[ryukafalz]

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.

(Unlike some other countries.)

[bobthepanda]

The neat thing about malls is that they are

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.

[alistairSH]

#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.

[bobthepanda]

#3 is a negative if you decide to only build office space on the mall property. But one can choose to build both residential and office space. Like this actual project: https://www.gglo.com/project/northgate-mall-redevelopment/

Neighbors in single family suburban homes are more likely to be NIMBYs and block development, so insulation from them is a feature, not a bug.