Imagine apartments built into what used to be department stores, (Oh, you’re JC Penny 203? I’m at Sears 106). Get those old arcades up and running. Set up meal stations at the food court. Once people actually live there, stores will start to move back in.
If I’m unable to finish my life in my own home, that doesn’t sound like a terrible option.
As other people have mentioned, this can be a hard problem.
However, malls are typically surrounded by massive amounts of space used for parking. There is a plan for the largest mall in my region to convert all of that land into residential spaces, 2000 apartments. The parking will be moving underground.
Seems like a decent idea to me.
Would be even better if instead of 2000 apartments, it was something like 1100 condos, then the rest split between offices, shops (including groceries), parks, and some sort of community recreation center. Do the same with the surrounding area, changing up the specialties of the locations a bit so that it’s worth it to leave your mall-sized area and visit others.
Then set up a mass transit system that goes between them, including consideration for people wanting to move large purchases like furniture and appliances, like one of the cars on the train has large doors, collapsible seats, and hardware for securing things too big for one person to safely hold. Or set up a parallel delivery system for things while the people ride the delivery system for people.
Then you don’t need the underground to go to parking and can increase the density of the area or put more space towards parks and recreation.
Welcome to many parts of Europe, you are invited to come visit any time :)
Yeah the malls themselves are hard to convert. Ditto for those unused office buildings downtown. Takes a lot of work to change commercial space into residential.
Easier to start from scratch, honestly. Those empty parking lots make it simple to put up medium density housing, and then put commercial spaces back into the mall. Aka the Reston Town Center model.
As a millenial, all I want is the LAN party old folks home.
My current job is in an office/call center that used to be a Famous Barr at a mall. It’s funny, I worked in that mall as a teen/early 20’s. Now I’m back working at the fucking mall XD (tho now I’m provisioning telephone service and processing telecom orders, not sweeping up in a movie theater or trying to upsell people at a shop)
As a GenX, I would prefer seeing them made into some sort of public space? We are losing a lot of that, at least where I live. Indoor space in particular.
Maybe 10 or so years ago, was a real push to convert old malls into apartments or low income housing. Turns out it’s not that easy. Those buildings were built with minimal plumbing, just a few public restrooms and limited water service for the food court. There’s just not enough water/sewer to supply more than a small handful of apartments. You’d have to tear up significant portions of the building to run all new plumbing for all the kitchens & bathrooms. And that assumes the underlying city infrastructure that runs to the mall could even support the new water & sewage demands in the first place.
I’ll grant you, it is a cool idea. It’s just not nearly as simple as it sounds.
If my retirement home has Dance Dance Revolution, I may just have to get myself a new hip.
Those are also the “mall rat” generations, so it’d be pretty fitting lol.
We can watch the original Fast and Furious, recreate a mockup of HTML eBay and put 5hp stickers on our mobility scooters with RGB under glow lighting, and sub’s around our nitrous bottles.
I live my life one quarter footprint store front at a time…
Knock these things down and plant trees and stuff.
While we’re at it knock all the corporate 9to5 office work buildings where all the employees can work from home and plant trees and stuff there too.
Trees and ponds and natural parks and shit, hiking trails…etc.
I’ve seen some concepts for mall-like communities based around retirement homes and elementary schools. Add a library, some shops, and other services, and you’re off to a great start.
The old-but-still-able folks can serve as crossing guards, read books to kids, play games with them, perhaps help with coaching or other tasks, etc… The young kids benefit from the wisdom and time spent with good role models, the retirees get much-needed social interaction, structure, and purpose.
A man can dream.
As a millennial I can tell you that most millennials I know wouldn’t want this but instead make it a place for none corporation and community events and such. A public place where your not forced to buy things where can just exist with others even if you have zero money and accessible to all genders and disabilities and races.
And yes retrofit part of it for people who need to get back on there feet, and homeless people.
If we could retrofit them into homeless shelters we could but it would require rebuilding mostly everything as malls are designed for stores not housing people (for instance the bathrooms are not private and not easily accessible if you live somewhere in it)
Not even renovated, just set me up in a hot topic.
Dibs on Spencers!
Have you been in a Spencer’s recently? Remember the skeezy area in the back? That’s now the whole thing.
Last time I was in one it was all Blacklights and shit that was cool when you were stoned lol.
This isn’t a too shabby of an idea. It probably won’t be used but a mix of stores and homes in one building sounds great.
The idea of apartments centered around a grocery plaza has been a thing for a while. It’s almost an answer, except it still requires transportation to everything else. Plus the stores tend to be higher prices to support the cost of property and because they can.
Add a metro station, a large parking garage, should work
ITT: people want cyberpunk megabuildings
That would be a cool place to live to me.
This sounds like such bad idea. Just demolish them.
counterargument; malls, arcades, and bookstores should come back in style because they were amazing and we don’t know what we missed until it’s gone.
They will come back as the US shifts away from car centered culture, malls thrive in Europe
How will shifting away from cars result in more people going to the mall? How are you supposed to get there?
By subway. By bus. By bike. Walking. The world by and large doesn’t revolve around cars. How do you think Europeans get there?
Public transport…and their countries are small as fuck. The amount of people who think the USA is the same size as European countries is hilarious. Most states are the size of a few eu countries.
Yeah, so? Are you going to a mall in the next state or what? Public transport connects suburbs and cities. You’re not supposed to take the subway from Chicago to your favorite mall in Seattle, just like no European takes a bus from Amsterdam to go shopping in Brussels.
Nope but the nearest mall to me is 2 hours drive. No one is building rails out into the smaller counties. The USA is massive. I’ve lived in Europe, its a lot smaller, and people still have cars. Not saying this couldn’t work for cities but people forget how spread out we are here in the usa.
Nope but the nearest mall to me is 2 hours drive.
Have you considered that this is because most of space in USA is allocated only for cars? Or that if this space wasn’t allocated to cars, then you wouldn’t need to traverse such disyance in first place?
but people forget how spread out we are here in the usa.
The solution: trains
The rest of the entire world is a teeny bit larger than the US, but they still manage to do public transport just fine, for the most part.
Besides Europe and Japan…no they really don’t.
In other countries, malls are still alive and well. In Philippines, that is where people literally chill in a hot tropical climate because of 24/7 air conditioning!
Malls are also seen as a sign of progress and modernity for many developing countries, so there is some cultural expectations to building and maintaining malls.
In US, we way overbuilt malls. There’s just too many. While I’m not a fan (shopping is not a destination, and I want to get it done as quickly as possible), I’m not entirely convinced they’re dying here either. Some people do like shopping and some people like the community experience. 3/4 of malls need to die, but we’ll see if it settles on a more sustainable number, or if online shopping ate their face
In the US we’re having a bit of a crisis of “third places”. Where do people hang out as a community? Where do you go? So many newly built suburbs don’t have any approximation of town center or community places. Malls served that need for a few decades, but many are going away. Now we’re trying to replace malls with “shopping districts”, basically rebuilding town centers that too many suburbs never had…. Plus they seem to be just a mall with less roof
There’s a mall near where I live that’s still pretty rad. I go there sometimes
