empty mall music reproduction is popular - this is a good one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D__6hwqjZAs
Empty malls are creepy as fuck
http://www.buzzfeed.com/...icas-abandoned-malls
The fact that some of the featured here are in Ohio, is not lost on anyone
You KNOW there’s a Developer somewhere TRYING to figure an angle on this
“Have you ever said ‘I could just LIVE in Hot Topic?’ … now you can!!!”
Actually, living in abandoned Malls was predicted in WIRED back in 1995
The mall in our town of 40,000 people is basically dead. But the big box store park is humming. It really is a type of mall. In neighbouring cities of 300,000 people the malls are humming tough to get a parking spot if you go to the mall. I don’t think malls are dead.
Yeah this mall is right off of I-95 and they’ve developed about a mile of road in front of it with all the big box stores and actually even around the mall is a bunch of restaurants, movie theater, some hotels. It’s like the core is dying but all around it seems to be doing pretty good (other than the Toys R US that closed).
Why is it that malls aren’t typically of a more mixed-use than just retail and chain dining? We have family in Melbourne, Australia and within 15 minutes of their suburban home there are two malls that are always busy, just absolutely slammed. Their use of space is much more mixed – small practice doctor’s offices, pharmacies, grocery stores, stores similar to Target, some local dining, indoor farmer’s markets at times, specialty shops, post office, etc. Rather than it being a place where you go just to look at the same stuff you can buy online for less money, it’s a place where you can go and get an entire day’s worth of errands done in one spot. There are other malls not far from them that are more like the purely retail focused American malls, and those tend to be pitiful, sad existences.
The mall near my house is awful – a sad food court, closed up shops everywhere, Macy’s used to be nice and now is dilapidated and dirty. There are only two reasons to set foot in there – to physically return an online Gap purchase or to hit a phone screen repair kiosk. The town where I grew up had a mall that was similarly dying or dead and repurposed itself into an outdoor mall – far fewer stores but those it has are bigger retailers like Sierra Trading Post, World Market, DSW, TJ Maxx, Nordstrom Rack, maybe now an REI, etc. When I’m back there it’s easy enough to just hit the one store I want to stop at (STP) since it’s right outside, which is something I wouldn’t do if I had to trudge through an entire indoor mall just to get into one store.
Retail these days is weird. Kohl’s apparently started embracing Amazon competition by now accepting Amazon returns in-store, trying to entice people through the doors in hopes some will buy there. It might be a smart play in a sea of retail stupidity.
The mall is dead. One of my best friends works for Simon Property. Their assets are positioned well and financially they’re in a good spot but their own internal analysis sees U.S.** mall square footage declining by 40%** over the next five years.
But isn’t a huge % of mall sqft taken up by the anchor stores?
Half theorizing here and half asking. I’d think they make up a lot of sqft.
Yes they do. However, the nature of retail CRE is very much win or lose. You won’t see, long term, malls where the anchors go but the smaller retailers stay. The vast majority of those leases have co-tenancy clauses so when occupancy falls below a certain threshold or a certain anchor leaves all the other tenants have the right to terminate.
So when one says that mall square footage will fall by 40%, that’s not anchors going dark but rather entire malls shutting down.
Long term I think some of the malls that go dark will be repurposed in interesting ways. I know Lockheed Martin is eyeing a busted mall in Oviedo FL (just outside Orlando) as an office/manufacturing campus. I’ve heard of proposals to turn other busted malls into hospitals. However for any of those alternate uses to make sense the price needs to be $0 IMO.
We have an outlet mall in the area. I think that if it weren’t for the Asian tour busses that are a daily occurrence, the property would be struggling.
I’ve been to two different malls twice (5 visits total) and every time busy hard to find parking.
This mall is hopping!
Real Russian Collusion.
A, O, way to go Ohio.
Around the Pittsburgh area there are people at the malls but it doesn’t appear to be near the numbers of the past and there are many more vacancies.
Oh, what’s the one that was really bad. Monroeville? My brother-in-law posted a picture of the inside a few years back. It was afterwork near Christmas, and you couldn’t see a single person in the picture.
Edit: It was the Century 3 Mall.
Without actually being in the mall business I’d speculate a lot of it is driven by co-tenancy clauses in leases and how capital-poor most mall owners/REITs are.
That is a cool doc. Will have to watch it fully soon. I’m an idiot. I thought Chrissie Hynde was from England. Even though she spent some time there, she is now just a little bit less sexy to me.
It really depends on where you are. Pentagon city and Tyson’s corner in DC both seems to be thriving. The outdoor village style mall near my family in Raleigh is thriving as well.
Last time I was in San Diego, you could find a reasonably thriving Fashion Valley mall less than a mile away from a failing Mission Valley mall, both outdoor malls, although not the village style companies are building these days.
That is a cool doc. Will have to watch it fully soon. I’m an idiot. I thought Chrissie Hynde was from England. Even though she spent some time there, she is now just a little bit less sexy to me.
Had you never heard her speak? Very midwestern accent.
It really depends on where you are. Pentagon city and Tyson’s corner in DC both seems to be thriving. The outdoor village style mall near my family in Raleigh is thriving as well.
Last time I was in San Diego, you could find a reasonably thriving Fashion Valley mall less than a mile away from a failing Mission Valley mall, both outdoor malls, although not the village style companies are building these days.
When we go to Southern California, January and July, my wife always goes to Fashion Island in Newport Beach and The Spectrum in Irvine. Fashion Island is dead, they have been having a lot of vacancies and less and less traffic. The Spectrum seems to be doing ok but still not as packed as it used to be. These are both outdoor malls and I get less traffic in January but July is beautiful.
It really depends on where you are. Pentagon city and Tyson’s corner in DC both seems to be thriving. The outdoor village style mall near my family in Raleigh is thriving as well.
Last time I was in San Diego, you could find a reasonably thriving Fashion Valley mall less than a mile away from a failing Mission Valley mall, both outdoor malls, although not the village style companies are building these days.
Some of this is driven by independent vs multi-unit mall operators. If you’re a brand like Gap and you want to go into a mall owned by Simon Property you’ll probably have to put at least ten stores in ten malls and you necessarily get to choose which ones and you certainly won’t be able to selectively shutter stores without a hefty financial penalty. The occupancy stability this provides becomes self-fulfilling after a while as you noted in your example.
I thought they did a really good job of capturing the 80s mall experience for middle schoolers. It brought back some really good memories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXyju7zFwyE
the fake commercial for starcourt mall from stranger things was one of the best things ive seen this year period
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Awesome!
it really is
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnVEnfeEDSA
Oh crap. I started going down the Youtube Rabbit Hole…here’s a super sweet 80’s advertisement from the suburban mall closest to where I grew up (suburb of vancouver)
As an aside - this mall seems to be doing well. It was gutted and renovated 5-10 years ago and seems pretty busy whenever I go into it. But suburban Vancouver has never stopped growing since the 80’s so that probably has something to do with it.