Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept • Hacker News Board

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#131

Post by seanp2k2 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

niftich wrote: post #72

guyzero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning can be an issue - there's an abandoned mall in Cupertino that's probably half a mile from the new Apple HQ. And to say it's prime land is an understatement - the entire area is desperate for new housing. Current proposal is for 2,400 housing units on the land. But previous zoning proposal that were ballot initiatives got defeated (hurray democracy) and it's required a state bill to force the city's hand for zo…

Residential vs. non-residential zoning always tries to tilt towards non-residential, because it has a better potential of return. Although both pay property taxes and both require utility services like water, sewer, and waste collection, non-residential properties attract both in-town residents and outsiders from other jurisdictions, who then typically spend some money in your town. Meanwhile, residential attracts ne…

Or even worse, they transfer their Prop 13 to a “replacement property”: https://blog.yonathan.org/posts/2017-10-transferring-prop13-...

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#132

Post by prolepunk » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

pascalxus wrote: post #124

Malls, yuck! I find little attractive about them, and I'm not surprised no one's going any more. malls are dying because they're all based on materialist consumerism: something millennials want no part of. Here's my suggestion. Fill them with Libraries, Gyms, yoga centers, Cafes, Restaurants, movie theaters, science museums, bike repair shops, ceramic hobby shops and indoor swimming pools, theaters and historic museu…

Ironically enough the malls were envisioned to be that by the person who came up with the idea, the devil's bargain here was letting cars be the part of the equation.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-gruen-effect/

Also I'm not sure about the egalitarianism of the millenials. Millenials shop at Amazon, and we've seen article after article reporting on deplorable ways the company in treats its workers.

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#133

Post by throwawayjava » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

pascalxus wrote: post #124

Malls, yuck! I find little attractive about them, and I'm not surprised no one's going any more. malls are dying because they're all based on materialist consumerism: something millennials want no part of. Here's my suggestion. Fill them with Libraries, Gyms, yoga centers, Cafes, Restaurants, movie theaters, science museums, bike repair shops, ceramic hobby shops and indoor swimming pools, theaters and historic museu…

> they're all based on materialist consumerism... Libraries, Gyms, yoga centers, Cafes, Restaurants, movie theaters, science museums, bike repair shops, ceramic hobby shops and indoor swimming pools, theaters and historic museums

Aside from libraries and (some but certainly not all) museums, aren't all of these examples of things that fit well within materialist consumerism?

I also prefer yoga studios, expensive coffee, fancy restaurants to specialty knives, clothes shopping, shoe shopping, and food courts.

But those sorts of personal preferences are just matters of choosing what to consume, which doesn't seem like a fundamental or important difference.

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#134

Post by seanp2k2 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #100

Tiktaalik wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the land is valuable. The building (and sea of parking) on it is built using last century thinking. Rezone and densify, and build a mixed use walkable community of residential commercial and office.

Some comment here on HN a month or so ago clarified this for me. It's more efficient to have a delivery truck go around to ten different houses than it is to have each of ten different vehicles drive from their houses to a central location. Now if only there were some way to do that with people , not just with stuff (cough mumble public transit cough).

“But I don’t want inner-city crime coming to MY neighborhood!” See also: why BART doesn’t go down the peninsula to San Jose like it was supposed to. Original BART system plan: https://io9.gizmodo.com/5866928/a-map-of-san-franciscos-subw...

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#135

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #133

pascalxus wrote: post #124

Malls, yuck! I find little attractive about them, and I'm not surprised no one's going any more. malls are dying because they're all based on materialist consumerism: something millennials want no part of. Here's my suggestion. Fill them with Libraries, Gyms, yoga centers, Cafes, Restaurants, movie theaters, science museums, bike repair shops, ceramic hobby shops and indoor swimming pools, theaters and historic museu…

> they're all based on materialist consumerism... Libraries, Gyms, yoga centers, Cafes, Restaurants, movie theaters, science museums, bike repair shops, ceramic hobby shops and indoor swimming pools, theaters and historic museums Aside from libraries and (some but certainly not all) museums, aren't all of these examples of things that fit well within materialist consumerism? I also prefer yoga studios, expensive coff…

Well at least the results don't end up in landfill.

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#136

Post by mdorazio » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

bcrescimanno wrote: post #130

Here's an anecdote about my experience at a mall yesterday. I needed some new shoes: I went to the Skechers store. There were 4 people working. Not a single one ever offered to help me. I had to walk up to the counter and the girl looked shocked when I asked her to get me my size to try on. She handed me the box and walked away. I never saw her again and walked out without making a purchase. I went over to Macy's to…

To play devil's advocate here...

1) Are you incapable of finding the right size shoes yourself? The boxes are usually laid out fairly logically and it's pretty rare for there to actually be anything of use "in the back".

2) Hiring people to provide the level of service you're asking for would significantly increase the cost of labor over the minimum wage kids that usually staff these stores. I'm fairly certain the cost increase would guarantee the store goes out of business with the razor thin margins they usually have. Put another way, do you really think paying 50% more for higher quality employees would guarantee 50% more sales revenue?

A big reason online shopping wins is because no one has the expectation that an actual human will help them purchase things, and the labor and rent costs are tiny in comparison to retail.

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#137

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

niftich wrote: post #64

Malls were always predicated on the assumption that well-to-do suburbanites, increasing in wealth and in number due to relative prosperity in the upper subdivisions of salaried workers, would spend their disposable incomes on getting boutique, brand-signalling merchandise for themselves and their children. This was a trend that was evidently worth commercially exploiting at a time when malls were being built, but by…

Compare all this to Europe and UAE.

No, retailers are struggling in the UK at the moment, there have been a number of high profile closures and restructurings. We haven't got the same capacity problems of the US but shopping habits are definitely changing.

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#138

Post by touristtam » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #85

selimthegrim wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mall was this? Randall? Parmatown? Tower City? Arcade sounds like one of the old downtown ones....

It's probably the 5th Street Arcades https://www.5thstreetarcades.com/ It's really a fantastic space, and it was basically empty just a few short years ago. That said, its model is not necessarily a solution to suburban mall decay, as it was already part of a dense downtown with a growing residential population and a captive workday population that often uses the arcades as a walkway between Euclid and Prospect. Many…

It is facinating how the shopping mall model from 70/80s has been on a decline for the last 20 years: https://www.economist.com/node/10278717

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#139

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #104

jdonaldson wrote: post #93

It's hard to explain how important malls were to some of my younger colleagues, or to folks who didn't grow up in some no-name midwestern suburb like I did. Malls were temples and town squares. They were facebook. They were the internet. Virtually all of your exposure to the "outside world" happened there. Malls were incredibly well built and thought through. They were the crown jewel for many mid-size towns (perhaps…

I think this might be US-centric phenomena. While we have some Malls in the UK, I believe most shops never really left the high-streets here (until the rise of the internet).

We did get a lot of out of town supermarkets though and they killed off lots of butchers, bakers, greengrocers and such like in town centres.

Re: Mall landlords struggling to find takers at a price they’ll accept

#140

Post by rhombocombus » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #136

bcrescimanno wrote: post #130

Here's an anecdote about my experience at a mall yesterday. I needed some new shoes: I went to the Skechers store. There were 4 people working. Not a single one ever offered to help me. I had to walk up to the counter and the girl looked shocked when I asked her to get me my size to try on. She handed me the box and walked away. I never saw her again and walked out without making a purchase. I went over to Macy's to…

To play devil's advocate here... 1) Are you incapable of finding the right size shoes yourself? The boxes are usually laid out fairly logically and it's pretty rare for there to actually be anything of use "in the back". 2) Hiring people to provide the level of service you're asking for would significantly increase the cost of labor over the minimum wage kids that usually staff these stores. I'm fairly certain the co…

A lot of these stores still operate on a model that requires a salesperson to fetch the product (i.e. the non-display shoes are kept in the back). That in combination with the ever dwindling margins in a brick and mortar retail store makes it difficult to hire adequate staff to meet these needs, that or you wind up paying people such a low wage that you don't attract folks who are very interested in customer service int he first place. This is a phenomenon that I have seen across lots of segments of retail, and I predict that in the next decade we will see a dramatic change in the way retail business is conducted.