Malls could be the best co-working offices. Ample daytime parking, baller food courts, medical facilities, hair dressers, dentists, cafes, movie theaters, entertainment, etc all under one roof.
Malls as coworking space would be literally the arcologies of dystopian cyberpunk.
No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world. Just one giant homogenised hermetically sealed world.
It wouldn't be "best" for many people.
Maybe "convenient" for bosses who don't like how much productivity they lose when a Meat Flavoured Productivity Unit has to go get a haircut or imbibe sustenance....
Malls can definitely obtain natural lighting if architected properly (eg sky lights and light pipes) -- malls are no different than other commercial offices.
For example: I used to work at GoogleX's "San Antonio station", which was a converted shopping mall, and it had great lighting, even on lower floors.
With multiple employers in same building, you'd also have many more socializing options -- including random colleagues who drop by to run errands.
Besides, what would you suggest instead -- let them turn into suburban blight?!
Where does the money come from? Cities are cash-strapped, which makes demolition & park development unlikely. Existing property owners aren't exactly in the business of giving away prime realestate or operating charities -- they'd probably opt for more suburban housing developments.
Cities are not cash strapped, they just claim to be when they don't want to pay for something. Most cities have tons of cash flow paying for roads, services like garbage/recycling, maintaining existing parks.
If they really cant find the money sell it to developers to make condos or single family homes.
Somehow a small city I used to live in managed to do it. The mall declined to the point that all that was left were the anchor stores and a few other internal stores when they decided to demolish it.
They left the major anchor stores (Target, Von Maur, Hobby Lobby), turned most of the center of the mall into parking lots, and put up a few multi-store strips around it, and it went from empty to having thriving businesses that have mostly all remained the past 16 years.
This guy has more details and took some pictures of the mall just before they closed it:
The city would only pay for redevelopment if it owned the land underneath and that land was unsellable. And if that's the case, the city has bigger problems than the mall (something like Detroit, where, for many years, there was simply nobody there to buy/use/redevelop).
Provide the right financial incentives and a developer should be able to do it on terms favorable to the city (vs getting little/no revenue from a derelict mall complex).
Indoor square footage is not, and will never will be a relevant constraint on food production.
At $400/square foot to build a mall, and $XY/square foot/year to maintain it, the only thing that makes financial sense to grow in one is black market marijuana.
Ok but the perfect isn't the enemy of the good here.
Being able to go for a climate-controlled one-kilometer walk every lunch break is a real luxury for a lot of people, it's way better than a cell in some high-rise near the highway. The mall could have a hackerspace too!
The simple solution is work from home because most people already have a home, and simple solutions win. The only reason you're mentioning malls is because they are there, but unless you're a mall-walker on the weekends, I'm pretty sure the average developer's definition of a good lunch break isn't "walking past the mall McDonald's 3 times before returning to your mall wework" or whatever.
Assuming that everyone has a comfortable and spacious home with a desk&chair area is, well, a bad assumption.
A bunch of people I know are now working significantly more time from a couch, in a clearly non-ergonomic position. We will see and hear about the real damage 5 years from now.
We are 3 up (two adults, 1 child) in a 2 bed flat (apartment) with no garden and for the last year both my partner and I have been WFH full time (in my case I changed job to one that is 100% remote forever).
I couldn't agree more, the transition for me was trivial - I'm a developer who plays games, I already had a nice chair, two 27" 4K displays and a fast desktop so for me my hardware/comfort improved - for my partner work issued her a just about passable laptop and..well that was it.
With the lack of space I used a spare 27" monitor I had putting it on the boys desk with a decent external mouse/keyboard and we bought him a gaming chair - that way my partner can use his room as an office while he's at school/his fathers but yeah it's not be great for her.
We are moving next year and my only criteria for the house is at has to have either a large brick built garage or a concrete garage and space for an office pod in the garden, working from home around a near-teenager was challenging (and frankly that's just gonna get worse) and long term not something I want - I need quiet solitude to work most comfortably.
Just curious, where are you that you're moving from a small-ish flat to a home with enough garden space for a stand-alone ADU/man-cave/office?
I assume you're moving out of the city and into the suburbs or similar?
I wonder if the last year of WFH will actually make suburban sprawl worse in the short- to medium-term? Lots of people moving out of city flats into suburban homes for just the reasons you mention. I can't blame them, but it's probably not sustainable either. [and easy for me to say, as I already own a suburban home]
I don't want to discard the fact that this is a real problem right now but in an efficient remote economy, employees are more likely to move to lower cost of living locations, possibly with better life quality and away from crazy overpriced urban centers that optimise for high salary in exchange for very little space. I think a world where people are more evenly distributed and have larger dwellings than a single room is more positive than keeping everyone clustered and have them working in malls.
There is a certain demographic in which a fair number of people find (certain) cities attractive. But, honestly, take convenience to employment out of the equation and the attraction of cities shrinks a lot. And if enough higher earning people move out, the city won't be as attractive to others. Take a look at NYC, among others, in the 70s and 80s.
Yup. Even people with floor space had to make significant adjustments. We had to buy 2 office chairs, 1 desk, and ended up buying some other furniture to make the wife's home office more pleasant. Probably $5000 total. Would have rather spent that on something fun, but oh well.
Our employers did at provide additional monitors (both of us already had suitable laptops), which was nice and better than many received.
OTOH, sometimes the budget needed to fix the ergonomic issue (if it can be fixed) is massive.
Especially for those with already limited space. It may become a useless spending when companies back to WFO after pandemi over or changing company that don't support WFH.
I have loved not commuting and I have a comfortable setup but I can’t honestly say that it hasn’t been a big problem being unable to get people’s answers to quick questions for days on end.
In my case I live in a 1br apartment where before the pandemic I was basically never home except to sleep and maybe on the weekend. Which I prefer, now having it be everything from office to social space and living space is very uncomfortable.
Anecdata, but the company I moved to a few months ago have 18 staff: only 3 of us have a dedicated work space (from the morning standups that I can see).
My brother works from home now and he's either in his living room or kitchen and my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office but prior to that worked from her dining room.
I've worked from home for a few years and have an office (spare bedroom we didn't use) so it's no big deal for me.
I'd love to see a large-scale survey around home office working.
> my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office
This is an interesting change happening in many places now and I wonder how it will impact the higher end of the market (and expectations) in a long term. Some people in larger houses recently went from 4 bedrooms with lots of space to 1 bedroom, 1 nursery, 2 offices. (yes, nice problem to have in practice, but still interesting)
I work for an all-remote company so there has been literally no change in my work life as a result of the pandemic.
It's not for everyone! Even for me, if there was a mall in my area, which had coworking, an attached hackerspace and, let's say, a gym? I would pick up a minimal "grab a desk" coworking package.
Why not? Sometimes being around people is nice. Sometimes there's lawn work or construction happening near my house. I could make a thermos of coffee and a protein shake first thing in the morning, head to coworking, get some stuff done, hit the gym, have my choice of food court meals, and head home for a shower and a quiet afternoon at home. Or call it a soft half-day and spend the afternoon working on something with circuit boards, or just shooting the breeze with the hackers.
Gosh this is sounding really nice! Anyone finds a setup like this, let me know!
There are plenty of malls in SF Bay Area that actually have good & healthy options instead of McDonalds. That's a solvable problem -- just like how some tech companies have amazing cafeterias.
What kind of malls do you have in your area to have no natural light? Pretty much every mall I’ve ever been to has tons of skylights and rooftop windows.
That's generally only in the common areas, not in the retail spaces that make up the vast majority of the actual floorplan and where any converted offices would actually be.
Yeah but that could be redesigned. They could punch some holes in the external facing sides of the former retail stores and add some glass. They could add more skylights on the roof and funnel them down too.
> No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world.
I think it's a US thing. Many malls have significant sun-light, though not for the stores (I think this is done on purpose so that you are not distracted and focus on the goods). This could be re-purposed, however. Concrete walls get removed and replaced by glass.
I’m not an architect but I doubt that. Refitting a building is expensive and buildings designed for one purpose are not going to be awesome for another unless your extremely lucky. Specialization is real. That said you could definitely retrofit the average department store building into reasonable offices.
I love how in the US, instead of building all these services and offices near each other and walkable from people's homes, we insist on ideas that force people to drive dozens of miles to get a walkable and convenient experience.
These Obama "we"s that contradict all known facts must stop. It's a kind of logical falacy to throw out a we that includes a vast majority that you know are not in agreement with you!
Americans absolutely freaking love their cars and have no desire to change the drive-thru lifestyle. I can't convince my parents not to feel pity on me when I'm overseas without one, they don't understand and can't understand that I am not merely indifferent, I hate the burden of a car and living in the inconvenient cities that pop up as an result of mass car ownership. The preferences of my friends in their 30s make it clear to me this American preference is not changing within our lifetimes. The lifestyle I want is only available, for the most part, in Asia. A recent long stay in Paris was even quite a surprise for me, I found the population density way too low to enjoy the convenient walk everywhere lifestyle easily found in Shanghai, Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul etc.
Right - I moved to the city because here in the US it's the only option to get any human-scale density. The next level down that you can commonly find is car-centric suburbia. The remaining human-scale places in the US outside of city centers are mostly isolated remnants from before we started knocking them all down to make room for cars. Nobody's building new ones.
1. Usually already located at a crossroads; you want a mall at a busy junction to attract custom
2. Usually already a local transit hub, since they tend to be a major concentration of jobs
3. Are separated from any pesky residential neighbors by major roads and/or large swathes for parking
4. Have a lot of land in the form of said large swathes of parking
These characteristics actually make them ideal for densification into a more walkable oasis; they already have some mixed uses, and the parking lots are developable without much fuss from neighbors. And you can do the whole thing in phases.
A bunch of malls in the Seattle area are getting redeveloped in this manner.
#1 is a mixed bag. Access by car is "easy", but traffic can be awful.
#3 is a negative. The separation from housing makes them LESS suitable for office space.
Put the two together, and even if the mall is redeveloped into nice office space with room to walk around, people outside the mall have to drive to do so. For people on the other side of those major arteries, they literally have to drive 1-2 blocks to walk around the mall (or former mall).
None of which is to imply we shouldn't redevelop malls into mixed use "urban" hubs. But, we shouldn't assume that redeveloping the mall in isolation will succeed. The surrounding area might need significant changes to fully utilize the former mall zone.
To be fair the US has the space to do what Asian and European countries couldn't.
Also America was basically virgin land. The invention of the car and highways shaped US cities when Tokyo and Paris were already centuries old.
I think you’ll find its pretty split. Lots of people prefer the privacy of a private car and large yards, but others would prefer walkable denser areas.
On the whole it might be slightly trending to the latter.
I'm an avid cyclist, so follow local traffic and infrastructure plans and related political/governmental issues. I live in a fairly dense suburb about 40 minutes outside DC (near Dulles Airport).
From what I can see, there is a subset of people who love owning a yard and having some of their own space for kids or gardening or whatever. And they like having a garage to store all their crap (and occasionally a car).
But, within that group, there is often a sort of despair (probably too strong a word) about the rotting infrastructure that surrounds them. Potholed roads, bridges literally crumbling, too much traffic, etc. This group pushes hard for more road construction, more sprawl, etc despite studies that mostly show more infrastructure doesn't help (demand always catches up). And they don't want to fund it via taxes.
There is another group that lives in the suburbs by necessity. Jobs are out here, costs are manageable, etc. They'd move to a city, if it were easier/affordable. I fall into this group. I actually sold my single-family home a few years ago and bought a smaller townhouse in a denser neighborhood so I could walk more places. Cost was the same and I enjoy the downsized home/yard, ability to walk/cycle for coffee or beer, and walk to work (thought that last bit was dumb luck on an office move).
And the vast majority are somewhere in between. Mostly ambivalent. Maybe some notion of the "American Dream" (big colonial home, white picket fence, etc), but content somewhere in the middle.
tl;dr - Americans like the cost and convenience of the suburbs, but much of that comes from indefinitely deferred infrastructure investment (though a massive chunk of suburban residents don't actually realize just how badly that spending is being deferred).
I once had a thought experiment of how a suburban city could be reworked with a focus on coworking centers.
Like the center of a neighborhood would be a coworking center and a park, it could be surrounded on each side by a subdivision, and the corners could be commercial/services. That way you'd be able to easily walk to your job if you wanted, and head home to let out pets or have lunch, no problem.
It would require pretty much everyone to move to coworking for it to be viable, though, and you might find out you don't like spending so much time with your neighbors.
After living in various parts of Europe for a few years and coming back, the US way of doing it seems mind-boggingly wasteful. Huge swaths of our country are long roads that lead to massive parking lots.
And of course we're obese, many people couldn't walk to accomplish errands if they wanted to.
I've been watching some Virtual Japan videos on YouTube lately, and it was really interesting how so many major streets in Japan don't seem to even be built for cars, people just walk in the center of the street and from location to location no problem, there might be some motorbikes but that's about it.
I don't think I've ever been to a city where they decide they don't need cars on their major streets. All of our cities presuppose that enough people will need to drive through it, and everything is much more spaced out because of it.
It's important not to underestimate how many customers a store in a mall needs to survive. Most need tens of thousands of people to visit the mall every week in order to generate sufficient customers to have enough revenue to be viable businesses. Food-based businesses are a bit different because the same customers can visit every day, but you can't operate a hairdresser or a movie theatre by serving the same few hundred co-working space users every day if you have to pay the sort of costs it takes to run a store in a mall.
You're assuming that the economics that work for a mall would still work the same way when it's converted to "office space plus amenities". I know a few office buildings in Berlin that have a food court, barber shops/hairdressers, dry-cleaners etc. inside the building. And I doubt they're paying full price on the rent - they're advertised as amenities that make the office space more attractive, raising the price of the office space in the building.
In Natick Mass they build a condo on top of the mall.
https://patch.com/massachusetts/natick/see-inside-natick-mal...
"This condo building was built in 2008 overlooking the Natick Mall. For just $925,000 you get sweeping views, 3 bedrooms, and access to all the shopping you can do (if you have any cash left over)."
But massachusetts has a weird relationship with Malls. I visited the Wayfair Offices, which sit above a really high end mall (Copley Place) in Boston. When I visited there was a pretty long line in the mall to get up the escalator to get onto the office floor...
From the article: "An Epic Games spokesperson told the Triangle Business Journal that the campus would include office buildings and recreational spaces."
That sure gives me the impression that they're tearing down the mall structure and probably parts of the parking lot, and then building new buildings.
I work out of (and take meetings in) Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan all the time. Lunch time crowd is a boisterous mix of Conde Nast fashion editors and Goldman Sachs analysts. All hating their jobs, ready to gossip. The food court is top tier. Blue Ribbon Sushi. MomoFuku japanese fried chicken and beer. You can stroll down to the marina to watch the boats bobbing in the hudson river. Or try on the trenches at Burberry.
But the best part is the proximity to the 9/11 memorial. The bottomless reflecting pools gargantuan in size where the former twin towers once loomed. Nothing quite focuses the mind like a few minutes at that historic work of public sculpture.
>>> Americans do more of their shopping online and gravitate to specialty brands and discount chains
The phenomenal rise of mobile shopping apps like PLT, DePop, Nova, and Shein provides a remarkable case study in instant commerce. One, the merch is so cheap, even teens can afford to wear an item just once. Two, the auxiliary market around creating digital content by fashion influences perpetuates the virtuous cycle. The compensation of course coming in the form of promotions, gift cards, commissions ...
Many malls I've been to had working offices on some floor or section of it, but they're not as visible as the store fronts. I'm sure they are great offices as well.
> The film centres on a group of office colleagues in downtown Calgary, Alberta, who bet a month's salary on who can last the longest without going outside by using the system of covered walkways that connect the buildings. The film takes place over one lunch hour on day 28 of the month-long competition.
The more or less dead mall fairly near me--there is still a thriving grocery store and Home Depot in the surrounding complex but not part of the mall as such--had as anchor stores JC Penney, Macy's, and Sears. It's in a smaller city. That (and even more rural areas--surrounding the smaller city is a lot of farmland such as where I live). There's nothing there to support significant co-working space.
The luxury malls in cities that would support more co-working space--though ask WeWork how things are going--are mostly doing better.
That’s pretty close to the mall’s original intent. They were supposed to be little villages of the future. They turned into uninspired, bland corporate centers.
Rackspace actually did this, their San Antonio HQ was a former mall (it had some goofy castle based theme and name, I forget).
I thought the idea was brilliant. The mall had a ton of space in which the company plonked a bunch of cubicles that everyone (including the CEO) used, plus many other amenities. On some days there would be delicious food trucks outside.
No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world. Just one giant homogenised hermetically sealed world.
It wouldn't be "best" for many people.
Maybe "convenient" for bosses who don't like how much productivity they lose when a Meat Flavoured Productivity Unit has to go get a haircut or imbibe sustenance....