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Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge

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Re: Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge

#271

Post by brudgers »

shard wrote: post #269
brudgers wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major projects take a couple of decades to get out of the ground. What was the demand like for housing ten years ago? What is the demand for office space like today? What was the demand for retail twenty years ago? (Low, low, and low) [1]. I agree there are only so many stores a mall can support. At that point the economically sound strategy is to stop building. It's not to layer on incidental complexity that provide…

Yes, real estate is a very regional thing, and places not affected by the S&L crisis and the dot.com crash would have different economics, for example in other countries. The place I had in my mind when replying to your comment was South Korea, where there are many mixed-use high rises with business or even malls on the first few floors, and residential above. I don't know the impact of S&L and dot.com on the economi…

The article was about the US. The economics and politics of the Korean Peninsula are rather different.

Re: Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge

#272

Post by Grimm1 »

emodendroket wrote: post #261
Grimm1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to work from home every day though and neither do a lot of people.

I have loved not commuting and I have a comfortable setup but I can’t honestly say that it hasn’t been a big problem being unable to get people’s answers to quick questions for days on end.

In my case I live in a 1br apartment where before the pandemic I was basically never home except to sleep and maybe on the weekend. Which I prefer, now having it be everything from office to social space and living space is very uncomfortable.

Re: Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge

#273

Post by flubert »

hogFeast wrote: post #99
flubert wrote: post #13

"Malls are dying" seems like a "the suit is back" sort of meme. I've literally been hearing this for 20+ years. And the mall near me seems busier than ever. Someone must be pushing this for some reason. People shorting mall real estate?

The people shorting malls have already made out like bandits. Mall operators are very close to bankruptcy. Macerich down 85% in the past five years, Simon down 70%, Alexander Baldwin down 70%...it is already over. Once these places lose their main tenant, it all shuts down. You haven't been hearing it twenty years either. Some people were putting on this trade in the early 2010s but this trade really picked up around…

>You haven't been hearing it twenty years either.

Back in the year 2000, someone created the Deadmalls.com website:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadmalls.com

...just a few random items from DDG:

From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"

"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150527125625/https://www.nytim...

From 2001: "Dying shopping malls reborn as old-fashioned downtowns"

https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-12/article...

From 2003: "Malls: Death of an American icon"

https://web.archive.org/web/20030707142032/https://money.cnn...

Cory Doctorow was talking about dead malls in 2003:

https://boingboing.net/2003/04/19/dead-mall-contest-re.html

From 1998: "Enclosed malls losing luster as well as tenants"

"Mintz thinks the vacancies signal a deeper problem -- that malls are outdated and out of touch with the needs of today's shoppers."

https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/1998/02/09/st...

And it turns out there was a book published in 2002:

"Greyfields into Goldfields: Dead Malls become Living Neighborhoods"

https://www.amazon.com/Greyfields-into-Goldfields-become-Nei...

Re: Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge

#274

Post by laylomo2 »

beambot wrote: post #207
laylomo2 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malls are already coworking spaces. People already work in them, full time, for different companies.

Let me be more concise: convert some of the dying big-box stores into open-office WeWork/Regus-style workspaces for white-collar desk workers.

According to the person I was responding to, that apparently would be an “arcology of dystopian cyberpunk”.

So it’s not cyberpunk when people work for dying big box stores, but it is when OP works in a WeWork located in the same mall?

Re: Mall department stores were struggling; the pandemic has pushed them to the edge

#275

Post by sk1459 »

brudgers wrote: post #163
sk1459 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The planners at the firm are paid to do what paying clients want. That’s what everyone there is supposed to do. What matters is that checks don’t bounce.

I’m actually trying to say that it is an industry dominated by snake-oil, charlatans and coffee-table “science”. There is no standard or obvious measure of performance, and liability is usually of little concern. The planners I know are hardly puppets of the real estate cabal and much more victims of naïveté and wiz-bang marketing. Like, I’m assuming rails-devs a decade ago and, maybe, rust devs today.
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