Business Insider must have been channeling some urban planning magazine last week when it asked what could be done with the hundreds of shopping malls suffering from the great retail apocalypse caused by Amazon and other on-line retailers. The publication’s answers leaned heavily to uses that need government subsidies, including art galleries, classrooms, community gathering spaces, indoor farms, farmers markets, public libraries, public walkways, and other public spaces.
The Antiplanner remembers when Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, decided it needed new office space, so it bought a former Sears Roebucks building. It could have torn down the building and built a new one for $15 million. But to prove its commitment to reuse and recycling, it converted the existing Sears store into an office building. The cost? $30 million.
The humorous postscript was that the Sears building was so old that its toilets had never been hooked up into Portland’s sewer system. For years after Metro–the agency whose mission was to protect the region’s water, air, and land–moved in, it was dumping raw human sewage into the Willamette River. If they had simply replaced the building, they would have discovered the need for hook ups right away.
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Back in 1972, architect Robert Venturi and some of his colleagues suggested that architects and builders could learn a lot from Las Vegas because the city was built, and rebuilt, and rebuilt again, to please American audiences. What made Las Vegas’ rapid evolution possible was that permitting was easy, construction was cheap, and so buildings that in another city would be repurposed were simply torn down and replaced with something newer and more advanced.
Too many cities have put up barriers to new construction. Among those barriers are lengthy permitting times and high housing prices that can increase the cost of labor by 40 percent or more. In some cases, old shopping malls might be effectively repurposed. But in most cases, the most efficient thing to do would be to tear them down–if the government gets out of the way.
Quite a few malls have been demolished in the Denver metro area: Cinderella City, Buckingham Square, Westminster, and Villa Italia come to mind. They were razed and replaced with housing, small retail, and big box stores, in the same way the old Stapleton Airport , Lowry AFB, and University of Colorado Health Sciences Center were razed and rebuilt. Those projects have added a lot of housing supply to the market although with the lowest unemployment rate in the country housing demand still remains high.
There is no great retail apocalypse. Academics have well documented that retail square footage in relation to population and income has been overbuilt since the 80s. These retail problems today have not been demonstrated to be any worse than other times.
Ya, ya, I get that it may seem picky to point out that it’s not an apocalypse. This isn’t some meteor coming out of no where and smashing a city to bits. This is a long process that has been much more subtle, it’s a shift in shopping behavior.
The shift just isn’t online, it’s store based too. Just as Home Depot, Kohls and others have chipped away at Sears for decades, just as Best Buy killed electronics sales at old fashioned department stores. And of course now – the circle of life, so to speak – Target and Wal-Mart have chipped away at Best Buys sales with their beefed up electronics selection.
BTW, Mr. O’Toole you’re touching on a couple problems that we humans seem to have. We don’t want to throw anything away. Maybe worse, we want things to stay the same forever.