And, isn't that sad. First we lost our great downtown shopping districts. I remember my thrill as a child in the 1960s when my Mom decided to take us downtown to the big Hudson's department store to shop.
Well, by the time I was 13 or 14 there was not longer any talk of going downtown to shop. After the riots of 1967 Detroit was too dangerous for a mom with three young kids in tow to travel to.
Hudsons Department Store, downtown Detroit 1920-1982
In 1998, after being vacant and vandalized for 16 years the grand old lady was demolished.
Hufdsons Department Store Implosion
But, as a consolation prize we had a nice new mall to shop in. Northland! Here's a little big from Wikipedia about that mall, which had a new Hudsons in it.
Northland Center was a shopping mall on an approximately 159-acre (64 ha) site located at the intersection of Northwestern Highway and Greenfield Road in the City of Southfield, Michigan, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit, Michigan, United States. Construction began in 1952 and the mall opened on March 22, 1954.Northland was a milestone for regional shopping centers in the postwar United States. Designed by Victor Gruen, the mall initially included a four-level Hudson's with a ring of stores surrounding it. In the 1960s it was joined by a modernistic cinema with a Cinerama screen. The mall was enclosed in the 1970s and expanded several times in its history. Managed by Spinoso Real Estate Group, Northland Center featured approximately 100 stores. Macy's, the last anchor, closed on March 22, 2015, exactly 61 years to the date of the mall's opening.[1]
Of course the cancer spread, the same demographic that made Downtown a high-crime no-go zone for nice ladies to go shopping worked it's magic on Northland too.
In February 2015, following the closure of the anchor stores, a local judge announced that the mall would be closing as of March 2015.[11] Around this time, the mall's official website closed.There is nothing unique about all this, it's happened in dozens of cities across America. But here we are and we still aren't really facing up to our problems and addressing them, we're talking in euphemisms.
Failed Northland Mall shortly before closing, 2015On October 7, 2015, the city of Southfield purchased the property for $2.5 million with plans to demolish the property.[12][13]
We are moving from first generation suburbs, to second generation suburbs, to exurbs, all to maintain some semblance of normalcy and community.
I guess the current end state is living in rural communities more than 500 miles from the nearest "urb" and doing all your shopping via Amazon.
Aint' diversity GREAT!