“What is the story on this huge investment that Xanadu mall represented? Obama backwards prosperity at work or what?”
This mall may have been finished shortly before he was elected; I believe the retailers that had committed to it only agreed to use the minimum space they had pledged (they had a range), and it would have been half-empty. Disposable income fell quickly (the job losses in the financial sector, as well as the housing bubble, really hit this high-tax area hard), and after a few years the developers admitted the mall had been targeting wealthy foreign tourists to NYC (which had dried up).