Rewild the space and repurpose the materials as much as possible to build sustainable walkable community centers
High-density housing
The amount of work required to add plumbing, ventilation, and other utilities; as well as the lack of daylight to inward-facing spaces, makes conversion to housing expensive and impractical.
Tear them down and give it back to nature.
In that case, no teardown required. Just let the plant take over.
That would be nice. Unfortunately that ain’t gonna happen with so many people. Feels like there is twice the number of people there used to be in my area.
Turn them into sanctuaries.
Free-roam VR arcades where you have a whole mall or office to run around in would be cool!
airsoft/laser tag
Skate parks
Thats what they already are.
A while back ago, there was an abandoned mall, a company bought it and allowed anybody to rent a small space in the open mall as a small business shop. People would put up curtains as walls and rent was very cheap.
The place was full of small vendors, more classy than a flea market, especially with the AC, but many artists selling all forms, and many odd widgets being sold. There was even a place that did custom glass blowing, etc etc. it was a real pleasure to be in and a community thrived there.
Importantly it was open consistently each day, so you could just randomly pop in and see what’s up.
From what I understand, the place was even making a profit, but apparently not enough. It was eventually sold and now it warehouses antique cars.
I think all those artists and small vendors vanished or moved online.
I miss it.
It was good.
I’d like more of those back, and to experience what community could develop from that.
So they could essentially make the mall business model work by not charging ridiculous rents? Maybe it’s just greed that killed malls to begin with.
Haha, that’s kinda what I was thinking, they turned the mall into a… Mall
I mean, greed is what is killing our society.
But specifically about malls; I was a manager at a big department store inside a mall for a couples years. The year before COVID, the mall switched to a new renting model that was ridiculous. I can’t remember the exact details, but the price per square foot went up substantially for smaller stores. Later that year I remember having to do rounds of the mall to report to corporate how many stores were closing.
Probably got bought by a private equity firm trying to squeeze the last bits of profit out of it before offloading it to some sucker. I’m sure that one year they jacked up rent looked really good on paper until those shops had taken the time to figure out their next move.
Turn it into housing
Unfortunately, most office space is not suitable to be converted into housing. The regulations are different. For example, office spaces don’t legally have to have every room be close to an outside wall to let in natural light, but residential buildings do.
You can learn more about this problem on this great podcast episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/
Libraries, museums, local mom and pop stores, basically a complete rejection of what these places stood for.
Some sort of community space, like skate park or exhibition. In the vein of art exhibitions, it could have sections for people to do graffiti
Paintball. So many times in the 90s I’ve fantasized about this while at the mall.
… in go-carts.
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This is what my local dead mall did. They gutted the Sears and put in a sports complex. It’s mostly pickleball courts now. It seems nice
Restart their business so more people have jobs
For malls, demolish one of two of the anchor stores and use the footprint to build some 5 over 1 or 7 over 2 apartments. Build pedestrian streets out into an out of the way part of the parking lot and full that area with townhomes. Given the size of the anchor’s footprint, you may need to install a small elevated park for residents. If there is mass transit nearby, have a free shuttle run to the stop. The hope is to get a development large enough for a grocery store.
Use the mall to anchor a BRT corridor, making a stroad leading up to the mall more transit friendly. Focus on smaller buses at first with small headways to get people to use the busses. Have at least three or four sites where you can level dying strip malls and replace them with dense housing.
5 over 1, 7 over 2? What does that mean?
Floors of housing over floors of commercial.
So like, the bottom floor is a grocery store. Floors 2 through 5 is housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
Five wooden floors over one masonry, concrete, or steel floor. They are the cheapest easy to build apartment houses currently in North America.
Corporate offices might make good housing, malls could be useful for community services. Medical centres, libraries, hackerspaces, community courses (volunteer led), open up skylights in some of the old stores and build greenhouses for community gardens, temporary accommodation, kitchens for homeless people (and other services), market stall spaces and short term storefronts for small businesses so people can have a fair go at selling their stuff without being locked into years-long contracts. So many good ideas in this thread!
