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.
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…
And, naturally, we’d be hauling boomboxes blasting gangsta rap in the baskets of our mobility scooters. lol.
Our generation’s old-folks home gonna be lit
I’m thinking this leads to MegaCity 1 type situations like in Dredd.
Have never seen it, but will take your word on it. lol
It’s worth watching
bc it will become our new reality. A bit of a… different take on the future than Star Trek shows, think more what led up to the Bell Riots rather than what happened afterwards.
mobility scooters with RGB under glow lighting
This but unironically. I think I need to find someone willing to let me do this to their scooter or wheelchair; I’ve got parts to spare and if it gets even a few chuckles it will be worth doing.
I think that’s the point.
Millennial here. Malls were seeing during my childhood and I’m almost Gen x.
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.
Can you provide an example since in not fully understanding what you’re after?
A library.
Yeah but one for talking
A talkbrary
Barnes and Noble/Starbucks tried that. It’s pretty cool but didn’t scale
I commented below with a similar idea. Like a public indoor park, for when Outside™ is no longer an option for recreation due to climate issues. They are big enough to accommodate large playgrounds, both child and adult style, running tracks, swimming pools, sports fields/courts. Keep the food court, sure, throw in a library, etc.
If we ever get a house and senate progressive enough to shave like 0.000000001% of the military budget we could put one in every abandoned mall and have funds left over.
Yeah that sounds awesome!
I was just trying to say that once you privatize something like a mall to make it housing or whatever it is, you will never get it back. The city or some public trust should hold onto the property. What you actually do with it depends on what would be best for the community I guess?
Being a Canadian, just having some indoor places where you can gather in to get out of the cold in the dead of winter is something I don’t think we should give up.
3rd places.
Not even renovated, just set me up in a hot topic.
Can’t. The goth kids burned it down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OvUDHpPgb4
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.
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)
I know it’s hard to imagine since you’ve pretty much got to pay to exist anywhere today, but malls were a place to just exist. I spent hours and hours wandering around the mall in the eighties without any money.
Expanding on the thought, it was perfectly ok to be, get this, a TEENAGER existing without any money in a mall!
In my country malls were never this. When I was young several malls, specially high end ones, banned unaccompanied teenagers during weekdays and at certain hours. Also, fuck malls with absolutely no seating or resting spaces outside of the food court. I hope they all go broke and get demolished.
Might also depend on the timing. At least in the 90s, my area was as described, a hangout place where ambient hanging out was considered just fine because enough people bought stuff it was worth it and people behaved relatively well, or they had enough security to make that the case.
Now there’s all sorts of signs up about unaccompanied teenagers are not allowed.
Also, fuck malls with absolutely no seating or resting spaces outside of the food court.
Sounds like EU got work to do
I have no respect for people with no shopping agenda
In a city in my country there was an old mall that was slowly taken over by bands who used the spaces as rehearsal rooms. It gained a huge following including some local big bands and concerts. They all paid rent too. Unfortunately, early this year, they were evicted by the owner and City Hall, out of nowhere and are on its way to become airbnb’s for tourists…
Nothing new…
Yesss, give us community spaces that are not designed around maximizing profits.
Elsewhere, someone suggested that it would be necessary to take the rebuild down to the dirt to handle plumbing and the like for individual units, but I’m not sure I agree.
Generally there is significant excess ceiling height in these commercial spaces, no reason the floor couldn’t be raised throughout the space to accommodate plumbing and the like in a way that’s easily accessible for future maintenance. You still end up with 8’ ceilings (or probably rather more) throughout.
Over the years, I’ve watched a number of retail chains and malls die, sometimes suddenly and sometimes slowly. It’s continuously seemed like a huge waste to me, when conversion to residential space would be relatively easy, relatively affordable, could be funded by local gov or nonprofit, and would make a significant difference in net housing costs in a given area.
When ‘traditional’ residential developers are competing with that, and with the ability to slap down standard-sized (AKA easy) risers/walls/etc. within commercial spaces of defined sizes, a further reduction in local housing costs is likely.
Stahp, I’m not even 40 yet.
And you won’t be able to retire in 20 years, or 30, maybe 40, if you’re lucky
But keep the appearance of a mall.
That way when we all have Alzheimer’s from micro plastics, we can wander around it and feel youngmall walks!
With those moving walkways you see in airports.
In some places they’re already doing it to revitalize the majority of the mall, convert a section and suddenly you’ve got people around 24/7 that want services.
Yeah, they’re trying that around here and failing spectacularly. The recent fascination for new construction in my area seems to be try this “Main Street, USA” shit where they build brutalist flat-roof apartment blocks but with the ground level being retail stores. The rationale seems to be to attempt to build some kind of enclave where people can live, work, and shop without ever having to leave. The only glaring caveats are that the only retail businesses that ever appear here are all shitty franchised fast-casual restaurants where nobody wants to go, with the gaps filled in by the usual parade of payday loan places, cash for gold, crossfit joints that attract no members, and a revolving door of nail salons and wannabe hipster barber shops opening and going out of business.
Notably, none of the retail joints at street level pay enough for anyone working there to afford the astronomical rent for one of the apartments in the same fucking building. These motherfuckers can’t even set up a company town correctly…
I’m talking about taking an existing mall and converting part of it, not new constructions
I know that, but for all the reasons being discussed in detail elsewhere in this thread nobody is actually doing that. What is happening in reality is what I described, and it’s bonkers.
The only malls or retail or industrial buildings I have ever actually seen “revitalized” into housing was done by tearing them down entirely and building new buildings on the land. Around me, at least, what’s being built is what I described in my previous comment.
I’ve seen both. Our area has had, for a few years, mixed use zoning as a requirement. So a bunch of projects that clearly only wanted to do housing are doing what you describe: Housing and a meets minimum commercial/office effort. Notably while trumpeting “walkable” which is really code for “we don’t waste land on unprofitable parking lots”. So you have somewhat dense living and retail where the retail has zero parking, so the only people a business could hope to get are the people in the units immediately close by, which are not a lot, since each project seems to go for low rise housing. So you get three stories of apartments which is more dense than suburbia, but not nearly dense enough to sustain a dedicated retail presence.
But there is this mall they’ve effectively renovated into a “downtown”, adding high rise apartments, and lots of them to the massive retail presence as well as big office buildings. Critically, also expanded to an insane degree the amount of available parking. It was a pretty failing mall (like most) and now it’s doing really well, both with high occupancy for their apartments and people going there for the rather nice retail. I think this was the first project and inspired the county to decide everything will be a success if it’s just mixed use, and they haven’t really come around to realize that they haven’t succeeded in forcing the developers to do viable mixed use by the current weak regulations.
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.
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.
Ridiculous.
That makes way too much sense.
As a millenial, all I want is the LAN party old folks home.
This sounds like such bad idea. Just demolish them.
That would be really good, but this idea has been explored and unfortunately it is only viable on a very narrow amount of buildings. Most malls aren’t properly built to be housing and the costs of adapting them for housing exceed the cost of just building new housing elsewhere. And the costs of tearing it down and rebuilding are even greater. Overall, Malls are economic net negatives for communities, all single use infrastructure constructions are.
I’m down and claiming the candy store in 113!
Instead of puzzles and bingo night, we’re having GoldenEye tournaments and D&D night!
I’ll take a Payless Shoes. Usually at one of the ends, sort of tucked away. Good bit of space, and quick access to the parking lot.
Oh yeah, like 90% of that parking lot can get repurposed into a park. Throw a bus stop in there.
