The trend has certainly been toward more "outdoor" style malls, like Santana Row here in the SF Bay Area or the Shops at Wiregrass in my former home of Tampa. B

The trend has certainly been toward more "outdoor" style malls, like Santana Row here in the SF Bay Area or the Shops at Wiregrass in my former home of Tampa. But I suspect there are a couple major factors in the Dead Mall phenomenon that this article doesn't really touch on. First, whenever a region is seriously overbuilding residential space they're usually also seriously overbuilding retail space. In Florida, the overbuilding of retail seemed to come first in some instances. When the retail spaces are big shopping centers, there's an awfully good chance they're going to start cannibalizing one another. The worst case scenario -- which I saw happen in Florida more than once -- isn't that all the customers leave Mall A for Mall B, but that the customers are split between Mall A and Mall B and neither mall ends up successful. Second, it doesn't seem to me that "anchor tenants" are as important now as they once were, and the malls that are most in trouble are the ones that were organized with the assumption you were really there to go Macy's or Nordstrom's and the other stores would survive on your impulse buys as you walked between the department stores and the parking lot. Santana Row here -- and to some degree Tampa's International Plaza, which is a mix of indoor and outdoor -- have fashioned themselves less as shopping destinations than entertainment destinations. The best way to avoid having a dead zone around a closed department store is to not have -- or need -- a department store.