Jun

28

My father (RIP) joked back in the 1980s that when our local northeast Ohio mall died that it would make a great prison. At the time we laughed because we never thought the mall would ever lose its appeal–I mean it had an Orange Julius store in it–what could be better than that? Well that mall did die and it still is just one huge boarded up bereft eyesore. The mall up the road 3 miles in the next town just lost its Sears anchor –recent December announcement. And this mall will be the next to die. Another 5 miles up the road in a better neighborhood is a mall that had to restrict unchaperoned teens on weekends due to a mass teen flash mob that went wilding–terrorizing the people actually shopping. It will be the next to go–people do not want to be harassed in a captive space when they go out to shop. The trend seems to be more of these outside based shopping plazas where you walk outside and stroll from store to store and enjoy open air and green space, etc. The "everything under one roof" concept seems to be going away.

What will eventually develop out of these dinosaur chunks of dead mall space in prime locations in less that prime towns? These towns lost middle america–maybe prisons, or halfway houses, or a la Trump–new job training centers, or low rent housing for displaced illegal aliens, or detention centers for questionable illegals, or new factory centers for returning blue collar jobs. I do not know the answer.

anonymous writes: 

The dead mall long standing empty property and another one about 20 miles away were bought by Amazon to be turned into warehousing distribution centers . Both will be high tech built for drone delivery. Not many flesh and blood workers to be getting jobs in these places. However, the building trades will be quite busy and there will be contractor dislocations and shortages of cement and rebar, etc to be anticipated.

Rocky Humbert writes:

It is arguable that this country has way too much retail space. It is arguable that Class A malls will survive, but Class C malls (that still look like the 1950's) will fail. It is arguable that population movements will render some malls unprofitable. It is arguable that the valuations of REITS are too high relative to their growth prospects and trend in interest rates. But the "Anchor Tenant" is a legacy of a bygone era….

Lastly, I will speculate that people who live in large urban centers (especially New York City) have little understanding of the social phenomenon of malls– and how they are the climate-controlled "main street" in many places. 


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