This article by Toronto’s Darryl Kaplan suggests that the love affair with shopping malls will be extinct within 15 years. Quoting Kaid Benfield who writes about the trends towards walkable downtowns and suburbs “This decrease in outer suburban development isn’t “urbanist wishful thinking”: it is fact. It’s also fact that central cities are growing again, after decades of decline – and, for the first time in a century, growing at a faster rate than their suburbs.
And people are driving less with annual decreases in miles driven peaking in 2005 and now at 1995 levels. People ARE using car shares, biking and walking and using transit. There is quite simply a modal split away from a motordom dominated life.
According to a 2014 article titled, America’s Shopping Malls Are Dying A Slow, Ugly Death, the news is bad , “About 15% of U.S. malls will fail or be converted into non-retail space within the next 10 years, according to Green Street Advisors, a real estate and REIT analytics firm. That’s an increase from less than two years ago, when the firm predicted 10% of malls would fail or be converted… Within 15 to 20 years, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz expects as many as half of America’s shopping malls to fail.”
Yesterday I was reminded that there were no neighbourhood bakeries or butcher shops in the local big malls, and how valuable those services are to the local community. Indeed those services ARE the community, the same as local merchants that support local events and sell the Girl Guide cookies on behalf of the neighbourhood troop. That fineness of grain and neighbourly attention to being part of the community is valued and coming back. As Kaplan states, “as quickly as retailers turned their backs on our pretty Main Streets some years ago, we will reject their giant flashing lights and empty parking lots. And when they see the future and seek to re-connect with a real community, we will welcome them with open arms.”
What I don’t like about malls is the lack of choice from the consumer perspective. It seems like every mall has the same chain stores with the same products. The prices in general are always a bit more than stores outside of malls.
Malls make even less sense when you don’t drive … as a pedestrian/cyclist, one prefers to shop during the course of one’s travels, not to make a special trip … I can pass so many more different places on my way home (on one of several different routes) then I can going out of my way to a mall.
Malls also contain a cartoonish imitation of “main street” that is sanitized and locked up tight after 9:00. In many respects this inward-looking economic construct is perversely anti-community, even when teeming with shoppers on long weekends and on Black Fridays, sucking the lifeblood from family-owned shops on real streets. Metrotown, Oakridge, Pacific Centre and Park Royal succeed only because they are surrounded by the city.
That is to say, streets like the real Main Street ARE the city.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
The problem with re purposing old malls is that they led the march of sprawl in the first place. Re-purposing them into something “better” – higher density, mixed use – demands growth. That may work in places that are growing but it is not a model for everywhere. Returning them to farmland or green space would be more fitting.