Gongol.com Archives: November 2024

Brian Gongol


November 24, 2024

Iowa No more mall rats

The City of Waterloo, Iowa, (metro population 168,000) has agreed to furnish millions of dollars to demolish and redevelop the Crossroads Mall. The whole project is budgeted at $87 million. It was once a significant retail center, but is down to a dozen or two employees in the entire facility. ■ Shopping malls once had their heyday because they delivered variety, availability, and proximity, all in a climate-controlled package. The model made sense until online shopping managed to provide more variety and nearly the same availability -- what the shopper sacrifices in having to wait for a next-day delivery, they gain in not having to look for a parking spot. And an online store is always at least as proximate as the nearest mall. ■ The malls that manage to survive much longer will do so because they offer something social or cultural that goes farther than a good layaway program. Some retail destinations are a little like Disney World and others are places to be seen consuming conspicuously. Many of them will go on. ■ But a lot of others will have to be replaced. Leaving them to die and turn into ghosts isn't much of a plan, especially for those places where a mall that once depended on anchor stores itself becomes a boat anchor dragging down the real estate around it. ■ America doesn't have much of a track record of developing high-quality centers for civic activity and social life; reimagining our many dead and dying malls as lively public spaces in the spirit of European opera houses with attractive community-building features may be a necessary way forward, at least for some.


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