This NYT story is a day late and dollar short: even their occupancy & health stats are misleading as most covered malls have already been torn down in the U.S. in the preceding decades.
I know that almost all the covered malls ever built in Colorado have already been torn down and replaced with clusters of drive-up big box stores. There’s only a handful of covered malls still in operation in Colorado.
And it’s got nothing to do with haves and have-nots, which of course is the prism that NYT exclusively views the world.
The real reasons covered malls have died:
1. Internet shopping: infinitely better selection, much better prices, MUCH more convenient, and MUCH quicker than mall (or any other kind) of shopping.
2. Shift in merchandise preferences: most people are more interested in buying stuff like electronic gadgets from Best Busy and the like, rather than candles and Hallmark Cards and the other kind of useless crap sold in covered malls.
3. Time: most people are in a hurry and don’t have time to browse and/or walk for miles past hundreds of stores they could care less about to purchase something from the store they DO want to buy something from; they want to drive up to the front door of the store they need something from, go in, buy it, and then leave.
Colorado has low black population and your two biggest cities are boomtowns....or you’d deal with that as mall death too
In the south black creep will kill a mall quick
I’ve seen this since the early 70s
Build a mall multilevel in high end urban area or way out where its rich white bucolic
Like Franklin TN where I live...
But since we now have the only safe multi tiered mall price wise in metro Nashville we get a lot of riff raff coming out here
Its funny...the new model is like better decorated clustered shopping centers in the 50s and 60s
Like the Avenue in Murfreesboro TN
Malls are just not the ideal anymore
Nashville like Denver or Austin has a huge immigration of youth hipsters taking over city core
I expect new retail concepts to accommodate
Lupton Simon Crowe and Davenport families take note