Let's go to the mall

Joel Kotkin writes in New Geography about malls.

Maybe it’s that reporters don’t like malls. After all they tend to be young, highly urban, single, and highly educated, not the key demographic at your local Macy’s, much less H&M.

But for years now, the conventional wisdom in the media is that the mall—particularly in the suburbs—is doomed. Here a typical sample from The Guardian: “Once-proud visions of suburban utopia are left to rot as online shopping and the resurgence of city centers make malls increasingly irrelevant to young people.”

To be sure, there are hundreds of outmoded malls, long-in-the-tooth complexes most commonly found in working-class suburbs and inner-ring city neighborhoods. Some will never come back. By some estimates, something close to 10 to 15 percent of the country’s estimated 1,000 malls will go out of business over the next decade; many of them are located in areas where budgets have been very tight, with locals tending to shop at “power centers” built around low-end discounters such as Target or Walmart.

But the notion that Americans don’t like malls anymore is misleading. The roughly 400 malls that service more-affluent communities—like those typically anchored by a Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom—recovered most quickly from the recession, and now appear to be doing quite well.

...Within the U.S., demographic change is creating opportunities for a new breed of mall-maker. Across the country, savvy investors and developers have been buying older malls, which tended to serve either Anglo or African-American customers, and shifting them instead to focus on fast-growing ethnic markets. Such malls can now be found in traditional Latino areas such as Southern California and Texas, but they also exist in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, and Charlotte, places that have recently become major hubs for immigrants.

Be sure of this: The ethnic mall is no flash in the pan, at least as long as immigrants pour into this country. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; today they make up as much as one-third of American kids. These kids, and their own offspring, not to mention Anglo or African-American friends, have been brought up with food and fashion tastes that often originate in Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, or China. When I was a kid growing up in New York, you went to Chinatown or Little Italy for an ethnic infusion. Now you get in your car, park, and get options not so dissimilar than what you would find—usually in a mall—in Mexico City, Mumbai, or Singapore.

...The notion of dead malls has been connected to a similar idea about the inevitable demise of the suburbs, which appeared possible at the height of the recession, but has since been shown to be largely false. Suburbs may not be booming as in the ’90s, but they are now growing as fast as core cities, and constitute more than 70 percent of all new population and 80 percent of new job growth since 2010.

...It is time to dispense with the twin memes of mall- and suburb-bashing, and begin appreciating and improving how most Americans live and shop. The malls of the future indeed may be very different in many ways—more segmented by income and ethnicity, more entertainment- and experience-oriented. But they will continue to serve an important focus for most American communities. And at a time when many of our most celebrated cities have themselves become giant malls (is there any place on Earth more boring than the area around Times Square?), the future of malls may prove brighter, and even more transformative, than commonly imagined.

Read more here.