulangerie, patisserie, charcuterie, boucherie, etc. in those small towns. But I could easily see people being willing to order their socks and hammers and such online.
I love those little towns and have dreamed of retiring to one. (One thing I need to figure out how to say in French is "How is the Internet there?"... though I suppose these days I could even get one of those nearly-dead little villages they sell so cheaply and bring a Starlink.)
this is not really a "little town", it is well inside paris metro, the largest urban area in continental europe, home to 10 million people, and a major technology hub. You'll have your internet here.
I think the distance between rural towns is generally more like 5-10km each direction in the parts of the US I am familiar with. 2km through a densely populated urban area is very different from 10km through the countryside too.
Sure. Point is that any isolated urban nucleus of 30.000 people is very compact and already has everything that you need inside a small radius. You can live there without a car.
> Boutique stores worked downtown because there was no better option
100 times this. People really romanticize "mom and dad shops", forgetting many of their issues - often limited/no selection of large/tall/petite clothes, worse/non-existing return policies and often lack of parking space/restrooms.
I recently ordered something from Newegg and it was shipped from China to some place 500 miles away from me. They don’t even charge me... the seller does. They only guarantee. So if the seller doesn’t refund me then I have to file a claim through them. Screw that.
My Amazon orders have dropped precipitously and I’m trying to get my girlfriend to stop ordering from there as well. I’ve gotten too many obvious someone-else’s-returns and fake items. Amazon has always been mostly okay with returns. (Once they wanted to charge me for a low value item I had them reship when their system said it was delivered but it wasn’t, but otherwise refunds and returns have been no problem.)
I find myself going to brick-and-mortar stores more often lately, especially since they seem to have gotten curbside pickup down. Otherwise o tend to go straight to the manufacturer when possible.
I think this is a very US perspective. In the town where I grew up in Germany they created a pedestrian zone downtown when I was a teenager. There was a lot of protests from businesses saying that people would drive to malls in the outskirts because they can't drive to the shops anymore. The exact opposite happened, if you look at the city centre it's busy every day and absolutely jam packed on nice days (except for covid restrictions). It's also an absolute tourist magnet.
The funny thing is, the city government is talking about expanding the zones and make the whole town centre pedestrian only and the businesses are protesting with the same arguments as 20 years ago.
To be fair, there's probably an efficient frontier problem in pedestrianizing neighborhoods. If you closed off the entirety of Manhattan to cars, it would probably destroy Manhattan, but if you closed off specific areas such that people could still move themselves and goods around the city, it would be much improved.
One interesting article I read but can't be bothered to find now mentioned how we could better utilize malls by making top floors of condos. It was such a simple but seemingly good suggestion. Already have huge amounts of parking, tons of floor area for convenience, and stores would change to those that better served the tenants. And as that happens, more people from outside would be incentivized to visit.
Perhaps there are reasons it wouldn't work, or is a bad idea. Perhaps I was enamored with the idea of rolling out of bed and getting Chick Fil A or Cinnabon in my pajamas.
Having residential above retail is super common in non-American cities. It works pretty well in Montreal -- condo buildings usually have a grocery store and coffee shop in the lobby, while a strip of three-story buildings might have two stories of residential above things like a collectibles store or a martial arts dojo, with a grocery store on the corner.
The problem with doing this with malls is you have minimum quality requirements for residences. Daylight requirements are a particular concern -- you can sell corners and edges, but you're left with a big space in the middle you can't use, unless you're willing to make the corner apartments expand that far. Once you start doing that, the condo costs comparable to detached houses, and there you lose out to The American Dream(TM). The real wins here would be in splitting apart the stores and putting housing above each one, and replacing "destination" shopping with neighborhood shopping.
> Daylight requirements are a particular concern -- you can sell corners and edges, but you're left with a big space in the middle you can't use, unless you're willing to make the corner apartments expand that far.
Or, since you're talking about the top floor, use skylights. You could even make it the top two floors, but each center unit is on both floors and has a "basement" without natural light.
> Once you start doing that, the condo costs comparable to detached houses, and there you lose out to The American Dream(TM).
Prices are set by supply and demand. If people like something else better then the price is lower. It's hardly going to be lower than the construction cost.
The real thing preventing things like this is that it's all too often prohibited by zoning for no good reason.
There are reasons for zoning requirements that skylights don't solve, and they are largely around egress.
Some mall layouts may be conducive enough to having condos put on the top level, or one could design a modern mall for that now (I've seen a few).
However retrofitting onto many of the 80s-90s era malls with huge floorplans is unlikely to be economically feasible.
Then units 01-04 and 13-16 are on the exterior of the building, units 05-12 are on the interior with skylights, and there are hallways between them as shown. Where is the egress problem?
Zoning generally requires egress be possible from every room which is a sleeping quarters (or living space like living room) via a window or door to the outside.
I’m not sure that a door to a common hallway would be considered legal egress.
Further, even if it was, this would require each sleeping quarters within your apartment to have an emergency exit door to the common hallway, in addition to the door within your apartment. This would be pretty loud and unattractive.
Another zoning concern is that there is generally a rule like “every area of apartment must be within 30 feet of door/window to outside”. So if you create these deep cavernous apartments you won’t be able to meet this rule either.
For example in NYC, every room needs two forms of egress.
Bedrooms this is the windows + door back to rest of your apartment. Living areas this is windows + door out to common hallway. It is illegal to create a room that has only 1 exit/entrance.
The concept here is that in the event of a fire if your 1 & only exit is blocked you are dead.
Similar rules apply to why in most jurisdictions you cannot legally finish off your basement unless it has sufficient exits directly to outside / windows big enough for a firefighter in full gear to fit through. This limits many existing basements for conversion depending on their depth as its hard to retrofit these into existing foundations..
If I could have a condo that was as quiet and accessible as a house (buying groceries, whether in person or by delivery, was a huge hassle in my SF apartment), with a "backyard" I could reserve for an hour or two of total quiet and privacy, I'd take that over a detached house. But my experience so far in two separate tower buildings was noise, a lack of mutual respect in amenity spaces, frequently breaking elevators, and overcrowding.
It's becoming more common in the US, and at least a few cities now have zoning laws requiring multi-purpose buildings in certain situations. There have been some significant redevelopments of the sort you talk about. They aren't the old style large malls with anchor stores, but are typically laid our like an apartment building or hotel, to maximize the window areas.
In Hong Kong the common model is one massive retail/amenities podium with several towers spiking out. You need daylight, but the towers themselves aren’t very wide; they’re mostly plus or star shaped around a central core.
Here, it appears people were grasping at straws to save a historically important building situated in a fairly convenient spot of a decent size city. So somebody invested $10 million to do this renovation, creating a whopping 48 apartments, many of which are 225 square feet!
Change the configuration file to location=outskirts and mall=half_abandoned_piece_of_shit and I shudder thinking of the business model that would support this at scale.
Whatever that would be, Cinnabon seems about the right smell for it.
This is actually what happens in many new developments in the US today, so called mixed use developments. Example, there is a lot of these in Austin, Texas; the one that I will mention is called “The Domain”: bars, stores and residential complexes all within walking distance, connected to downtown via bus and rail. It’s pretty amazing.
It’s probably a model that will be replicated across the US if the urbanization trends continue.
Multipurpose is way common outside the US. And yes, I've visited and still visit sometimes the local coffeeshop or Maccies in my pajamas. It's nice early in the morning.
An interesting innovation, by my uncle who runs a healthcare group, was converting disused malls into hospitals. The unused central atria works well since hospitals need that airy feel, and apparently it's cheaper to refurbish a mall into a hospital than build one from scratch (mostly because malls tend to be distressed properties today, which you can pick up for pennies on the dollar). He's currently focusing on expanding in ex-London cities in the UK.
This isn't a new concept, even in the USA. SV residents can see this (ground floor retail, upstairs residential) embodied in the Two Worlds complex in Mountain View, which is at least 30 years old.
Problem is, retail space demand is in a death spiral as shopping moves to the online giants. People shift to using local retailers primarily for looking, trying on, or stealing from.
American Shopping malls were modeled on European town centers. They just got a little lost as the concept was copied.
But mixed use development is becoming more common in the US. I know of 2 or 3 mixed use developments that have opened up around my city.
> What was new about it was that it was an entirely enclosed system of shops with no exterior windows and a climate-controlled interior. This was a particularly good fit for Minnesota with its cold winters. Until then, shops in malls and arcades were connected by outside walkways. This new design was on two levels, had a department store at each end, and escalators to bring shoppers up to the second level and down again when they’d completed walking the mall. And it had a central court with skylights, fountains, plants and seating.
> Gruen was inspired by centrally planned urban re-development in his hometown of Vienna, Austria, that took place there after the democratic uprisings in 1848.
... most malls have only one floor (albeit one with a very high ceiling). Certainly the mall that the original article is talking about has only one floor (source: I lived near the city discussed by the author and know the mall he's talking about). You can't convert the top floor of a one-story building.
It seems like the typical American shopping mall would need a lot of work to convert partially to residential. Most malls have virtually no exterior windows for one.
Our local mall went through a period of decline, as old stalwarts like Sears, Montgomery Ward, and JC Penny went out of business or left. But then it got renovated, new stores moved in, and it's as busy as ever. I think it just took a different selection of stores to attract customers back. And the redesign made space for a number of medium-size anchor stores like REI who have doors facing out rather than into the mall itself.
I saw someone say the problem is there are just too many malls in America. In Australia it seems every mall is packed to the point where you can hardly walk through them, but all so that the number of malls per person in Australia is much lower than in America.
REI might work in a well populated area. This town has 11k inhabitants. The neighboring town which sports Walmart and Costco (the one the author laments driving to) has a population of 8k.
I don't think there is enough population to support a profitable REI in an age where you can order everything it sells for cheaper elsewhere.
Is it fair to compare value and tax revenue of the 9 downtown blocks to the mall? Aren’t malls usually built in cheap areas because the land has low value, while downtown is typically, well, down town.
Also the mall space is including parking lots and the 9 blocks have parking somewhere but not in those 9 blocks.
Is it fair to compare value and tax revenue of the 9 downtown blocks to the mall? Aren’t malls usually built in cheap areas because the land has low value, while downtown is typically, well, down town.
Well, downtown have something going for it if it's valuable. Land that are of low value aren't exactly prime estate.
Also the mall space is including parking lots and the 9 blocks have parking somewhere but not in those 9 blocks.
Why would that in itself be valuable use of lands? Remember, even the roads are a land use choice.
Parking lots are not very valuable. I meant that the mall parcel includes retail space and parking while the 9 blocks is only retail space. So it’s comparing different densities. I was thinking that there is probably some parking lots for the people doing that shopping that should be included when comparing taxes per area.
I think it would be an accurate comparison if those 9 blocks were replaced by a mall, but this seems like apples to oranges if the goal is to see which brings in more tax revenue to the community.
I suppose sales tax would be really important too.
??? It depends entirely on the location of the parking lot.
The land value of a downtown parking lot which is the same size as a high-rise building lot next door is going to be similar. Obviously the high-rise is worth more money since there’s a building with leasable space, but the land value of both lots will be very close. A parking lot doesn’t need to remain a parking lot forever, you could borrow money and build a building on it.
The downtown could have good public transportation options along with many living or working close by as well. When there is parking it is more likely to be a denser parking garage.
Yes, that is true. I’m not contending that parking lots aren’t required for malls to work. I just think it’s comparing different densities of commercial areas.
It doesn’t factor in the parking lots needed to support the 9 blocks of downtown.
So the level of spatial resolution seems off to make an accurate comparison.
It seems to me the point was “downtown shopping is better for tax base than malls” and shows the tax for those two areas. But my not including the parking needed for downtown those aren’t really comparable areas in that there is additional space needed to support the downtown area.
But the bigger area is comparing downtown to whatever land was turned into a mall since I’m not aware of any malls that were literally used to replace town squares. In the small to middle towns I’m familiar with the mall was built away from the center of town frequently on farmland or similar empty space.
I think this is obvious if you watch the walmart movie[1]
There was an interesting scene in the movie where a small town was getting a new walmart, and they drove around downtown.
They pointed at each of the stores and assigned values like "6 months" or "3 months" as an estimate of survival after they lost all their business to walmart.
Another wave of change has been moving in slow motion for years with online purchases and local stores, but the pandemic has been a tsunami in comparison.
Walmart purposefully designs their pay structure to externalize their labor costs to taxpayers.[1] They have gladly led the way in lobbying for offshoring manufacturing jobs.[2] They do everything they can to avoid paying taxes and bust unions.[3][4]
They will burn a small town's economy to the ground so they can turn a profit selling goods produced in sweatshops and labor camps. If that's not evil, I'm not sure what would qualify.
To be fair to Wal-Mart, that seems to have less to do with Wal-Mart being a devious corporation and more that the lower class can scarcely afford to live anymore without the ultra-efficient economies of scale Wal-Mart provides.
In a world with a livable minimum wage, I imagine Wal-Mart would have less of a captive consumer base.
I mean, part of why that is the case is that walmart itself depresses wages. It comes to town, undercuts other businesses, those businesses close, people need jobs, they go to work at walmart (possibly at a loss of income but probably a loss of hours even if not), and then they can't afford to shop anywhere but walmart anymore. And the cycle continues.
It's not like they're doing this in a snidely whiplash scheme-y sort of way but they are still doing it, and they're not unaware of or innocent in the effect they have.
As someone who makes more than enough money to not have to shop at Walmart, I still shop at Walmart. Even brand name food items will be 20% cheaper than most grocery stores (Aldi's excluded). And meat is just incredibly cheap, $1.78/lb for boneless chicken breast? Yea, I'm gonna keep shopping at Walmart.
Just because I have money to burn doesn't mean I want to burn it overpaying for basic things.
Right, but at some point you have to question why these things are so cheap. What conditions are you helping to perpetuate by buying inexpensive clothes and meat?
Not that you're obligated to spend your money differently than you do. But this speaks to the country's yawning divide between red/blue that some of us choose to spend supporting local economies, buying ethically sourced goods, and generally trying to reduce the negative externalities of our lives. Meanwhile, other people don't want to worry about that, which is fair, but I don't know how culturally sustainable it is for groups to be polarizing at each end of that continuum.
I don't think we necessarily disagree here. I think these things are evil. I just don't think they're unique or special in the modern capitalist system. It's all gross.
But I think people get into a cognitive dissonance trap when they try to think of the people who are selling them cheap chicken legs as literally evil, when they can only imagine people doing things like engaging in slavery or wage suppression or whatever as things only people who wake up every morning going "How can I be evil today, I'm bored of tying people to train tracks!"
But nope. That's that guy you met at the last Startup Weekend event doing that. He seemed nice and you had a drink with him. He's a real person with a family and he made his money off diamond mining or selling the work of 8 year olds, and now he's a VC.
Having lived through the peak of the US Mall years, I blame the downfall on... Nintendo.
The mall was a social center for teens. A lot of money got pumped into the malls from that age group.
Teen boys would go for the arcade.
Teen girls would follow, checking out the guys.
Many stores catered to that demographic (Spencers, HotTopic, makeup and cheap jewelry stores, etc.)
In short, it was a place to go on casual dates, find dates, hook up, and the like.
My peer group quit going as frequently as we could play SuperMario Brothers for free at home. And, once the internet emerged, that was it... teens rarely leave their houses now, don’t date, and shun all face-to-face contact.
I’m younger than you I’d guess by a decade. We still hung out at malls. The internet? Maybe. Super Mario Bros? No. We even still had some arcades, though not as many as their were.
It might have helped, but my default hypothesis for anything entertainment related is that people will stop finding something interesting after a while. You can never get the novelty back.
I think you're onto something here, as far as that being one, first major impetus that got taken away. Surely people went to toy stores etc, some of them in malls, to buy Nintendo games, and then bought something else while in there. So I wouldn't call that the destruction per se, but I see where you're coming from.
That's rude. It's a valid perspective. I dumped thousands of dollars in arcade games in the 70's and 80's and spent at least as much buying tshirts and toys and pizza or walking down to the theater and watching a movie.
For me there was a sense of adventure going to the mall because the products would change unpredictably. It was like a living art piece that served great food and could lead to unexpected purchases. It was also fun in the pre-internet era of having the chance to run into someone you knew randomly whereas social media creates a seemingly constant contact.
In the 80s the malls usually had 1) an arcade, 2) at least one bookstore, sometimes two, 3) a toy/hobby store where you could buy RPGs and wargames, 4) a music store or two, and 5) 'food' of some kind. Good memories, though I rarely go to a mall these days.
Perhaps the company was debt-loaded so it would fail and be liquidated. The (complicit) lenders collected lots of interest payments, and the parent company gets the proceeds from the asset sales, along with a nice tax write-off because of the "loss".
Boutique stores worked downtown because there was no better option, not because it was great. Who wants to drive downtown to get shoes or a tie? Going in and out of building after building, dealing with traffic, trying to keep your packages out of the rain, etc. sucks.
Malls took over because you could socialize, you were out of the elements, there was a mix of attractions and shopping, it was comfortable and safe to walk everywhere. You also didn't have to deal with driving in and out of downtown, they were almost always right off of some major highway.
But malls aren't great either. There’s been zero innovation in the business model since the beginning. Relative to the Internet, the selection sucks, prices suck and the logistics suck. Shopping is an event rather than an impulse. Back when you could download your entire Amazon order history, my chart of orders and spending nearly had an expoential curve in it from 2006 to 2018 as the superior (to me) experience gradually drained my business away from brick and mortar.
And guess what's back? Boutique shops. My daughter opened up an Etsy store when she was 14 and has sold custom sculptures and stickers to people all over the world. No way she could have done that downtown or in the local mall.