God, imagine living in a retirement community that has a Hot Topic.

No God please no. I hated malls as a child, this would be some sort of fucked up psychological torture.

As is often mentioned, the plumbing situation makes this somewhat untenable.

But, as the world warms and outdoor recreation becomes impossible, I think they could be repurposed into indoor recreation centers, not that different from a regular mall, just less focused on shopping and more on fun and exercise.

As a GenX, I would prefer seeing them made into some sort of public space? We are losing a lot of that, at least where I live. Indoor space in particular.

They've turned one mall in my city into a community college and office space, and the other is going strong and attracting new tenants

Wait you guys are retiring?

they've already started turning them into rental units because that's apparently the entire American economy now

Imagine how much money you could make by ripping off retired people who cannot leave the mall anymore due to old age.

Not that I would endorse this. Combining retirement homes with retail sounds dangerous for the retired.

In Austin (when I lived there) the main mall finally closed down in the 2Ks. It was obvious that nobody was going to pick it up so the city turned it into an Austin Community College campus.

This is now my favorite housing idea ever.

I've thought about this a lot, on account of infinite people having an insane amount of trouble just keeping consistent shelter over their heads. My gal had suggested this as a means for the homeless. I know that right now malls are being lent out to many individual small organizations (namely churches as far as I know it). But I am not sure this is sustainable as a whole. Due to maintenance costs, hazardous situations like mold and lack of privacy.

I also think about how people keep saying cost of living is why people aren't having kids. But I have lived in multiple places that were once a much larger living space that had been jankily peacemealed into several much smaller apartments. I am a human that enjoys having space of my own, even if it's micro in nature. I can't imagine I am alone in that. And I don't believe people will want to further invest in divvying up spaces in malls. At least, unless they're getting kickbacks. And they'll probably do it in the worst of ways. Leading to spaces that will be barely sound and fast to degrade but slow to fix. I mean shelter is super duper important. But I swear to god your surroundings can affect your mental state. And when you're wedged together in a decaying mold filled building with a bunch of aging individuals facing a slew of different health-issues it'll probably deteriorate your wellness faster than if we tore the places down and utilized some sort of cheap eco-friendly building material/robo-builder to assist making healthier homes.

Also mind you, I don't think we're gunna have beautiful low-income or middle-income homes if the greige, vinyl, orange-peel, chrome take-over points towards anything.

when internet still basically consisted of angelfire and geocities (yes, even before myspace), we used to go to the mall and pester the goth kids smoking cigarettes by the mall entrances who were there because they also had nothing else to do

Malls are actually doing fine.

Apparently they were already shutting down the too-many-malls that there were, but there are still a few hundred and they're doing well.

Specifically, for the reasons you're saying, because they have a food court and arcade stations and basically our community centers, more than just shopping outlets.

It looked like all the malls were dying out because there were simply too many for the American population, but now that number's kind of stabilized and slowly growing again.

But as for the disused ones that were built during the boom 20 years ago? sure.

They'd make good housing.

you have to go all the way down below the dirt to prep a site for residential units. With a toilet, shower, and sink per unit, the density of sewer and water plumbing is much higher than commercial. Fire codes also demand egress points (a.k.a. windows) for every bedroom - hard to do Inside a big box retail space.

They tore down the big, stagnating mall a few minutes from my place years ago. It's still a big, empty lot.

This would have been a much better and surely most cost-effective solution. Instead, we're probably eventually gonna get another soulless office park in spite of dwindling demand.

That would be really good, but this idea has been explored and unfortunately it is only viable on a very narrow amount of buildings. Most malls aren't properly built to be housing and the costs of adapting them for housing exceed the cost of just building new housing elsewhere. And the costs of tearing it down and rebuilding are even greater. Overall, Malls are economic net negatives for communities, all single use infrastructure constructions are.

Stahp, I'm not even 40 yet.

Nah. Vaporwave themed laser tag arenas. Let's go.

Cool idea but lack of natural light could be an issue.

I would love to see this kind of repurposing of properties to be far more common! Malls tend to be fairly central, so they make ideal locations for being nearby everything a person could need in a residential setting.

This isn't a too shabby of an idea. It probably won't be used but a mix of stores and homes in one building sounds great.

mall walks!

Those are also the "mall rat" generations, so it'd be pretty fitting lol.

I'm down and claiming the candy store in 113!