Recently I learned WHY this happens. The previous tenants (which were chain stores) signed multi-year leases. As long as the parent corporation exists, it must pay rent for that space until the lease runs out. The owner apparently has insufficient incentive to find a new renter (or perhaps permit a sublet arrangement) as long as the money still is flowing in. Out-of-town owners may neither notice nor care what the persistently empty storefront does to the neighborhood. They do not invest to spruce up the worn space so that it can compete with newer malls that have opened near a new highway entrance. If the whole mall loses money for them, maybe it offsets profits from some other property they own – such tax benefits can encourage the owner to neglect its outmoded malls.

It also happens that (for other reasons) our town lacks inexpensive space for local start-up businesses. We have just begun to think about whether it is possible to use the dead mall space for this. Can we make a workable business model? How to get the owners to agree? We don’t know yet.

I’m sure you may remember East Hills mall here in Pittsburgh. That and Eastland Mall were two in the suburbs that have never recovered. They are (and have been for twenty or so years) big abandoned complexes. Every now and then someone tries to have a go at getting them up and running. Instead we got two things:

1.) Bigger stuff like Pittsburgh Mills which is a huge mall-plex in the middle of nowhere

2.) The creation of so-called town centres in the parking lots of older malls.

Of course, Pittsburgh is about ten years behind the times so I guess we’ll go through a lot of other abandoned solutions before we get to anything useful.

Scott

Years ago I lived across the street from Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, Washington. At the time it was about 80% EMPTY. Death was around the corner. But the owner/manager started a farmer’s market and offered space for near zero rent plus a percentage of sales. It filled up and prospered because it opened the door to local businesses looking for a niche. Today it has morphed back into a collection of big-box and mall-centric shops but for a time it was a great example that a local, diverse ecosystem could recover and thrive.

I see little hope for our seemingly limitless quantity of decaying malls. Some of the New Urbanist re-creations have been inspiring but ultimately I think the lack of diversity between malls will kill off most of them.