Wet Coast Journals

Death of the shopping mall; birth of the quasi-public mall

Patrick Condon sent the following link to the Livable Communities listserv, predicting the "extinction" of the shopping mall.

http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/02/pf/yourhome/deadmalls/

What seems to be happening, at least in Canada, is that malls are beginning to attract more public tenants as opposed to private ones. In London, Ontario, the major tenants of the downtown Galleria Mall are the London Public Library, the University of Western Ontario’s Continuing Studies division and a jointly run public art gallery.

I believe that in Windsor, Ontario, the public art gallery temporarily moved into a shopping mall while its space was used for the Windsor Casino (my memory may be faulty on this).

Closer to home, at the Central City mall in north Surrey, two of the major tenants are public institutions — Simon Fraser University and the federal Citizenship and Immigration department. A third major tenant is a private college. Meanwhile the retail outlets are dying. Sears has closed one of its two floors in the mall and will concentrate in future on standalone outlet stores (meaning vast acres devoted to parking spaces and big box stores).

So, as the shoppers disappear, and the retail outlets move to new locations accessible only by car, the public sector is moving in to the older malls. While this is good for the mall owners (they maintain revenue) and for the smaller services within the malls (restaurants especially); I find it disturbing that public institutions subject themselves to the whims of a private sector landlord. Mall landlords in the past have exercised their prerogative to keep people they consider undesirable off the premises.

Posted by wetcoast at August 4, 2003 01:12 PM