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Agreed. The more popular new shopping areas I’ve been are outdoor “malls”. Shopping mixed with outdoors, and as you said greenery, art, music and novelties. A lot of indoor malls are dying. I can remember when the same empty places exploded in the 90s.
Lots of parts of the country have unpleasant weather much of the year.
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.
This suggestion put me in mind of George Romero’s seminal 1978 analysis of the potential for reallocation and repurposing of large-scale commercial property, and in 2021 the notion of high-density rehousing for communities displaced by a public health crisis seems all the more relevant.
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Wonder if zoning laws have a big effect on that.
Probably more like there’s semantics triggered fear in having home literally on top of a supermarket, as opposed to two being mentally separate.
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.
Things like this exist in some city centers - but I’ve never seen one in the normal areas malls lurk. The three types usually try to stay some distance from each other unless forced together by exorbitant land prices. The surviving stores that used to be anchor candidates seem to be happy being on their own in a sea of dedicated parking.
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.
Most malls I've seen are one-story (rarely two), and given the natural cost-minimizing nature of their construction I doubt that you could just build more stories atop the existing structure (but I'd like for an engineer to chime in).
I imagine Sbarro, Orange Julius, Aunt Annies, etc, are probably also struggling.
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Lots of parts of the country have unpleasant weather much of the year.
We've got outdoor malls in Chicago. They're more popular than the indoor malls even in the winter.
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.