161–170 of 275 posts
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Online retail happened, and it's not just America [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_mall#Changes_in_the_retai...
and yet i don't see any of this in Canada, malls packed, more malls built and Toys R Us still in all of them. What could be the difference between Canada and USA?
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Such proposals have been made. San Francisco's Stonestown Galleria has a proosal for adding 3,000 housing units, in the outer Sunset: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Stonestown-Galleri... San Jose's Santana Row, completed in 2002, has over 1,200 residential units: https://web.archive.org/web/20170107101031/https://westernit... (PDF)
Stonestown isn't in the Outer Sunset, its closer to "Lakeside" TBH. It'd probably be a good spot for housing since the lightrail runs next to it, its near a college (SF State), and near 280 which makes commuting to the southbay easy.
https://californiatravelmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12...
South-west side of SF, about as far from downtown as you can get.
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At the professional level, urban planners meet confidentially with developers and figure out how to make projects happen. What you see is what money wants to do. The professional urban planner's job is to generate economic development. Theories live in the academy.
A planner at my firm recently told me, with complete confidence, that on-street parking increases safety. Then I was told that research from AASHTO was just not something this person agreed with, and haven’t I heard of Strong Towns? Here’s a lovely YouTube video. I wanted to rip my own eyes out.
Malls could be the best co-working offices. Ample daytime parking, baller food courts, medical facilities, hair dressers, dentists, cafes, movie theaters, entertainment, etc all under one roof.
Epic Games bought a nearly 1 million sq-ft mall to convert into a new headquarters https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/4/22213102/epic-games-buys-ma...
That sure gives me the impression that they're tearing down the mall structure and probably parts of the parking lot, and then building new buildings.
Malls could be the best co-working offices. Ample daytime parking, baller food courts, medical facilities, hair dressers, dentists, cafes, movie theaters, entertainment, etc all under one roof.
https://patch.com/massachusetts/natick/see-inside-natick-mal... "This condo building was built in 2008 overlooking the Natick Mall. For just $925,000 you get sweeping views, 3 bedrooms, and access to all the shopping you can do (if you have any cash left over)."
But massachusetts has a weird relationship with Malls. I visited the Wayfair Offices, which sit above a really high end mall (Copley Place) in Boston. When I visited there was a pretty long line in the mall to get up the escalator to get onto the office floor...
Malls seem like the perfect mixed use type property. Stores on 1 floor, offices on 2nd floor, then 2-3 floors of housing. 1 of the big department stores could be a grocery store.
I think it must be human nature that we don’t desire housing and commerce in a single building in the same way as how we’d want kitchen and bathroom to be separate, because buildings in that apartment on top configuration always seems borderline rundown to me. Office + mall examples usually seem to be working fine, except there always are one entrance for each, distanced physically as well as in general aesthetics.
However the truth is literally the opposite.
Every city older than about 100 years is built with mixed use retail and housing.
I encourage you to do some googling
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I love how in the US, instead of building all these services and offices near each other and walkable from people's homes, we insist on ideas that force people to drive dozens of miles to get a walkable and convenient experience.
Right - I moved to the city because here in the US it's the only option to get any human-scale density. The next level down that you can commonly find is car-centric suburbia. The remaining human-scale places in the US outside of city centers are mostly isolated remnants from before we started knocking them all down to make room for cars. Nobody's building new ones. (Unlike some other countries.)
And much of the human density isn't the kind I want it to be. My faith / ethnic community don't live in city centers. They live in towns 30-40 minutes outside the city.
Anecdotal, but the pandemic has pushed our mall past the edge to the other side- one of its abandoned anchor stores is now a mass vaccination site.
I have trouble buying clothes online. It's hard to determine fit, shipping things back is a hassle beyond comprehension, and it's impossible to try things on (which is fun). Malls need to improve along a number of dimensions. Better dining, easier transportation or integration into live / work / play mixed use, and addition of grocery stores would make them better than Amazon. Add a Target to any mall and it's twice…
> Malls need to improve along a number of dimensions. Better dining, easier transportation or integration into live / work / play mixed use, and addition of grocery stores would make them better than Amazon. That's because no one implemented the original vision of the mall, at least in the US. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/05/07/victor_gruen_t... "He imagined designing an environment full of greenery and sh…
Not a North American city mind you, but a true old development city.
Human scale. People first, not cars. Everything you need to live within walking distance.
This is the vast majority of Europe.
Twice a week? Is this common for people? Even when online shopping wasn't a thing I don't think I was at a mall once a week.
