Off-topic: Antinous, is there a Complaints Desk? I’m getting sick of looking at that drawing of ”Mad Dog” Dick Cheney, and I’m a card-carrying ACLU member!

i hear some flint houses are going for 5k. What i’d do is buy it, fix it up on my vacation time, and rent it to friends back home for about 400 a month to friends or family.

;>

In college I ran a LARP (let the mockery begin) and one of the constant challenges was finding an space that wasn’t expensive, a death trap or someone’s apartment.

At one point we were gaming in a closed up store, the owner of the building was glad to have us for 5 bucks a head and we left the place cleaner than we found it.

Repurposing these huge buildings into art galleries, meeting spaces, private offices even housing is such a sound idea. There are a number of dead and dying malls here in Chicago that would be great for this.

As for the civil liberties question, what if local governments offered tax incentives to the land-owners to purchase the malls outright? Lots of these owners are stuck with white elephants, too big to fill and to much money to tear down.

Not that I’m supporting eminent domain!

Fascinating that malls started as a response to car culture and became an icon of it.

All the new development will only add to this. Buildings like the Bow, and that thing that is replacing Penny Lane, will all have street-focused retail and unobtrusive parking/loading zones. They will still have +15 (glass walkway) connections, however.

And there are crackheads/homeless both inside and outside the +15 system!

But back to the article, I’m sure it would work for some malls with street connections, but what about malls walled off by freeways on every side? That’s not urban living at all.

I don’t know how well it would urbanize… it’s just a fairly flat, one / two story sprawl. It just doesn’t seem to have the potential for density you’d get with building more vertical.

It could be turned into an interesting condo complex, with the aforementioned gardens and a few retail shops, but honestly it would seem a bit odd given the competition farther north and the… flatness of it.

Probably best would be a GarageTown or something thoroughly utilitarian.

The developers find their own uses for street things.

It even has a weekly farmers market!

Another issue of mine is a mall’s preference to a few empty storefronts than a full mall. Owners of malls would rather raise leases than, once again, focus on the long-term of the common good.

(shudder)

In the conceptions I’ve seen, the mall itself is ripped out; the outline, if it goes below grade, might be turned into a garden area. Mixed use buildings of the 2-4 story variety (see Christopher Alexander) are built in he space that was the parking lot, with covered parking integrated. The space the mall had taken up is likewise redeveloped.

Like most misunderstood aspects of New Urban design, this approach has other simultaneous strategies too. All future solutions will have to try to solve multiple problems at once, as the mess we’re in has multiple causes. In this case, the two most interesting aspects to me are these:

1 – Even if it’s currently bus-based, the transit infrastructure already exists at brownfield mall sites from their original lifetime. This is a tremendous savings of time and right-of-way and route-making saved when trying to integrate transit into new neighborhoods. In the case of brownfield malls, the transit skin and bones are already there, waiting for a reason to be again.

2 – if you look at the current pattern of urban reinvestment (a good thing), you see that costs are pushing the poor further and further out, to areas which fpr decades now have been built bereft of transit solutions, or really any thought whatsoever towards sustainability. If they’re not already, these brownfield malls are soon to be right in the hearts of those vapid neighborhoods, where those who can afford commutes the least are being forced by financial pressures to live.

Right now, brownfield mall redevelopment is still just an innovative and proactive idea. Soon, it will be a societal survival strategy, an emergency response.

We clear-cut our old growth neighborhoods throughout the entire last half of the 20th century. We put ourselves in this bind. At least approaches like this are trying what they can to find ways out again.

- Heath, Austin TX

Seriously, great if we can repurpose those buildings, but I can think of nothing more horrifying than living or working in an old mall.

The part of the equation that New Urbanists always miss is that good cities and communities almost always happen organically.

(You can see a pretty good view of it on Google Maps. It’s the brownish oblong in centre, between Elizabeth, Pearl, and Pine Streets.)

When Burlington got its second large retail mall (about two miles to the northwest) it died a dog’s death. I think about three or four of the retail spaces are occupied in 2008 despite the mixed-use pedestrian walkways, government offices across the street, lakefront park one block to the southeast, and the like.

In short, I think people hate this concept, and prefer purely commercial indoor shopping malls. Maybe not in their heads, but in their wallets and their feet, they do.

they’ve got to be better than than the modernist disasters that fucked inner city britain during the 20th century.

so long as the people who might live in these places can make decisions that actually get acted upon, not some over bearing architects dream, they’ll be fine, even great places to live.

its that good.

Of course, no one lives in Factoria, and it’s only reason for existence in the first place is T-Mobile’s historic headquarters.

Quick. Someone send this story on to Walla Walla, WA (currently in an amazingly unlikely wine industry boom) before they tear down Blue Mountain Mall.

(shudder)

Do you know how much people drop to live near shops and parks and town centers right now?

Think of the cost savings and reduced enviornmental impact of repurposing some big old department store in a mall into lofts? Turn the rest of the smaller stores into a variety of public spaces, open markets and indoor multi-use and I’d happily live in a mall!