Ding Dong! The Enclosed Mall Is Dead
With only three enclosed malls built since 2005, it seems safe to say we've seen the last of the shopping mall as we've known it.
"The mall is a beloved and reviled American artifact, and if current trends continue that’s exactly what it will be: An artifact."
"Many of the nation’s 2,000 malls are dead or dying. Only three have been built since 2005. And no plans are on the drawing board for more.
Of course, suburban sprawl and its favored shopping patterns are, if anything, increasing as a decade of rampant real estate development ensures. So the icon of the next generation could well be a mall, it will just be an outdoor, pedestrian-friendly expanse that feels like a main street, but isn’t."
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Demise of Malls?
The mall concept is not dead. It is better than ever. It now embraces a mixture of uses. Most are now open malls, not in a straight alignment, that are open to natural conditions unles extrenme weather dictates otherwise, with a few interconnected covered pedestrian galleries. A main mall will have varied algnment and appearance and have side branches, and have integrated residences and public functions. It will have perimeter parking. not an inside "parking mall" in between facing buildings (which shoud face on a pedestrian mall). The focus must be on people and pedestrians, providing parking for automobiles only as an accessory use.
This certainly fits my experience
When I lived in a small town in southern Illinois a few years ago, there was a Wal-Mart, a downtown, and a mall. The Wal-Mart was of course doing fine. The downtown was in OK shape too. But the mall across the street from the Wal-Mart could charitably be described as lifeless.
Evidently, what happened had been: the mall sucked some of the life from the downtown. The downtown bounced back. But the Wal-Mart eviscerated the mall, which lacked the walkability of the downtown and the shopping efficiency of the Wal-Mart.
Victims of Success
There are reasons for the demise of malls that don't require resorting to anything more sinister or revealing than economics. First we have too many retail square feet per person in this country by a huge margain. Kunstler has a nice graph at his blog: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/06/peak-s... Second the bigger retailers now have dedicated construction divisions who can apply economies of scale and more precise site location and use smaller plots to put up stores faster and more efficiently. They also are not subject to the whims of the mall developer in the out years. Many of the smaller speciality stores are no longer as dependent on brick and mortar premium placement for critial mass customer traffic. There are many sucessful malls. In Thousand Oaks, California the mall is being massively renovated and expanded. The Ontario Mills Mall in Ontario, California still attracts full occupancy and parking lots.
Personally I'd be glad to see malls fade into anachronism as communities wise up to the economics of private island community but I just don't see the value of the new version; "the inside out mall" (Simi Town Center, Camarillo Premium Outlet Mall) to be any better. Planners (hopefully) have dusty drawers full of adaptive reuse plans for when both models cease to function. Let us hope it doesn't take as long as it took to reuse the old mills of New England.