3 ms·

America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing?

4 points by miles 3y ago

downrightmike 3y ago
Knock them down and build a dense micro city for human scale. That's how humans live, we don't want to live in a high-rise and have to commute by car for a coffee. Use European cities as an example, Mix it with more density in a cleaned up Kowloon Walled City model.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > Mix it with more density in a cleaned up Kowloon Walled City model. I don't think anyone can really do Kowloon Walled city right. Living in a high rise works, you don't need to commute by a car for a coffee, why do you think HK is like that? Very few people have cars, coffee shops are all around, and public transit is good.
m463 3y ago
I wish they brought back small niche stores, say hobby stores. Or possibly a mall full of computer and electronics stores. but probably land is worth too much, and the benefit to the community is an externality that doesn't map to the short-term bottom line.
simonblack 3y ago
All jokes aside, it costs more to convert something than to start from a bare patch of ground.* You probably would have to demolish the buildings, rip up the parking lots, and then go from there. First to subdivide the land, if you want to sell off individual houses or small blocks of apartments. Or else use the whole parcel of land and put a larger set of related apartment buildings on it. * I once looked at the estimates of converting a smallish building into one for a different use. When the estimates came in, the cost of converting that existing building was about 15% more than starting from bare ground. And it would have taken a lot longer.
dsq 3y ago
As others have said here, for residential, it probably makes more sense to knock down and rebuild than try some weird revamping.
blacksqr 3y ago
The takeaway I got from this article is not that there's something so great about malls for redevelopment, but that restrictive zoning laws are the real problem. It seems to me that what this piece is describing is a hack that governments have found to make residence-friendly zoning changes without running into the buzzsaw of NIMBYism.

4 points by miles 3y ago

Knock them down and build a dense micro city for human scale. That's how humans live, we don't want to live in a high-rise and have to commute by car for a coffee. Use European cities as an example, Mix it with more density in a cleaned up Kowloon Walled City model.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> Mix it with more density in a cleaned up Kowloon Walled City model. I don't think anyone can really do Kowloon Walled city right. Living in a high rise works, you don't need to commute by a car for a coffee, why do you think HK is like that? Very few people have cars, coffee shops are all around, and public transit is good.

m463 3y ago

I wish they brought back small niche stores, say hobby stores. Or possibly a mall full of computer and electronics stores. but probably land is worth too much, and the benefit to the community is an externality that doesn't map to the short-term bottom line.

simonblack 3y ago

All jokes aside, it costs more to convert something than to start from a bare patch of ground.* You probably would have to demolish the buildings, rip up the parking lots, and then go from there. First to subdivide the land, if you want to sell off individual houses or small blocks of apartments. Or else use the whole parcel of land and put a larger set of related apartment buildings on it. * I once looked at the estimates of converting a smallish building into one for a different use. When the estimates came in, the cost of converting that existing building was about 15% more than starting from bare ground. And it would have taken a lot longer.

dsq 3y ago

As others have said here, for residential, it probably makes more sense to knock down and rebuild than try some weird revamping.

blacksqr 3y ago

The takeaway I got from this article is not that there's something so great about malls for redevelopment, but that restrictive zoning laws are the real problem. It seems to me that what this piece is describing is a hack that governments have found to make residence-friendly zoning changes without running into the buzzsaw of NIMBYism.