Turn malls into mixed housing/office/commercial space. You could live work and play in the same place, like a mini Mall of America.
My mall turns into a market every weekend. Anyone can sign up and come set up some tables and sell their things. Lots of homemade decor and antiques, usually some cool stuff.
Not the anchor stores, but two of the biggest store fronts which are in the corners in the main square of the mall converted. One is a 24 hour gym, the other is a gymnastics and ninja warrior type training place, and there are always classes of different age groups, and they also sell like open passes so you can go just about any day during open times and work out on the equipment. Talking about cool trampolines, shit hanging from the ceiling to climb around and swing yourself. Between those two places, there is a constant stream of people coming and going from the mall.
They also have a few stores that aren’t your typical mall stores. For example, a liquor store, dentist office, bike shop, etc.
One thing that I think has helped the mall a lot is a movie theater, and it’s the only one within a twenty minute drive, so even though it’s small a lot of people go there.
Between all that, the other stores are doing pretty well.
Housing/retail neighborhood with doors to the outside and resident community areas inside.
Pickleball court centers and medical malls of doctors offices.
This is what my local dead mall did. They gutted the Sears and put in a sports complex. It’s mostly pickleball courts now. It seems nice
I think in the current climate, public community/leisure spaces would be good. Nobody has any money, a lot of people don’t have heat (or cooling) at home, spaces where people can just exist comfortably need to be made. What if a former office could be converted into tennis courts, chess rooms, libraries, computer rooms, just a room with sofas or tables where you can sit and not buy anything?
I know everyone wants to make a profit but loads of these spaces are just empty, surely something could be done?
Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.
I don’t see it as a negative if homeless people are warm.
So, no more library?
The dead mall inside the city here became mostly parking for the stadium, with a couple of businesses and a city bus transfer center. The one to the east became an office park.
I would like to see the upper levels of office buildings converted to housing and the ground floor to retail, couple floors between left for offices.
Malls I would like them to become city parks with skate parks (they usually have more up and down than the rest of the city) and buildings with libraries and community space and events rental space.
I don’t want any of this as much as I want a healthy mass transit system, safe bike routes, and safe walking routes. But I do want the buildings converted and it is possible, I used to work for a construction company that did nothing but renovation and repurposing of commercial spaces.
I agree, use these abandoned buildings to bring back Third Spaces!
Become abandoned haunted spaces with nature overtaking.
Tear them down and give it back to nature.
In that case, no teardown required. Just let the plant take over.
That would be nice. Unfortunately that ain’t gonna happen with so many people. Feels like there is twice the number of people there used to be in my area.
Other than the awesome suggestions of having them be more focused on smaller shops and other community services…
FPV drone park!
Some sort of community space, like skate park or exhibition. In the vein of art exhibitions, it could have sections for people to do graffiti
Turn it into housing
Unfortunately, most office space is not suitable to be converted into housing. The regulations are different. For example, office spaces don’t legally have to have every room be close to an outside wall to let in natural light, but residential buildings do.
You can learn more about this problem on this great podcast episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/
High-density housing
The amount of work required to add plumbing, ventilation, and other utilities; as well as the lack of daylight to inward-facing spaces, makes conversion to housing expensive and impractical.
Libraries, museums, local mom and pop stores, basically a complete rejection of what these places stood for.
I live in NE Ohio. In Cleveland the offices buildings are getting converted to apartments and the malls are getting torn down and replaced by Amazon warehouses
At least the first half is uplifting…
Rewild the space and repurpose the materials as much as possible to build sustainable walkable community centers
