In The Land Of Dead Shopping Malls: Smart Solutions For A Retail Apocalypse

Malls are being mauled. In case you’ve been paying closer attention to Wall Street or the housing market lately, rest assured that America’s once-bustling shopping meccas are doing just as poorly.

Last month, General Growth Properties, the country’s second largest mall owner, declared bankruptcy. Anchor chains are dropping like flies, from Circuit City to Filene’s Basement. The trend has even reached the level of irony as liquidation resellers are being liquidated. The practical implication of all this is that local malls are going dark all the time across the country, with the carnage being documented at sites like DeadMalls.com.

It’s fair to assume to that these vacant structures are now done forever–at least as old-school malls. But rather than letting these massive properties become gaping holes in the fabric of our communities, it’s time find ways to reimagine them as vital, forward-looking redevelopment projects. This is exactly what Ellen Dunham Jones and June Williamson have done in their book Retrofitting Suburbia. Recently we spoke with Dunham-Jones, the director of the architecture program at Georgia Tech, about how to repair the legacy of this failed American institution.

In one sense your book is about addressing the structural problems with American suburbs. What do you see as the most acute symptom right now of that something is out of whack?
Households that make under $52,000 a year on average are now spending a third of their income on transportation because of where we’ve put the “affordable” housing. Suburbia was premised as the affordable way for households to grow and thrive. But that’s turned into drive-till-you-qualify affordability–and, in the long run, that’s not affordable.

Wow, that’s a lot. No wonder we’re going broke.
It’s amazing: ask people how much they spend on housing and they can always tell you. But ask how much they spend a month on transportation and people are like, “Uh, I dont know.” There’s car payments, insurance, depreciation, and you have to calculate all of that, and then gas. There’s a great website that was put together by the Center for Neighborhood Technology at the Brookings Institution looking at the combined costs about 30 major metropolitan areas.. They said if we’re going to talk about affordability we have to look at housing plus transportation, because increasingly transportation constitutes more of the household budget than housing and yet we haven’t been thinking about it.

A year ago when gas was at $4, you could feel the system starting to come unraveled.
Exactly. I think the foreclosure crisis was party triggered by high gas prices because of where we put the so-called affordable housing. But it has proven unaffordable not just to households, but to communities that are constantly building new infrastructure further and further out. Yet most of the land in this country that has any prospect of development is still zoned for single family homes. We’re still planning for this Ozzie and Harriet demographic that just doesn’t reflect reality anymore.

So how do malls fit into this picture?
The first generation of malls and office parks and subdivisions were built at the edge of cities. They were intentionally car dependent. But retail keeps seeking out the cheaper land, further out, and so every five or ten years another mall is built another five or ten miles away. Ironically now, our early generation suburban properties suddenly have relatively central location. Sprawl, the same force that killed them, is now making them extremely valuable.

When you look at these old malls today, what do you see?
We characterize a lot of malls and similar sites–boxes surrounded by lots of parking–as “underperforming asphalt.” That’s the case whether it’s an apartment complex or an office park or some form of retail. Developers have started seeking out those sites, because they tend to have pretty decent local access. Of course, more and more people are looking for urban housing types, looking for a more urban experience. They want to live near work, they want night life, they want to network, and they don’t want a mall–but they’ll take a lifestyle center or, better yet, a town center with live/work/play all together.

Redeveloping Belmar

What’s a good example of how a mall site can be redeveloped?
Belmar, a development in Lakewood, Colorado, used to be a mall called Villa Italia. It’s a pretty great on a lot of levels. We dedicate a whole chapter in the book to it. It went above and beyond in terms of finding ways to be green. Aesthetically, the quality of the construction has been better than most, and I like the fact that there’s a mix of some more modern design in there and it’s not only neo-traditional. It’s very well integrated with bus, and there’s light rail coming that will be within walking distance.

In your book you talk about another redeveloped mall in Denver that’s very different than Belmar.
It’s interesting to compare Bel Mar with the Cinderella City mall project, in Englewood, another suburb of Denver. Like Belmar, Cinderella City was a tear down, though the department store stayed up and became the city hall. It’s got transit integrated right into it. It also has a Wal-Mart. In terms of residential development, it only has rentals, no condos. It’s at a much lower price-point than Bel Mar, a more affordable version of a redeveloped mall.

Transit at redeveloped Cinderella City mall

It seems like a good thing to have both models out there.
Absolutely. Englewood is definitely an intriguing one. It’s got a lot of public art,. It’s kind of funky. There’s still just these biiiig parking lots, but it’s an interesting hybrid. Which one would i rather live at? Well, if I could afford it I’d rather live at Bel Mar.

Tell me about University Town Center.
That’s another one that we really were excited about. University Town Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, in suburban DC. It’s an in-filled office park and I think that’s a really cool project. Edward Durel Stone, who designed the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kennedy Center in DC, was the architect for the original office park and these office buildings kind of look like versions of the Kennedy Center. They’re remaining exactly as they are and they will continue to be office buildings and then what’s happening the DC metro system will extend and will stop diagonally across the highway from it. The owner will build a main street between the buildings and put in retail and stack above it. There’s also a residential tower. It’s really creating a very mixed use piece.

What similarities do these and the other cases you look at share?
Most of the retrofits that we saw were on very low density one-story stuff, so in most cases the buildings were just scraped and you’re starting over–though usually if there’s a department store, it gets reoccupied. So it was nice to find an example where they kept the buildings–that’s by far the most sustainable direction.

You’ve also noted some successes in more improvisational mall rehabilitation.
A lot of older strip malls are getting retrofitted into denser, mixed use town centers. There are some structural advantages to rehabbing. New construction is always more expensive than buying into existing construction. Essentially what Jane Jacobs points out way back in Life and Death of Great American Cities is that part of what’s so attractive about older neighborhoods is that they can afford to have, you know, the music teacher school or the shoe repair shop or obscure little hobby stores–the independent mom and pops. With new construction, the rents are just too high. There’s a whole lot of this going on around Atlanta and parts of DC. These older strip malls have turned into immigrant destinations and suddenly you see mom and pop shops and health clinics and libraries in that immigrant group’s language. They’re suddenly really serving specific local needs in a way that brand new construction never would.

One of the most stunning facts in your book is that the US has six times more retail space than any European country.
Yes, we’re at about 20 square feet per person. Canada is next highest at about 11.

After years of living in the red, our consumption habits arguably have shifted to permanently lower levels. This seems like a serious problem not only for retailers, but for communities that have a lot of retail space.
Nobody knows what the appropriate amount of retail space is, and I don’t think there’s a magic number. As best I can tell, Atlanta is almost 24 square feet per person and I think we’re really over-retailed. We’re expected to lose about 10 million square feet here. But that would only knock us down to about 21 or 22. We’d still be over national average. I dont know what a realistic number is, but I do think there’s a correction going on.

How did we get into this fix?
Whats kind of interesting is that retail sales per square foot has been declining for a long time. The chain stores have known that, but until recently their response has been to build more square feet even in the long run it’s a self-defeating cycle. It’s been the only way to get more revenue–to continue just building more. Clearly we’re seeing that that strategy doesn’t work.

In a broader sense, we’ve built the country a certain way. It’s stupid to second guess. What should the plan be going forward for American cities?
A team of us were invited by the History Channel to take part in this show called The Future of the City. They picked three cities and invited teams to imagine those places a hundred years from now. I was on a team looking at Atlanta. We really focused on how to reverse sprawl–but also recognized that Atlanta’s is going to be the first city on the east coast engaged in west coast-style water wars. So what we did, first off, was put a thousand foot buffer on every stream bed. The next order of business was to really expand transit. Luckily, Atlanta has a ton of railroad lines and we used all of them for some form of mass transit. We also came up with the idea where folks who live too far from transit or too close to a stream bed are given the means to transfer their development rights to a transit corridor and then move there. So those far flung subdivisions become re-greened and they become productive land–for instance, for intensive urban agriculture.

MORE WITH ELLEN DUNHAM JONES — INCLUDING SOME MORE DETAILED TALK ABOUT POLICY SOLUTIONS — IN COMING DAYS.

Top two photos via Retrofitting Suburbia on Facebook; Cinderella City photo from TransitBest blog