If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials.
If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials.
Imagine apartments built into what used to be department stores, (Oh, you're JC Penny 203? I'm at Sears 106). Get those old arcades up and running. Set up meal stations at the food court. Once people actually live there, stores will start to move back in.
If I'm unable to finish my life in my own home, that doesn't sound like a terrible option.
you have to go all the way down below the dirt to prep a site for residential units. With a toilet, shower, and sink per unit, the density of sewer and water plumbing is much higher than commercial. Fire codes also demand egress points (a.k.a. windows) for every bedroom - hard to do Inside a big box retail space.
As a millennial I can tell you that most millennials I know wouldn't want this but instead make it a place for none corporation and community events and such. A public place where your not forced to buy things where can just exist with others even if you have zero money and accessible to all genders and disabilities and races.
And yes retrofit part of it for people who need to get back on there feet, and homeless people.
If we could retrofit them into homeless shelters we could but it would require rebuilding mostly everything as malls are designed for stores not housing people (for instance the bathrooms are not private and not easily accessible if you live somewhere in it)
But keep the appearance of a mall.
That way when we all have Alzheimer's from micro plastics, we can wander around it and feel youngKnock these things down and plant trees and stuff.
While we're at it knock all the corporate 9to5 office work buildings where all the employees can work from home and plant trees and stuff there too.
Trees and ponds and natural parks and shit, hiking trails...etc.
As a millenial, all I want is the LAN party old folks home.
I've seen some concepts for mall-like communities based around retirement homes and elementary schools. Add a library, some shops, and other services, and you're off to a great start.
The old-but-still-able folks can serve as crossing guards, read books to kids, play games with them, perhaps help with coaching or other tasks, etc.. The young kids benefit from the wisdom and time spent with good role models, the retirees get much-needed social interaction, structure, and purpose.
A man can dream.
As other people have mentioned, this can be a hard problem.
However, malls are typically surrounded by massive amounts of space used for parking. There is a plan for the largest mall in my region to convert all of that land into residential spaces, 2000 apartments. The parking will be moving underground.
Seems like a decent idea to me.
That would be really good, but this idea has been explored and unfortunately it is only viable on a very narrow amount of buildings. Most malls aren't properly built to be housing and the costs of adapting them for housing exceed the cost of just building new housing elsewhere. And the costs of tearing it down and rebuilding are even greater. Overall, Malls are economic net negatives for communities, all single use infrastructure constructions are.
This sounds like such bad idea. Just demolish them.
I would love to see this kind of repurposing of properties to be far more common! Malls tend to be fairly central, so they make ideal locations for being nearby everything a person could need in a residential setting.
Nah. Vaporwave themed laser tag arenas. Let's go.
Maybe 10 or so years ago, was a real push to convert old malls into apartments or low income housing. Turns out it's not that easy. Those buildings were built with minimal plumbing, just a few public restrooms and limited water service for the food court. There's just not enough water/sewer to supply more than a small handful of apartments. You'd have to tear up significant portions of the building to run all new plumbing for all the kitchens & bathrooms. And that assumes the underlying city infrastructure that runs to the mall could even support the new water & sewage demands in the first place.
I'll grant you, it is a cool idea. It's just not nearly as simple as it sounds.
If I could buy a large abandoned mall, I would absolutely love to turn it into an affordable community housing complex where shops can be set up alongside the housing units. There's definitely more than enough space in any mall I've ever been to in America where you could easily renovate and turn stores into either single unit housing or maybe 2-3 units (big stores like JCPenney or Sears not included in this count because you could turn those into tens upon tens of units, assuming they're as big as the ones at the mall near where I live).
They've turned one mall in my city into a community college and office space, and the other is going strong and attracting new tenants
It'll be just like "Dawn of the Dead"
As is often mentioned, the plumbing situation makes this somewhat untenable.
But, as the world warms and outdoor recreation becomes impossible, I think they could be repurposed into indoor recreation centers, not that different from a regular mall, just less focused on shopping and more on fun and exercise.
In Austin (when I lived there) the main mall finally closed down in the 2Ks. It was obvious that nobody was going to pick it up so the city turned it into an Austin Community College campus.
Imagine how much money you could make by ripping off retired people who cannot leave the mall anymore due to old age.
Not that I would endorse this. Combining retirement homes with retail sounds dangerous for the retired.
they've already started turning them into rental units because that's apparently the entire American economy now
Malls are actually doing fine.
Apparently they were already shutting down the too-many-malls that there were, but there are still a few hundred and they're doing well.
Specifically, for the reasons you're saying, because they have a food court and arcade stations and basically our community centers, more than just shopping outlets.
It looked like all the malls were dying out because there were simply too many for the American population, but now that number's kind of stabilized and slowly growing again.
But as for the disused ones that were built during the boom 20 years ago? sure.
They'd make good housing.
In other countries, malls are still alive and well. In Philippines, that is where people literally chill in a hot tropical climate because of 24/7 air conditioning!
Malls are also seen as a sign of progress and modernity for many developing countries, so there is some cultural expectations to building and maintaining malls.
God, imagine living in a retirement community that has a Hot Topic.
This is now my favorite housing idea ever.
A working exemplar of the original vision is still functioning beautifully: "The Grove Arcade" in Asheville, NC.
My current job is in an office/call center that used to be a Famous Barr at a mall. It's funny, I worked in that mall as a teen/early 20's. Now I'm back working at the fucking mall XD (tho now I'm provisioning telephone service and processing telecom orders, not sweeping up in a movie theater or trying to upsell people at a shop)
Oh damn...
I've thought about this a lot, on account of infinite people having an insane amount of trouble just keeping consistent shelter over their heads. My gal had suggested this as a means for the homeless. I know that right now malls are being lent out to many individual small organizations (namely churches as far as I know it). But I am not sure this is sustainable as a whole. Due to maintenance costs, hazardous situations like mold and lack of privacy.
I also think about how people keep saying cost of living is why people aren't having kids. But I have lived in multiple places that were once a much larger living space that had been jankily peacemealed into several much smaller apartments. I am a human that enjoys having space of my own, even if it's micro in nature. I can't imagine I am alone in that. And I don't believe people will want to further invest in divvying up spaces in malls. At least, unless they're getting kickbacks. And they'll probably do it in the worst of ways. Leading to spaces that will be barely sound and fast to degrade but slow to fix. I mean shelter is super duper important. But I swear to god your surroundings can affect your mental state. And when you're wedged together in a decaying mold filled building with a bunch of aging individuals facing a slew of different health-issues it'll probably deteriorate your wellness faster than if we tore the places down and utilized some sort of cheap eco-friendly building material/robo-builder to assist making healthier homes.
Also mind you, I don't think we're gunna have beautiful low-income or middle-income homes if the greige, vinyl, orange-peel, chrome take-over points towards anything.
I absolutely hate malls in Russia. I'd prefer them all demolished and replaced with grass, but this seems a valid option too.
Good riddance
