What Should Be Done with America’s Abandoned Malls? (2024)

Any North American over 30 likely has memories of idle days and misspent youth congregating in enclosed shopping centers: that paean to America’s national religion, consumption. They were both a symptom of and accelerator for “white flight.” They were the social centers of the least social generation—Gen X—which has now ceded the power to make-or-break an industry to the millennial. They were centers of capitalism, and as capitalism crushed the millennial generation—so scarred by the financial crisis of 2008 were they that they began to scorn material goods in favor of experience and suburban sprawl over urban spaces—so did millennials crush the mall.

The reasons for the end of the era go beyond just millennial taste. The internet, wealth inequality, and re-urbanization all helped kill the American mall. But the dead mall has become a new sort of symbol, one of nostalgia and a sort of desire to slow the inevitable yet ever-quicker process by which modes of being become extinct.

As the now-hallowed icons to 1980s youth culture fade from view, they leave behind decaying real estate that must be repurposed, reimagined or, sometimes, simply put down. They have inspired Deadmalls.com, a YouTube series by Dan Bell, who documents his eerie findings on Instagram, and countless feature stories. But what will actually become of the spaces? There are a few options.

To Re-tenant or Redevelop?

Redeveloping a mall in its entirety can be an expensive and risky proposition. And many malls are owned by publicly traded companies whose shareholders want solid returns, not high-risk redevelopment projects. To get a loan is “very hard for any kind of speculative development,” said Spencer Levy, head of research for the Americas at CBRE, the largest commercial real estate brokerage in the world. As a result, while many malls have been turned inside out, from closed-air to open-air, it can be easier to re-tenant the existing structure, often with a grocery store as the anchor. Levy highlights the Hunt Valley Towne Center, near Baltimore, where ownership demolished the indoor Hunt Valley Mall in favor of an open air shopping center anchored by a Wegmans.

Anchor tenants, which were traditionally department stores, played a major role in the decline of malls. Apparel and accessories, the bread and butter of department stores, account for about 58 percent of total sales in malls in the U.S., Levy said. Those sectors are also the most vulnerable to “disruption,” as it is kindly put, by internet retailers. Add to that the frequent provision in mall leases that allows tenants to pay significantly less rent when anchor tenants depart, and you have a cascade effect that cripples a mall financially, sometimes leading landlords to simply hand back the keys to the bank. In 2015, The Atlantic estimated that of the 1,200 or so malls in the U.S., one third are “dead or dying.”

But how to know which malls will die as many limp along zombielike, is not so easy. One way is to look at those lacking anchor tenants or that have traditional department stores as anchor tenants. But that’s not the only approach. Many malls, especially outlet malls, still see huge sales volume, even with brick-and-mortar apparel retailers as anchors. As James Carville would tell you, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

“Demographics is an underused science,” said Brian Andrus, head of the Florida Gulf Coast Commercial Association of Realtors. “You have to establish what that area truly needs and truly wants,” before re-tenanting or redeveloping. Many areas want a grocery anchor, but others would more likely support big box stores like Walmart. Which malls need re-tenanting, redeveloping, or good old fashioned demolition is perhaps mostly a function of demographics, which are a function of the regional economy.

Have and Have Nots

“If you look at a place like New York City, there's actually a lot of mall construction going on,” said Matt Chaban, policy director at the non-profit Center for an Urban Future. He points to the outlet mall under construction on Staten Island and closed-air retail developments in Hudson Yards and the Oculus. That might seem counterintuitive, but the construction is likely a reflection of the booming economy here in general, he said.

Meanwhile in Akron, Ohio, where the Rolling Acres Mall has been overgrown to such an extent that dead mall aficionado Dan Bell saw frogs spawning in its fountain when he last visited, new mall development is highly unlikely.

“The struggles of the mall are the struggles of middle america that we're seeing all over the place,” Chaban said. Areas with high unemployment, declining populations, and low wages have some of the worst-off retail properties, creating a cycle where a lack of products and services contributes to the overall economic decline.

Of course, some malls won’t be coming back at all. America is “over-retailed,” with the most retail stores per capita of any country in the world. For malls that won’t be reoccupied, turned inside out, or redeveloped as entertainment centers, they can be converted to office spaces, as happened at the Bannister Mall in Kansas City.

Call centers are another use that is often floated, but it’s not clear if any plans to redevelop a shopping center as a call center have actually moved forward. In Austin, Texas, a community college purchased a local dying mall and made it into classrooms, office space, and a library, as The Atlantic reported.

At the Hunt Valley Towne Center, the developer also built multifamily apartments around the new, outdoor retail—a reversal of an old real estate adage that development is supposed to work the other way around, with retailers moving in once housing is built.

Chaban suggests that dead malls might also be converted to vocational training centers, which would help address a need in underserved areas that often comes hand in hand with a glut of unused mall space. Of course, it’s hard to imagine making cold calls from a disused Orange Julius. “I think one of the challenges of repurposing these spaces is they are so purpose-built,” Chaban said.

The Hawthorne Plaza Mall, in a suburb south of Los Angeles, closed in 1999 but found new life as a film location. It served as the dystopian backdrop for the movie Gone Girl and HBO’s Westworld before redevelopment plans for the mall were announced last year.

The Urban Suburban

Developers have also begun trying to urbanize malls in order to capture the millennial market, with its marked preference for cities.

“The biggest trend of all, which is not talked about often enough, is that. . .people are creating an urban suburban environment,”Levy said. That might mean more experiential retailers, such as restaurants and movie theaters, but, in a properly executed urban-suburban development, the movie theater will have reclining seats and serve beer from a local microbrewery—a happy melding of convenience and urbane tastes.

Many redevelopment plans focus on entertainment. Rollercoasters and waterslides are sometimes under consideration. A plethora of outdoor space is a must, Andrus said. Americans once fetishized being away from streets and grime; now they crave an urban “feeling.” Or they do to a point.

At the Arcade Providence in Rhode Island, developers have taken the re-urbanizing impulse to an extreme and built micro-apartments where the country’s oldest mall stood until last year.

“The most sustainable thing [underused malls] can become is urban suburban,” Levy said. He points to the Jersey City, New Jersey, waterfront as a prototypical urban-suburban development. It brings together the experiential feel of cities and the accessibility of a suburb, with a backdrop of New York City and the Hudson River.

But don’t count malls out just yet. As Levy said, while the U.S. may be the most retailed nation, it also has by far the most consumption per capita in the world. Maybe not everything from the 1980s is out of vogue.