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Issue: Shopping Malls

Shopping Malls

By: Sharon O’Malley

Pub. Date: August 29, 2016 Access Date: October 1, 2021 DOI: 10.1177/237455680217.n1 Source URL: http://businessresearcher.sagepub.com/sbr-1775-100682-2747282/20160829/shopping-malls ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Can they survive in the 21st century? Executive Summary

For one analyst, the opening of a new enclosed mall is akin to watching a dinosaur traversing the landscape: It’s something not seen anymore. Dozens of malls have closed since 2011, and one study predicts at least 15 percent of the country’s largest 1,052 malls could cease operations over the next decade. Retail analysts say threats to the mall range from the rise of e-commerce to the demise of the “anchor” department store. What’s more, traditional malls do not hold the same allure for today’s teens as they did for Baby Boomers in the 1960s and ’70s. For malls to remain relevant, developers are repositioning them into must-visit destinations that feature not only shopping but also attractions such as amusement parks or trendy restaurants. Many are experimenting with open-air town centers that create the feel of an urban experience by positioning upscale retailers alongside apartments, offices, parks and restaurants. Among the questions under debate: Can the traditional shopping mall survive? Is e-commerce killing the shopping mall? Do mall closures hurt the economy? Overview

Minnesota’s Mall of America, largest in the U.S., includes a theme park, wedding chapel and other nonretail attractions in an attempt to draw patrons.

Northland Center in Southfield, Mich., was America’s grandest shopping center when it opened in 1954. It died last year. Once the world’s largest shopping center, with a vast outdoor parking lot and 111 stores, anchored by a Hudson’s, Detroit’s largest department store, it housed a bank, a post office, a theater and several auditoriums. Although its stores were closed on Sundays back then, the open-air complex, which featured fountains, artwork, trees and sculptures, became a popular after-church destination for suburban Detroit families. 1 “The theater was a big draw for Northland,” architect and mall historian Lauren Ortega said, and the sprawling 159-acre shopping center “became a part of a ritual of suburban life,” as did thousands of other shopping centers around the country. 2 To compete with newer indoor malls, the owners placed a roof over the iconic open-air center in 1974. Seventeen years later, the mall added a food court with a Cinnabon and a Panda Express, by then must-have mall staples.

But the changes were not enough to stave off a slow decline precipitated by a sluggish economy, competition from newer, higher-end malls and a growing exodus of shoppers to online stores. In 2015, with its department store anchors gone, half of its storefronts vacant and its operating losses running $250,000 a month, a dilapidated Northland Center closed for good. 3 Northland was one of dozens of decaying regional malls—enclosed shopping centers measuring 300,000 square feet or more that draw visitors from long distances—to shutter since 2011, according to Green Street Advisors, a research and consulting firm that tracks mall activity. 4 At least 15 percent of the country’s 1,052 regional and super-regional suburban malls will close over the next decade, it predicts. Some will be razed; others will be converted into community centers, churches or schools. 5 (See Short Article, “Developers Reinventing an American Institution.”) Other industry analysts foresee a future with even fewer massive malls. Urban planner Ellen Dunham-Jones forecasts that 42 percent of malls are already dead or on the brink of closing. A CoStar Group survey last year determined that in nearly one-fifth of enclosed malls, 10 percent or more of storefronts are vacant. And 3.4 percent had vacancy rates of 40 percent or greater—a sure sign of pending death. 6 Still, not every enclosed mall is in danger; in fact, many Americans might not stand for it if they were. In a 2016 survey by Australia-based Westfield Corp., the fourth-largest shopping mall developer in the United States, 45 percent of U.S. shoppers ranked the traditional mall as their preferred retail destination. 7 And about 80 percent of the country’s enclosed malls have vacancy rates lower than 10 percent and are therefore classified as healthy, according to the CoStar survey. 8 One example is Minnesota’s 4.2 million- square-foot Mall of America—the largest, in square feet, in the U.S.—with its theme park, wedding chapel and other non-retail attractions. Owners of the largest, most profitable malls performed better financially in 2014 than investors in other kinds of real estate. 9 “There are clearly shopping malls in the U.S. that are high value,” says architect Terry Shook, founding partner of Charlotte- and Los Angeles-based Shook Kelley, who points to real estate investment trust Taubman Centers, which invests only in shopping malls. Sales at Taubman properties average an industry-topping $712 per square foot. 10 That’s proof, says Jan Rogers Kniffen, CEO of J. Rogers Kniffen Worldwide Enterprises, a retail consulting firm, that “the malls are not dying, and the malls When it opened in 1954, Northland in suburban Detroit was the are not going to die. We may see some serious attrition among these great world’s largest shopping center, housing 111 stores on a malls, the 1,100 regional malls. But we’re never going to see [top-tier mega- sprawling 159-acre site. (Bettmann/Getty Images) malls] struggle. They’ll just take more share.” Daniel J. Busch, a Green Street senior analyst, agreed: “One of the biggest misconceptions is that the malls in aggregate are struggling or even dying.” 11 Still, tracking dead and dying malls has become something of a spectator sport for historians, the media and nostalgic shoppers. DeadMalls.com, a website with cultlike status among mall-watchers since it started collecting stories of decaying malls in 1999, said that New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois are losing malls at a quicker clip than other states. 12 A litany of woes is to blame, according to retail analysts, including: E-commerce. Perhaps the primary threat to malls, online shopping is growing faster than in-person shopping. Anchor-store closings. Reeling from the online threat and competition for Millennials’ dollars from “fast-fashion” retailers like H&M and Primark, mall anchors such as Sears and Macy’s have closed hundreds of mall-based stores, taking with them the foot traffic that smaller mall stores rely on for sales. 13 Changing demographics. As teens, Baby Boomers loved to hang out at the mall. Now retired or heading toward it, most are empty nesters who no longer need to buy as much for their homes or themselves. 14 Plus, 58.6 percent of American women work or are looking for jobs, leaving them less time for shopping at the mall. 15 And teens spend 26 percent less time at the mall compared to 10 years ago, according to investment bank PiperJaffray, which conducts a semi-annual survey of teen spending. 16 Too many malls. “The U.S. is undoubtedly over-malled,” Green Street analysts noted in the firm’s 2015 U.S. Mall Outlook. In fact, in many markets, a mall’s biggest threat is other malls. Green Street called mall closings “a healthy outcome,” given the oversaturation. 17

Mall consolidation. Publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs, control the majority of U.S. malls, and they began the merger trend in the late 1990s as they bought up or merged with their competitors. Further consolidation is expected. 18 One byproduct: REITs are spinning off underperforming malls from their portfolios, creating separate entities to own them, sell them or kill them, and refocusing their resources on expanding or redeveloping their malls into high-end shopping destinations in the United States and Asia, where indoor malls are still thriving. 19 Outstanding loans. Hundreds of malls across the country owe an aggregate $47.5 billion on loans taken out during a 1990s “borrowing binge” for mall construction, according to data from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. 20 Some mall owners may opt to walk away from their weaker properties rather than foot the bill. General Growth Properties Inc., the second-largest U.S. mall owner, defaulted on a $144 million loan on suburban Detroit’s Lakeside Mall that came due in June. 21 That mall’s fate is up in the air. Most of the casualties will be older, so-called Class B and Class C malls whose owners have not invested in their upkeep or upgrades the way they have for top-tier, Class A properties. Many will be in communities with declining populations and high unemployment, and no longer appeal to shoppers. “When you look at a mall that might be struggling, the broader economy in those individual communities is probably struggling,” says Tom McGee, CEO of the New York-based International Council of Shopping Centers, the global trade association of the shopping center industry. “With a very consumer-facing industry like shopping, to the extent that the economy is struggling, that will affect the malls.” With each closing, the era of the traditional suburban shopping mall, begun around the same time Northland Center opened, will fade a bit further into history. Even for malls that survive or thrive, “the status quo will be changing,” says James Cook, Americas director of retail research for JLL, a Chicago-based financial and professional services firm that specializes in commercial real estate services and investment management. In part, that means mall developers have stopped rushing to break ground on new shopping center complexes; indeed, just one major mall opened last year and none has opened in 2016. 22 The long-delayed, $5 billion American Dream Mall in New Jersey’s Meadowlands, across from New York City, may open within two years. Shook says it may be among the last new enclosed malls to be built: “It’s like watching the last dinosaur walk across the landscape.” Taubman in January scrapped plans to build an enclosed mall in Miami. 23 In fact, since indoor mall construction peaked in 1990 with 16 million square feet of new space, building has tapered off every year. In 2007, for the first time in more than 40 years, no new malls opened in the United States. And then, five years passed until the next opening. 24 Instead, owners of top-tier malls are pumping billions of dollars into renovating and rebuilding outdated shopping spaces in an effort to appeal to Millennial shoppers who crave unique experiences more than the items for sale in stores. “What made a good mall in 2000 and what makes a good mall in 2016 is different,” says Paco Underhill, CEO of New York-based market research firm Envirosell and author of “Why We Buy” and “The Call of the Mall.” Mall owners are in “the constant process of trying to upgrade their properties.” As a result, developers are repositioning malls—traditionally centers that specialize in shopping—into destinations that feature shopping but whose main draw might be an amusement park, a concert venue or a row of trendy restaurants. “The share of wallet that consumers are spending on the core [merchandise] that is sold in the mall is diminishing,” says Michael Brown, a partner with Chicago-based management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. “Consumers spend less and less … on apparel and footwear. They’re looking for experiences.” New York-based retail consultant Robin Lewis, co-author of “The New Rules of Retail,” agrees. “Experiences are the only thing that is going to save the day,” he says, “for malls and for retailers as well.” Malls, McGee says, are “curating” their offerings, based on the tastes of their local communities. “It’s really important that you don’t have plain vanilla experiences,” he says. “As consumers, we have come to expect a customized experience.” To that end, owners of Class A malls are catering to shoppers with plenty of money to spend, replacing struggling, midlevel department- store anchors like Macy’s—which closed 40 stores in 2015 and ‘16 and has announced plans to shutter another 100, most of them in early 2017—with luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. 25 In locations whose populations can’t afford high-end price tags, some gasping malls are aligning themselves with discounters such as Target, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls; signing supermarkets as tenants; or reaching beyond retail for new anchors like medical or government offices. 26 But some analysts say the indoor mall is beyond resuscitating. Shook points to the success of open-air, mixed-use town centers that create the feel of an urban experience by positioning upscale retailers alongside apartments, offices, parks and restaurants on streets in popular communities not too far from city centers. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who created such a shopping center, called The Grove, in Los Angeles in 2002, also sees the industry headed back to open-air, street-front shopping clusters known as “lifestyle” centers. “Within the next 10 to 15 years,” said Caruso, “the traditional indoor shopping mall will be a memory, a historical anachronism that no longer meets the needs of consumers or

27 Page 4 of 25 Shopping Malls SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. retailers.” 27 As economists, mall developers, retailers and urban planners consider the status of the suburban shopping mall, here are some of the issues being debated: Weighing the Issues Can the traditional shopping mall survive?

Parents and children flocked to the suburban Cherry Hill Mall in southern New Jersey last December not just to visit Santa but to take a virtual sleigh ride and attend a “Sleigh Flight School” in a 2,000-square-foot Christmas village. The DreamWorks-hosted “Adventure to Santa” was designed, said Joseph F. Coradino, CEO of the mall’s owner, Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, to “make Cherry Hill Mall a must-visit destination through the holiday season.” 28 In fact, owners of regional malls are spending billions to transform their generic, retail-centric properties into must-visit destinations by making the experience of visiting the mall just as appealing—or more—as shopping at the stores inside it. The concept isn’t new: Mall of America, built in 1992 in suburban Minneapolis, has been the Midwest’s top tourist destination since it opened. 29 There, visitors can get married in a wedding chapel or pilot an airplane flight simulator. The planned 6 million-square-foot American Dream Miami, which will usurp Mall of America’s status as the largest U.S. shopping mall when it CEO Tom McGee of the International Council of Shopping opens in 2020, will feature a snow-covered indoor slope where patrons can Centers: “As consumers, we have come to expect a customized 30 ski. experience.” In fact, the Austrian architect who designed Northland in 1954—and two years later, Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, the world’s first enclosed suburban shopping mall—conceived both as their communities’ hubs for socializing and entertainment. Like Northland and other decaying malls, today’s thriving destination malls—as many as 400 in the United States—have a roof, two floors, a food court and a big parking lot, and some are decades old. Two differences have saved this new breed from Northland’s fate, however: Their owners have loosened their grip on both tradition and their wallets. By pouring money into redevelopment; embracing technology as a complement rather than a competitor; and courting tenants, retail and otherwise, that excite young shoppers enough to get them through the door, the top tier of shopping malls has not only survived, it is thriving. Percentage Share of Leasable Area by Retail Space Type

Neighborhood centers lease more space than other shopping facilities

Note: GLA stands for gross leasable area. See glossary for definitions of types of centers. Source: ICSC Research and CoStar Reality Information Inc., “U.S. Shopping-Center Classification and Characteristics,” 2016, http://tinyurl.com/guqt75q

Neighborhood center areas make up 31 percent of the shopping industry’s gross leasable area, more than any other type of shopping facility. For a complete listing, download the Excel file above.

“Experiences and entertainment,” says author Lewis, who writes the weekly The Robin Report for the retail industry. “If these stores and these malls and these shopping centers want to tear these Millennials away from their iPhones to come shopping for stuff, they’ve got to create awesome experiences, experiences they can’t get online.” Once there for the adventure, they shop, too. The International Council of Shopping Centers reported in May that patrons buy “discretionary” items like clothes and electronics during 48 percent of their mall visits. They dine at a restaurant or the food court 43 percent of the time. 31 Not every healthy mall has an outsized adventure tucked inside, though; a careful selection of retailers has kept the second-largest U.S. shopping center by number of stores and square footage, King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia, in the black. The 52-year-old mall banks

Page 6 of 25 Shopping Malls SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. on its seven department-store anchors, from the affordable JCPenney to the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, to drive foot traffic. It houses 40 restaurants and lures shoppers with top-flight shops like jeweler David Yurman, clothier Betsey Johnson and home accessories store Williams-Sonoma. A high-tech Apple store is also a magnet. 32 In fact, the iPhone maker’s stores generate so much traffic that they’re credited with increasing a mall’s overall sales by 10 percent, according to Green Street. 33 Likewise, the 24 malls where high-end electric carmaker Tesla is a tenant average $940 in sales per square foot, compared with $835 industrywide. 34 Of course, not every community is wealthy enough to support a Tesla dealership at the local mall. The real estate truism that location, location, location can make or break a property remains valid: Most thriving malls are in densely populated suburbs not far from a bustling city, near transportation and in regions whose residents have money to spend, says economist Ryan Severino, director of research for real estate research firm REIS. Those conditions allow developers to favor upscale retailers, a move that thrusts per-sale spending by shoppers—and thus sales per square foot—upward. That’s good for the malls, which typically base the rent they charge on a store’s sales. That leaves many shopping centers in less affluent communities unable to compete for mall stalwarts like Williams-Sonoma and Macy’s, which are reported to be abandoning secondary malls so they can concentrate their resources on upscale centers and online sales. 35 At the same time, mall operators are spending less—or nothing—on shoring up faltering properties and more on making the top performers even more successful. Those practices are widening the gap between Class A malls, with sales per square feet topping $500, and all others, industry experts say. Class B and C malls, whose nicest store might be a Sears or a JCPenney, are struggling to compete with nearby destination malls and online retailers. Green Street Advisors estimates that the top 100 malls, out of more than 1,000, claim 44 percent of total mall value. 36 “Those midlevel malls are getting crushed because they have no reason for being,” says Howard Davidowitz of New York-based Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting firm, who notes, “Most malls are middle-class.” Envirosell’s Underhill agrees: “Most malls have a ubiquitous offering. The customer gets bored because the malls all have the same tenants.” But Severino says some of those at-risk malls can rescue themselves by carefully selecting their tenant base, just as the top-tier malls are doing—only with discount stores like T.J. Maxx, Ross Dress for Less and Dollar Tree, along with small medical offices and other service providers—rather than luxury retailers. Even then, Green Street’s Busch notes, such malls face stiff competition from strip malls—small open-air centers with a row of attached stores—and giant stand-alone discount stores like Walmart. “Where the malls are really struggling is somewhere between those two extremes,” he says. In the end, it’s a game of survival of the fittest, says A.T. Kearney’s Brown: “The best malls are getting stronger.” For those that don’t, says JLL’s Cooke, “The question is: When will they close?” Is e-commerce killing the shopping mall?

Online shopping will account for just 9 percent of retail sales this year, but industry analysts point to it—or at least to its biggest player, Amazon—as the most potent threat to the shopping mall. 37 Globally, e-commerce accounts for $1.5 trillion in sales and is forecast to grow 15 percent annually for the next three years. Still, by 2019, online shopping will account for just 12.4 percent of retail sales—$3.5 trillion of a total $28.5 trillion. 38 For mall owners, the concern is that online sales are growing faster than in-store business. In fact, in a June survey by United Parcel Service, shoppers for the first time said they make more purchases online than in stores. 39 And every year that brings an increase in e- commerce will see a corresponding dip in the revenues of physical stores. That trajectory led Green Street Advisors in January to estimate that occupancy rates for non-anchor storefronts in shopping malls will dip to 94 percent in 2019 from 95 percent in 2015. A year earlier, it had predicted occupancy would top 96 percent by then. 40 “Better-quality malls are adapting and should be fine,” the analysts wrote in the January report. But they didn’t say the same for weaker malls, which will have a harder time recruiting replacement anchors as more department stores, on which they rely to lure shoppers to the center, withdraw from malls. Malls typically rely on department stores to drive traffic to smaller “inline” stores. 41 The closing of Macy’s at Northland, in fact, may have been the final blow to the iconic mall. In December 2014, a representative of its management company told USA Today it had no plans to close Northland. In January 2015, Macy’s, Northland’s only remaining anchor tenant, moved out. The mall closed in March. 42 Those larger, upscale malls are “poised for unprecedented success going forward—not in spite of e-commerce, but because of it,” Michael P. Kercheval, the International Council of Shopping Centers’ former president, wrote in a 2014 industry report. 43

Vacancy Rates Among Retail Spaces

Shopping centers have higher vacancy rates than malls

Notes: “Mall” includes lifestyle centers, regional malls and super-regional malls. “Power centers” are outdoor “big-box malls” that are dominated by large discount department stores. “Shopping centers” include community centers, neighborhood centers and strip centers. “Specialty centers” include airport retail, outlet centers and theme or ethnic centers. Source: Based on data from the CoStar Retail Report, first quarter, 2016, National Retail Market, 2016

Market conditions and vacancy rates for the U.S. retail market changed little in the first quarter of 2016. Vacancy rates, however, are highest at shopping centers.

Driving that optimism is the fact that stores with a physical presence account for 95 percent of all retail sales, according to management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. 44 Its survey of 2,500 U.S. shoppers concluded that “brick-and-mortar is the future of modern retail,” and noted that two-thirds of shoppers who buy something online visit a physical store before or after the sale for five reasons: Consumers prefer to shop in stores for apparel, accessories, health and beauty products and furniture. For items they want to try out, such as electronics, or try on, such as shoes, they visit stores. Because they can carry their store purchases home with them, shoppers prefer to conduct the transaction onsite rather than online, which requires them to wait for delivery. Consumers like to pick up their online purchases in stores rather than having them shipped to their homes. Shoppers who return merchandise, whether bought online or in a store, prefer to return it to the store. The takeaway from this and other studies, researchers say, is that online and in-store shopping are equal contributors to the same bottom line for retailers that offer both. While a retailer’s online success may allow it to occupy fewer, and smaller, stores in malls, it is unlikely to obliterate the need for physical selling floors—or for malls. Conversely, online-only retailers, stung by profit-sucking shipping costs, are increasingly opening brick-and-mortar stores. So-called “evolved retailers” like Amazon, eyeglass retailer Warby Parker and men’s clothier Bonobos have found that a physical presence boosts their online sales by up to five times. 45 “If you want to increase the traffic to your website, open stores,” said Scott Galloway, founder of New York-based digital benchmarking firm L2, who called “pureplay”—retailing in either a physical or online space, but not both —“dead.” 46 Yet one newcomer to U.S. retailing—Dublin, Ireland-based Primark, with stores in downtown Boston, King of Prussia Mall and Danbury Fair Mall in Connecticut—does not sell any of its ultra-low-priced apparel online. Its executives have said the cost of shipping has, for the 47-year-old chain, rendered e-commerce “not a profitable avenue.” Yet its sales are growing. 47

More typically, mall operators are encouraging the convergence of their tenants’ online and physical presence. They are recruiting stores that subscribe to “omnichannel” retailing, with a nod to Millennial shoppers, who are accustomed to comparison shopping and product researching on their smartphones, sometimes while standing in the physical store. The concept, in simple terms: Shoppers browse the Web to learn about products; order them online or drive to the mall to buy them; have store-bought products delivered to their homes, or pick up Web orders in the store; and return unwanted merchandise either via mail or in the store, no matter where they made the purchase. Over the December holidays, says McGee of the International Council of Shopping Centers, one-third of online shoppers picked up items in stores. Among those shoppers, 70 percent bought something else while they were at the mall. “That’s not a negative,” he says. McGee predicts the future of retailing will be “clicks and bricks,” not one or the other. “I don’t think as a society we’re going to end up in a place where we’re sitting behind a computer and doing our shopping,” he says. “At least, I hope that’s not the case.” Do mall closures hurt the economy?

Economists and retail analysts are engaged in a classic chicken-or-egg debate: Are mall closures hurting the economy, or is the sluggish economic recovery in some communities putting malls out of business? Construction of new shopping centers dipped in 2013 to its slowest pace in 40 years, according to the latest figures from the International Council of Shopping Centers. 48 By 2015, 60 million square feet of new retail space was under construction, compared with 150 million square feet in 2007. 49 Fewer new shopping centers, when combined with mall closures in a community, mean a loss of jobs and tax revenue. Nationwide, shopping malls and centers of all sizes employ 12 million people, or 9.3 percent of the U.S. workforce. And for every 100 employees at a regional shopping mall, up to 30 additional local jobs are created at businesses that either supply the mall or After coming to dominate the retail sector through online-only sell to the workers. 50 The shopping center industry generates $141 billion a sales, Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar store in Seattle year in tax revenue, McGee says. in late 2015 in an effort to boost its online sales. (George Rose/Getty Images) The loss of a shopping mall could make a community less attractive to homeowners and, by extension, to new restaurants, businesses and service providers, says Maureen McAvey, who until June 30 was the Bucksbaum family chair for retail at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “In some cases,” she says, “the neighborhoods around [the closed mall] have deteriorated, become less dense.” But that downward slide is likely to have begun before the mall closed, not because it closed, she says. On the other hand, the construction slowdown is correcting an oversupply of retail space, which is heating up competition among malls. As a result, the quality of stores is improving at malls that survive, leading to higher sales per square foot and allowing owners to collect higher rents. In turn, mall owners pay more in taxes, which could lead to greater prosperity in the communities they serve. But those communities are likely to already be more affluent than the ones that are losing their malls. When the earliest regional shopping centers and the first indoor mall opened in the 1950s, the American economy was strong. Between 1947 and 1975, the growth of household income was between 86 percent and 90 percent, regardless of earnings bracket. Between 1975 and 2010, that changed, according to University of Maryland economist Melissa Schettini Kearney. Families with the lowest incomes reaped gains of just 3.7 percent, while incomes rose 57 percent for those in the top 5 percent. 51 The 2007-09 recession accentuated the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Between 1999 and 2008, the number of suburbanites living in poverty grew five times faster than the number of poor city dwellers. 52 Those people “can’t go to fancy malls,” says Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates. “That’s where we are. We’ve destroyed the middle class, and they’re trading down,” shopping at outlet centers and Walmart instead of at the mall. Mall historian Ortega agrees. America’s middle class, she said, is disappearing along with the suburban shopping malls built to service it. And a dead or dying mall can make a struggling community’s situation worse: “Boarded-up malls sit by the highway and function like

Page 9 of 25 Shopping Malls SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. billboards that say, ‘Disinvest here.’ Ultimately, the rise of dead malls undermines the communities in which they are located, fueling further disinvestment and sprawl,” said historian Robert Fishman. 53 For that reason, said Richard Rhodes, president of Austin Community College in Texas, whose school purchased the failing, 1.2 million- square-foot Highland Mall, a deteriorating mall might be worse for the local economy than a dead one. “What happens when a mall begins to deteriorate and no longer functions as a mall?” he said. “In the surrounding neighborhoods, you begin to see the crime rate increase, other homes and buildings being vacated—the whole community surrounding it begins to deteriorate.” The Austin space will soon be part shopping center, part college and part regional workforce center. 54 The increasing “bifurcation”—to use an economists’ term—between thriving, Class A regional malls, which cater to the moneyed, and all others mirrors the expanding U.S. income divide. Stores that target the working class, such as Sears, Kmart and JCPenney, are abandoning their anchor spots in middle-of-the-road malls, further endangering them. But McAvey says communities whose malls fail will get their needs met elsewhere. A failed mall, she says, might have been important to its community, “but it was not meeting 100 percent of the community’s needs, because if it was really thriving, it would not have shut down.” Not everyone agrees. Civic leaders in Landover, Md., decried the closing of Landover Mall in 2002 as a snub from retailers. Once the region’s largest indoor mall, the 1.2 million-square-foot location, which was situated in a black, working-class community, lost its department store anchors and several inline retailers to the newer Bowie Town Center, located 15 minutes away in a more affluent neighborhood with less crime. “It’s an insult,” one prominent dentist told The Washington Post. “You’ve made money off of us for years.… When you take it out of the neighborhood, it’s a part of the community that’s dying.” 55 Some of that suburban mall business is headed back to the cities and to communities’ old Main Streets. “The good news,” says McAvey, “is in the bigger cities, you’re seeing thriving downtowns.” Architect Shook agrees: “The great cities are coming back,” he says. Still, he adds, “Not everyone can live in our cities, so we will be building more suburbs. The question is: What kind of suburbs are we going to build?” His hunch, he says, is that they will not include new, indoor shopping malls, but will be walkable communities that mingle shopping, restaurants, services, homes and jobs. He points to the mixed-use Birkdale Village, 12 miles north of Charlotte, N.C., as an example of “the way we have to go.” Background Early Birds

Merchants have clustered in central spots to sell their wares for centuries. In fact, the first shopping districts can be traced to ancient Roman forums. One of them was Trajan’s Market. Now in ruins, the forum was designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, a Syrian-Greek engineer, and built around the year 107. It is considered the world’s oldest shopping center. 56 The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, built between 1455 and 1461, continues to operate; it’s one of the world’s largest shopping centers, and its 5,000 covered shops attract more than a quarter million visitors a day. 57 Medieval market towns, squares, bazaars and seaport commercial districts had one thing in common: a central location, a necessity in an age when shoppers got around on horseback or by foot.

That concept carried through the centuries. By the turn of the 20th century, the American shopping hub was the downtown department store. The central business district of every major American city had one: often a dominating building with dozens of elevators and escalators, and sometimes large enough to fill a full city block. The original, 13-story Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago, for instance, filled more than three-quarters of a large city block when it opened in 1914. 58 In Detroit, the sprawling J.L. Hudson Co’s flagship store had 25 floors of retail when it opened in 1911 and was the world’s tallest department store. 59 Even then, not all downtown employees lived in the city; many moved into sparsely settled communities that were free of the congestion, pollution and crime of cities. They commuted to their jobs from those early suburbs via street cars. Likewise, housewives rode street cars when they traveled downtown to shop. But it wasn’t long before those early suburbanites had less of a need to venture into the city. As their numbers increased and transportation improved, convenience stores and small grocers began opening clusters of shops on the edge of suburban streets along streetcar routes. Riders could hop off, pop into a store just steps away from the track for a purchase and then climb aboard the next trolley. Yet they still ventured downtown to shop for everything except groceries and day-to-day necessities. Suburbs at the time “were still ‘sub’ urban,” said architect Ortega, who wrote her Columbia University master’s thesis on “The Rise of the Mall.” “Suburban communities relied on their downtown as a place to work and shop.” So streetcar shopping strips stocked limited goods “with the understanding that the regional city was the locus of all shopping needs.” 60 That began to change when Americans started to drive automobiles. Those sparse streetcar strips gradually expanded their offerings so suburbanites could do more of their shopping in their own neighborhoods. As early as 1896, a strip in the affluent Baltimore suburb Roland Page 10 of 25 Shopping Malls SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Park built its stores far enough away from the street to make room for a few cars to park out front. In 1907, developer J.C. Nichols began building small clusters of neighborhood stores away from trolley routes in Kansas City’s upscale Country Club District. 61 By 1916, shoppers from all over Illinois were traveling by car to Market Square in Lake Forest north of Chicago, which the National Register of Historic Places has designated as the country’s first planned shopping center. 62 Then, in 1928, the Grandview Avenue Shopping Center in Grandview Heights, Ohio, became the first U.S. “regional” shopping center with an integrated parking lot. 63 Just two years later, Sears, Roebuck & Co. started building hundreds of freestanding department stores alongside suburban streetcar strips, which began the strips’ expansion into what would eventually become today’s “strip malls.” Sears made the move, in large part, in response to the successful efforts of larger, more powerful department stores like Hudson’s to keep the chain from building downtown. 64 As drivers began to clog city streets in the 1920s and 1930s, more shopping centers appeared in a growing suburbia. Still, department stores other than Sears and Montgomery Ward were unwilling to open branches outside of cities, so most of the new shopping centers were small neighborhood centers, anchored by grocers and convenience stores. And investors remained wary of the high cost of developing even this new kind of retail outlet, let alone full- scale regional shopping centers. The Great Depression and World War II further delayed the expansion of 65 Mall historian Lauren Ortega: Until the automobile came along, suburban shopping centers. When the war ended in 1945, just a few suburbs “were still ‘sub’ urban.” hundred shopping centers, mostly small neighborhood strips, dotted the country. But a decade later, there were almost 3,000, mostly strip malls. 66 Game-Changer

By the late 1940s, more than 2 million automobiles were on the road, the suburban population was growing faster than urban downtowns and postwar consumers were splurging on appliances and other goods that had not been available during the war. 67 In response, suburban shopping centers became larger and more numerous. Supermarkets owned by chains and full-size department stores replaced small grocers as tenants. Planned, regional shopping centers measuring 300,000-plus square feet and housing two large “anchor” department stores, along with 30 or more smaller shops, opened in the suburbs of Raleigh, N.C., Seattle and Boston. 68 By the early 1950s the number of regional shopping centers totaled about two dozen and could be found on the outskirts of cities from San Francisco to Framingham, Mass. 69 The introduction of the first climate-controlled, fully enclosed shopping center in the United States, in Edina, Minn., forever changed American shopping and retailing. The first shopping center to be called a “mall”—a term associated with sprawling, enclosed centers— Southdale Center, located 10 miles from downtown Minneapolis, became the template for approximately 1,500 enclosed malls built over the next 50 years. Architect Victor Gruen “didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype,” author Malcolm Gladwell wrote of the man commonly described as “the father of the modern shopping mall.” 70

Southdale Center, in suburban Minneapolis, was the world’s first fully enclosed suburban shopping mall.

Gruen designed the 810,000-square-foot Southdale as the centerpiece of a larger, mixed-use complex of apartments, offices, medical offices, parks and churches, most of which were never built. 71 He intended the mall itself to mimic the lively town center of his native Vienna. Its centerpiece was a landscaped courtyard under a large skylight, one of the many features common to copycat malls all over America. Unlike other shopping centers, whose storefronts faced the street, Southdale’s exterior was plain and windowless. Display windows and doors of the structure’s 72 stores, including Dayton’s and Donaldson’s department stores, opened to the mall’s interior, so shoppers who walked past them could easily enter without going outdoors; Gruen called this design “introverted.” 72 This mall had stores on two floors, not on a single level like outdoor shopping centers, and featured two tiers of parking for 5,000 cars. Long promenades with elevators at the far ends of each floor encouraged shoppers to walk and browse. Malls as Economic Stimulus

Even before Southdale’s opening, the exodus of city dwellers to booming suburban communities reachable by newly built interstate highways had led big-city department stores to buy suburban plots on which to build their own enclosed, regional malls. One business writer remarked in 1956: “Shopping centers have popped up like wild onions this year”; developers opened 25 regional malls that year, more than double the number already open. 73 A 1954 change to the federal tax code spurred the building boom by doubling the speed at which real estate investors could take tax deductions for the depreciation of new property. Congress approved the changes in an effort to stimulate the economy as post-World War II prosperity waned. “Developers who had been mulling over the shopping center concept abruptly shifted their projects into high gear,” said historian Tom Hanchett. “Accelerated depreciation, in plain language, suddenly transformed real-estate development into a lucrative tax shelter.” 74 The building boom lasted for three decades, during which as many as 45 covered regional shopping malls, with their Gruen-inspired two stories and expansive parking lots, opened around the country every year and integrated themselves into suburban culture. 75 But developers did not confine the sprawl to the suburbs. During the boom years, “investors didn’t care where the mall was being built,”

Page 12 of 25 Shopping Malls SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. according to an account by the Smithsonian Institution. They were building simply for the tax breaks. Instead of following the population to the suburbs, mall developers began building on the outer fringes—and the population followed them. 76 By 1970, the United States was home to 306 regional malls. Over the next decade, developers opened 440 new malls, nearly half of them with “super-regional” status, covering 800,000 square feet or more. The building of smaller strip malls and other open-air shopping centers kept pace: The count in 1970 was 37,352; in 1981, there were 55,551. 77 A “mall culture” had developed among teenagers whose social lives revolved around the enclosed plazas. 78 America, Hanchett said, had become “the world’s first suburban nation.” 79 Downtown retail districts suffered with each suburban mall opening because it pulled customers away from the central core. One example: Greensboro, N.C., lost all four of its urban department stores within four years of the 1974 opening of the suburban Four Seasons Mall. 80 Around the country, headlines at the time called city centers “eroded” and “decayed.” 81 By 1978, two years before Gruen died, the architect who started it all said he regretted doing so. “I am often called the father of the shopping mall,” he said in a speech. “I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.” 82 Beginning of the End

A two-year recession beginning in 1980 tempered the building frenzy; between 1981 and 1986, just 117 new regional malls opened. 83 As the market cooled, North American mall makers looked overseas, exporting the indoor mall template to Europe, Asia, Kuwait, Dubai and elsewhere, where fewer—and, in some spots, no—malls existed. Mall construction abroad, however, never reached domestic levels. The United States has more than 100,000 shopping centers of all sizes; Spain, by comparison, has 424. 84 Between the early 1980s and the recession of the late 2000s, enclosed mall openings dipped from more than 40 a year to fewer than 10. Since the recession ended in 2009, no more than five malls opened in any year. 85 In 2006, before the start of the latest recession, 40 malls went dark, Green Street Advisors estimated. In mid-2009, the firm projected that at least 100 would close by that December. 86 In the meantime, construction of new, enclosed regional malls screeched to a halt. 87 Still, traditional malls weathered the recession better than open-air centers, including neighborhood centers and lifestyle centers. By 2010, the top tier of indoor, regional shopping malls outperformed all other kinds of shopping centers financially. 88 And in 2012, construction on a trickle of new malls began again after a hiatus of more than five years. Like enclosed regional and super-regional malls, strip malls continued to expand in size and in number and are by far the most common kind of shopping center in the nation. What started with a couple of necessity shops here and there at the turn of the 20th century had mushroomed into a collective 300 million square feet of one-stop convenience shopping nationwide by 1970. In 2016, 68,730 strip malls, often anchored by a grocer or a drugstore, occupy 900 million square feet across the country. 89 Other alternatives to big-mall shopping sprung up over the years as well: Outlet Centers. Clothing and shoe manufacturers more than a century ago opened the first small outlet stores, located right at the factory, to sell damaged or unsold products to their employees at a discount. 90 In 1936, men’s clothing manufacturer Anderson- Little built the first outlet stores that were not located on a factory site. In 1974, women’s lingerie maker Vanity Fair opened the first outlet center, in Reading, Pa., with room for its own outlet shop plus those of several other clothing companies. 91 Four years later, real estate developer Belz Enterprises opened the first enclosed retail outlet center in Lakeland, Tenn., far from any suburban shopping mall. The first enclosed mega-outlet center, Potomac Mills, opened in Woodbridge, Va., in 1985. 92 Outlet centers have been among the fastest-growing shopping centers ever since. Most retailers no longer offer only “seconds” in their outlet stores; rather, they design and manufacture apparel and other goods to sell at a discount to shoppers who otherwise might not consider—or be able to afford—making name-brand purchases. Power Centers. “Big box” stores such as Target, Best Buy, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Home Depot began clustering in power centers in 1986, when San Francisco developer Terranomics opened 280 Metro Center in Colma, Calif. 93 Since, then, more than 2,000 of the 250,000- to 600,000-square foot shopping centers have appeared, featuring “category-dominant” stores—retailers selling a single product in a large store—that price-conscious shoppers can’t find in malls. 94 Typically, shoppers visit just one store per trip to an open-air power center. The shopping center industry refers to these stores as “category killers” because once a category-dominant store opens, other stores that sell the same type of goods can’t compete. 95 The International Council of Shopping Centers estimates there are 2,253 power centers across the country today. 96 Lifestyle Centers. Caruso’s The Grove made the term “lifestyle” center popular in 2002, when the 575,000-square-foot outdoor

marketplace opened in Los Angeles adjacent to the city’s historic Farmers Market. The shopping center surrounds a large park. High-end stores, dozens of restaurants and 14 movie theaters are among The Grove’s attractions, along with the city’s tallest Christmas tree, an internal trolley car system and a musical fountain. 97 Such lifestyle centers have actually been part of the American shopping landscape at least since 1970, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, which counts 466 of them around the country. While most are populated with high-end stores, they are not as elaborate as The Grove; their average size is 332,752 square feet. Kniffen describes the centers simply as “outdoor, open-air malls,” noting construction of new lifestyle centers has nearly ceased. ICSC confirms that fewer than 100 new lifestyle centers have opened since the 2007-2009 recession. 98 Unlike regional shopping malls, lifestyle centers are not enclosed. Storefronts face streets and street parking, and typically are designed to mimic the style of historic urban rowhouses. And unlike mixed-use town centers—heralded by many in the retail industry as the future of the shopping center—lifestyle centers are retail-focused and rarely combine apartments, offices and entertainment venues in the same structures as the stores. Current Situation Hands-on Owners

The future of the mall is coming down in many cases to the savviness of its owner and managers. Consider what happened at Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., one January afternoon two winters ago when the wind chill was 40 below zero: The mall, the largest in the United States, was nearly empty, and store managers called on the operator to shut it down. Instead, its social media team sent out an invitation to past shoppers, offering free admission to the mall’s indoor amusement park. A couple of hours later, 100,000 people were lining up for rides, eating at the mall’s restaurants and shopping at its stores. Calls from retailers continued to pour in, but now they were begging management not to close early. 99 A decade ago, the mall’s owner, Triple Five, might not have had access to shoppers’ contact information; most management companies traditionally have left it to department stores to collect customer data and reach out to them with their own promotions. But today, mall owners, especially large ones, have developed a direct relationship with their tenants’ customers and are leveraging it to get more shoppers through their doors. “Shopping mall operators used to be very passive,” Envirosell’s Underhill says. “ ‘I open the mall, I sign the deal, I keep the mall clean, I make sure the spaces are full. That’s what my job is.’ ” But now, owners are “much more activist,” he says. “There’s a difference between somebody sitting back and being a landlord and somebody being proactive about the health of their property. The more proactive the owner is, the more likely the mall is to be a success.” Like individual stores that offer discounts and freebies to frequent buyers, most large malls have started their own loyalty programs to reward customers who regularly spend money at the mall. Aside from increasing the number of mall visits, the owners are collecting data about shoppers who sign up for the programs—which stores they shopped at, what they bought, how much they spent and how often they dropped by in a given month. Then, they use that intelligence to target ads, social media messages, coupons, surveys and other communications. Underhill points to Simon Property Group, General Growth Properties and Tabuman Centers—the first-, second- and fifth-largest REITs involved with shopping malls—which train on-site mall managers to help troubled tenants with everything from designing more compelling window displays and in-store signs to incorporating technology into the physical shopping experience. 100 And, he says, “retailers are receptive to that.” In fact, says retail consultant Lewis, they’re demanding it. “Real estate people, they are one step removed from the consumers, so it’s taking them longer to understand this,” he says. “They are now being cajoled and confronted by retailers to change their structure as well.” Brown of A.T. Kearney agrees. A Kearney survey asked retailers what they want from mall operators. “They said: ‘I need you to generate traffic,’ ” he says. To that end, more than 30 malls owned by six of the largest REITs offer same-day delivery of items purchased in their tenants’ stores. Shoppers who don’t want to carry their packages home from the mall may opt to have them delivered later that day. Some malls also have curbside pickup services—sometimes called “click and collect”—for shoppers who order online but want to pick up their items at the mall without leaving their cars. 101 And mall owners are taking credit for the concierge-like service. “Big developers are now branding their projects as their name; so that they have … their names on the door now, too,” Elizabeth I. Holland, CEO of property management firm Abbell Associates and chairman of the International Council of Shopping Centers, said at the trade association’s 2016 convention. “It puts more rubber on the road for

In Westfield Corp. shopping malls around the world, the mall developer, which manages $29 billion in assets, is experimenting with technology that could change the way customers shop. Through Westfield Labs, the company’s technology innovation unit, the developer is testing what Westfield co-CEO Steven Lowy has called “a wonderful physical and digital experience that is comparative to no other form of retail. 103 That experience begins before a shopper who has signed up for it leaves home for a trip to the mall. Shoppers can plan their trips by doing an online search of the physical inventory available at every store in the mall and creating a wish list of wanted items. As the customer pulls into the parking garage, she receives a welcome text from the mall and a camera snaps a photo of her license plate. Another phone message directs her to a parking space near the stores she plans to visit. Later, another text will remind her where she left her car. Once inside, the shopper checks in at a digital kiosk, which directs her to the location of the stores that have the products on her wish list and sends coupons to her phone. It notifies her if an item she has saved in an online shopping cart is available at the mall. If she sees something in the store she likes, she can scan its barcode with her phone and add it to her wish list. She can preorder lunch or coffee from a mall café, where it will be waiting for her at the time she chooses. And a hands-free shopping program frees her from carrying her purchases around; the mall will have them delivered to her car or to her home. Retail Space Under Construction

First quarter 2016, in square feet

Consultant Robin Lewis: Offering new experiences to shoppers is “the only thing that is going to save the day.”

Notes: “Mall” includes lifestyle centers, regional malls and super-regional malls. “Power centers” are outdoor “big-box malls” that are dominated by large discount department stores. “Shopping centers” include community centers, neighborhood centers and strip centers. “Specialty centers” include airport retail, outlet centers and theme or ethnic centers. Source: Data from the CoStar Retail Report, first quarter, 2016, National Retail Market, 2016

More than 15 million square feet of retail space for shopping centers was under construction during the first quarter of 2016, while less than 11 million square feet of space for malls was under construction in the same period.

Westfield’s vice president of creative services said the experiments are “using digital to amplify the physical.” 104 Likewise, at malls across the United States, developers are experimenting with beacons that use Bluetooth technology to detect nearby smartphones and send them coupons and information about specials. They are recruiting tenants like Apple stores that sell high-tech products and let customers try them out as they shop. And they are creating mall-wide apps that retailers can use to promote their specials. “Technology is changing the way we do everything,” William S. Taubman, chief operating officer at Taubman Centers, said at the 2016 International Council of Shopping Centers convention. 105 A growing number of malls have charging stations for phones and tablets, and a few even advertise electric-car charging. Yet some malls don’t offer free Wi-Fi to their customers. Mall of America, in fact, didn’t roll Wi-Fi out until last October. 106 Most are just starting to develop smartphone apps that customers can use as a mall directory and to get coupons and information about specials; apps so far have been the purview of each store at the mall, not of the mall itself. “Every mall needs an app,” said Liz Bacelar, whose former firm Decoded Fashion organizes events to connect decision-makers in the fashion and retail sectors with new technologies. She notes a mall app saves shoppers from having to crowd their phones with apps from every store they frequent. “One app with all of the brands in it … [is] much more important to me as a customer than the app from the brand I love,” Bacelar said. 107 Bacelar said owners’ lack of attention to technology could cost them. “Property managers are choosing to be the last one on the train,” she said at an International Council of Shopping Centers convention in December. “That needs to change.” Looking Ahead

Kings and Queens

Within a decade, the number of enclosed regional and super-regional malls could dwindle from almost 1,100 to just a few hundred. Malls that remain low-tech, lack experiences and continue to populate their selling floors with stores that shoppers can find anywhere will be gone, the experts say. Few, if any, indoor malls will be under construction, as consumers flock instead to open-air, mixed-use town centers within walking distance of their homes. To complete with town centers both in urban cores and in the near-in suburbs of major cities, the malls that survive will be high-end and high-tech. Within those malls, analysts, developers and urban planners predict, each store will be smaller than today’s average, as more customers place orders both online and in the store, and then wait for delivery to their homes—in most cases, on the same day. Showroom-style stores, like today’s downsized TargetExpress, will stock only the most commonly purchased items in large quantities, and show samples of the rest to shoppers who can order what they want for same-day home delivery. Shoppers won’t stand in line at cash registers in stores at the malls of tomorrow; instead, they will use their smartphones—or their high- tech replacement—to scan barcodes and check themselves out. They’ll try on clothes in fitting rooms equipped with smart mirrors that will snap their photos in different outfits so they can compare the looks side-by-side. Some of those mirrors might even render the shopper’s image wearing clothes she hasn’t tried on yet, based on photos and measurements taken by a full-body scanner. The stores at the mall will be less familiar; Underhill of Envirosell predicts “most” of today’s retailers will be out of businesses within 30 years. Instead, up-and-coming shops that offer unique experiences will rule the day, à la today’s Pirch, a high-end kitchen and bathroom store where customers can try out shower jets by showering at the store, and Cabela’s, a sporting goods chain with vast stores that include huge aquariums and wildlife displays, and that arranges for customers to go on fishing and hunting expeditions with instructors. Bacelar, formerly of Decoded Fashion, predicts that window shopping will be interactive; even when the mall is closed, she says, interactive glass storefronts will double as touch screens that let a shopper drag and drop clothes onto a virtual mannequin that is the same size as the customer. The touch screen also will allow shoppers to place their order. Those mall-operated loyalty programs could include points for borrowing rather than buying clothes and other items, as the sharing economy—businesses fueled by a growing preference among Millennials to rent, borrow or share rather than buy everything from rides to lawnmowers to music to clothing—endures and the preference of young shoppers for frequent wardrobe overhauls is met with clothing brands designed solely for renting. A group of online retailers pioneered the trend, and a 2016 study by Westfield predicted it will soon move into physical stores. 108 Over-the-top, non-retail experiences, from unique restaurants to indoor swimming pools will be as ubiquitous as the stores, and most malls will incorporate apartments, offices and service providers like doctors, barbers, gyms and hotel rooms into or next to their space. “The shopping mall will be an ‘all’ and not a ‘mall,’ ” says Underhill. “It will be a place that gives people pleasure to go to, over and beyond just access to goods.” But perhaps the greatest experience at the mall of tomorrow will be the highly personalized, highly attentive customer service that shoppers will experience, because without it, customer service expert John Tschohl says, they will have no reason to shop in physical stores. He predicts stores in future malls will mimic the intense customer-service experience common to today’s Apple stores: “There’s somebody there to greet you,” he says. “They ask you how they can help you 100 percent of the time. They know the products they’re selling. And they treat customers like kings and queens.” About the Author

Sharon O’Malley, an instructor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, is a freelance writer, editor, consultant and trainer who has published articles in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including The Arizona Republic, USA Today, Ladies’ Home Journal, Working Woman and American Demographics. For SAGE Business Researcher, she has written reports on Internships, the Free Economy, Mortgage Finance and Product Recalls. Chronology

1800s-1900s U.S. shopping centers get their start. 1828 The country’s first indoor shopping center, Westminster Arcade, opens in downtown Providence, R.I.

1896 Baltimore’s posh Roland Park suburb features a row of stores with room for customers to park at the door. 1900 Retailers cluster strips of small convenience stores close to the street along streetcar routes to sell groceries and sundries to commuters. 1916 Wealthy residents and investors in Lake Forest, Ill., fund the building of Market Square, the country’s first planned shopping district. 1920-1945 Suburban shopping strips compete with downtowns. 1922 Entrepreneur J.C. Nichols, who coins the term “shopping center” to describe retail sites built for access by the automobile, builds the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Mo.’s wealthy Country Club District, a planned residential community. It is often cited as the world’s first full-blown shopping center, although its shops occupied more than one site and were bisected by public streets. 1928 The Grandview Avenue Shopping Center in Grandview Heights, Ohio, becomes the first U.S. regional shopping center with an integrated parking lot. 1931 Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas is the first retail center to occupy a single site, with storefronts facing away from the streets. Late 1940s- Shopping center construction steps up. 1950s 1949-1951 The first large-scale regional shopping centers emerge: Cameron Village in Raleigh, N.C. (1949); Northgate in Seattle (1950); Shoppers World near Boston (1951), creating the first serious competition to downtown shopping. 1954 The open-air Northland Center, on the fringes of Detroit, becomes the world’s largest shopping center with 110 stores and a vast parking lot.… Changes to tax law that allow developers to rapidly write off the cost of building increase the construction of regional shopping centers by 500 percent within three years. 1956 Developers open 25 regional shopping plazas, more than doubling the number built before that year.… Southdale Center, the country’s first enclosed suburban shopping mall, opens in Edina, Minn.… The word “mall” is coined to define the large, enclosed suburban shopping center 1959 Developers build 206 shopping centers of all types; total square feet constructed that year is 32 million, double that of 1954.… Kalamazoo, Mich., is the first city to close off some major downtown streets and turn them into pedestrian malls. 1960s-1970s Malls get bigger; competition gets stiffer. 1962 The opening of Midtown Plaza in Rochester, N.Y., begins a trend among downtowns to build urban enclosed shopping malls to revitalize their cities. The mall closed in 2008. 1974 VF Corp., owner of the Vanity Fair clothing brand, opens the first multistore outlet center in Reading, Pa. 1976 Developer James Rouse revitalizes Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall by turning it into a “festival marketplace,” focusing on food and specialty shops. His innovation spurs a number of similar urban redevelopment projects around the country. Few have survived.… Water Tower Place, the country’s first vertical mall—a multistory shopping center built on limited space in a dense urban space—debuts in Chicago. 1980s-1990s Megamalls, power centers and outlet malls emerge. 1980 Victor Gruen, the creator of the enclosed shopping mall, dies. Two years earlier, he said of his invention: “Those bastard developments … destroyed our cities.” 1985 Western Development (now Mills Corp.) combines features of shopping centers with bargain outlet stores in the first mega-outlet mall, located in Woodbridge, Va. By 1987, the U.S. was home to 108 factory outlet malls. 1986 First “power center”—filled with big-box stores like Toys R Us and Bed, Bath & Beyond—opens in Colma, Calif., a San Francisco suburb. 1989-1993 Shopping mall construction drops nearly 70 percent, largely in response to the savings and loan crisis. 1992 Mall of America opens in Bloomington, Minn., on the site of the demolished Metropolitan Stadium. It remains the largest mall in the United States.

2000s-Present Popularity of traditional shopping malls wanes. 2000 Peter Blackbird and Brian Florence create DeadMalls.com to track out-of-business malls in real time. 2002 The Grove opens in Los Angeles, creating a high-end template for the rebirth of open-air shopping centers, now known as “lifestyle centers.” 2008 America falls into a deep recession.… 180-year-old Westminster Arcade in Providence, R.I., closes. It is redeveloped in 2012 as a residential building for micro-apartments.… Sales per square foot at regional malls bottom out before steadily increasing for the next eight years. 2009 General Growth Properties, the second-largest U.S. mall operator, files for bankruptcy. It was the largest real estate bankruptcy in U.S. history at that time. 2010-2016 Malls struggle to survive. 2010 Indoor regional shopping malls outperform all other kinds of shopping centers financially. 2014 The Mall at University Town Center in Sarasota, Fla., is the first traditional, indoor mall to open in the U.S. since 2006. … Westfield Corp. opens Bespoke at its San Francisco mall to bring retail and technology communities together. 2015 Green Street Advisors reports that more than two dozen malls have shut down since 2011, and another 60 are near death. 2016 United Parcel Service survey shows shoppers make more purchases online than in stores for the first time.

Resources Bibliography

Books

Dunham-Jones, Ellen, and June Williams, “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs,” John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Two architecture professors call on urban planners, architects, developers, environmentalists and local governments to repurpose abandoned shopping malls and other suburban relics instead of razing them and bulldozing green space to build new structures. Hardwick, M. Jeffrey, “Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream,” University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. A historian of American culture follows the life and accomplishments of Austrian-born Victor Gruen, widely credited as the architect of the American shopping mall. Lewis, Robin, and Michael Dart, “The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World’s Toughest Marketplace,” St. Martin’s Press, 2014. Two retail industry experts explain how, in an age of technology and globalization, retailers need three competencies to survive: an ability to anticipate and respond to changing consumer demands; a deep connection with consumers; and control of the “value chain,” the activities taken by the manufacturer, warehouse, carrier and supplier of a product as it makes its way to the consumer. Scharoun, Lisa, “America at the Mall: The Cultural Role of a Retail Utopia,” McFarland & Co., 2012. A founder of the Cross-Cultural Design Lab at the University of Canberra in Australia regards the American shopping mall as more than a place to buy goods; it’s also a primary place for community and social interaction to which consumers have a spiritual and emotional connection.

Articles

Ajudua, Christine, “The World’s Coolest, Most Cultured New Malls,” The New York Times Style Magazine, July 27, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/j74hcpn. A travel writer describes five malls around the world that have combined shopping with culture and community. Rothbort, Scott, “What the death of the American mall means for investors,” MarketWatch, Nov. 19, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/h2y3qpy. A personal investment counselor warns investors against sinking their money into shopping malls unless they are upscale and have been reinvigorated with restaurants and entertainment options. Schwartz, Nelson D., “The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls,” The New York Times, Jan. 3, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/mtuay55. A business reporter looks at two sides of the shopping mall “obituary,” showing that unlike dozens of dead and dying malls, top-tier properties continue to thrive.

Sinclair, Nicole, “5 retail groups that will survive the death of the mall,” Yahoo! Finance, Nov. 12, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/nostvtl. A markets correspondent says five kinds of retailers are thriving while others languish: Amazon; department store off-price brands; traditional discounters like TJ Maxx and Ross; active-wear makers like Nike; and those specializing in automobiles, home improvement, technology and health care.

Reports and Studies

“Industry Conditions: Shopping Centers: Where Americans Buy, Socialize, Play and Work,” International Council of Shopping Centers, May 19, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gldqodq. The trade association for the shopping center industry summarizes the findings of an April survey about the frequency of visits and spending habits of Americans who go to shopping centers. “Shopping Centers: America’s First and Foremost Marketplace,” International Council of Shopping Centers, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/zahdkef. A study of the shopping center industry by its trade association finds that shopping centers and malls remain “successful, vibrant and vital to commerce.” “U.S. Mall Outlook,” Green Street Advisors, Jan. 26, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/h5luxzg. A real estate research firm forecasts more closures for those malls that cater to middle-income shoppers; it also predicts increasing competition from e-commerce over the coming years and more consolidations among mall developers. Hanchett, Thomas W., “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of the1950s and 1960s,” American Historical Review, October 1996, http://tinyurl.com/jj7hvb3. A former Youngstown State University history professor posits that a 1954 change to U.S. tax law was more influential in the shopping mall building boom of the 1960s and 70s than the automobile or urban flight. Ortega, Lauren E., “The Rise of the Mall,” Columbia University, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/gpeljeu. A graduate student in architecture traces the history of the modern shopping center from its 19th-century roots and argues that a return to the concept of the mall as a community’s social and civic center can save it. The Next Step

Anchor Stores

Abrams, Rachel, and Sapna Maheshwari, “Macy’s to Close 100 Stores as E-Rivals and Discounting Hit Legacy Retailers,” The New York Times, Aug. 11, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zj3dr9z. Macy’s, America’s largest department store chain, is set to close 100 stores because of consumers’ shifting shopping habits. D’innocenzio, Anne, “Anchor stores go chic to shed big box image,” The Philadelphia Tribune, Aug. 16, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jlmt4cw. Some department stores plan to revitalize their appearance—and bottom lines—by adding spas, restaurants and more-attentive staff. Peterson, Hayley, “A new report signals disaster for American shopping malls,” Business Insider, April 25, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/znkqgd9. A real estate research firm says more closures of mall anchor stores such as JCPenney, Macy’s and Sears are necessary for the companies to return to the productivity levels of a decade ago.

E-commerce’s Future

Johnson, Lauren, “Walmart Buys Ecommerce Startup Jet.com for $3 Billion to Compete Online With Amazon,” Adweek, Aug. 8, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jm3ub3j. Walmart bought e-commerce startup Jet.com in an attempt to improve its online and mobile presence and to compete with mega-online retailer Amazon. Thomas, Brad, “Simon Says: ‘Malls Far From Extinct, Safe From E-Commerce For Now,’” Forbes, April 26, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hv3jfqs. Simon Property Group CEO David Simon contends e-commerce is not killing the mall, saying “business is as solid as it’s ever been.” Von Bergen, Jane M., “E-commerce is driving retail employment,” Albuquerque Journal, Aug. 16, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zn6bnpy. In-store and e-commerce retailing are becoming more intertwined, with stores driving online traffic and websites spurring foot traffic in brick-and- mortar locations, according to an e-commerce and retail company executive.

Mall Competitors

Gustafson, Krystina, “Americans aren’t done with outlet malls just yet,” CNBC, Aug. 22, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/j3rbbr9. Traffic at outlet malls is rebounding after a decline in sales earlier in the year, according to a Cowen & Co. survey. Lam, Bourree, “Why the Biggest Big-Box Stores Survive,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zlhovuu. Two economists report that despite closings or bankruptcies among some big-box stores, sales are rebounding at warehouse stores and supercenters.

Sloan, Katie, “Outlet Centers Are Morphing into Lifestyle Centers,” Rebusiness Online, Feb. 16, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jv6r6sm. Outdated shopping areas are being reborn as “lifestyle centers,” with the addition of enhanced restaurants, entertainment options and more luxury stores.

Reuse and Revamping

Del Rey, Jason, “A giant shopping mall company is turning to 10 startups to breathe new life into retail,” Recode, Aug. 1, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hlb8gll. Westfield Corp., which operates 32 U.S. malls, is teaming with advertising agency R/GA and 10 startup companies to spur innovation in brick-and-mortar malls. Semuels, Alana, “A New Life for Dead Malls,” The Atlantic, March 9, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/qcevowb. Defunct shopping malls are finding new purpose as schools, workforce centers and churches. Wahba, Phil, “New Mall Cements Lower Manhattan as a Luxury Retail Mecca,” Fortune, Aug. 16, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jseeyjc. Fifteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, New York City’s new World Trade Center opened its 100-store luxury mall as the centerpiece of the complex’s commuter terminal. Organizations

CoStar 1331 L St., N.W., Washington, DC 20005 888-226-7404 www.costargroup.com A leading commercial real estate information and marketing provider. Envirosell 907 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10010 212-673-9100 www.envirosell.com A consumer behavior research and consulting firm founded by author and retail specialist Paco Underhill. Green Street Advisors 600 Newport Center Drive, Suite 800, Newport Beach, CA 92660 949-640-8780 www.greenstreetadvisors.com A market research, data and analytics firm specializing in research on real estate investment trusts, or REITs. International Council of Shopping Centers 221 Avenue of the Americas, 41st Floor, New York, NY 10020-1099 646-728-3800, Option 1 http://www.icsc.org/ The global trade association of the shopping center industry. J. Rogers Kniffen Worldwide Enterprises 405 Lexington Ave., 14th Floor, New York, NY 10174 212-724-2204 http://www.jrkwwe.com/ A firm specializing in equity research and financial and management consulting for the retail sector. National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts 1875 I St., N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20006 202-739-9400 www.reit.com The global trade association for REITs and publicly traded real estate companies with an interest in U.S. real estate and capital markets. National Retail Federation 1101 New York Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20005 202-783-7971 www.nrf.com The world’s largest retail trade association representing discount and department stores, home goods and specialty stores, Main Street merchants, grocers, wholesalers, chain restaurants and Internet retailers from the United States and more than 45 other countries. Urban Land Institute

2001 L St., N.W., Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036 202-624-7000 http://uli.org A nonprofit research and education organization that focuses on land-use policy and practice. Notes

[1] Malcolm Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle,” The New Yorker, March 15, 2004, http://tinyurl.com/ng3dyh5. [2] Lauren E. Ortega, “The Rise of the Mall,” Columbia University, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/gpeljeu. [3] JC Reindl, “Judge approves plan to close Northland Center mail,” Detroit Free Press, Feb. 26, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/qxxjcn6. [4] “U.S. Mall Outlook,” Green Street Advisors, Jan. 27, 2015, provided to SBR by Green Street Advisors. [5] Ibid. [6] Nelson D. Schwartz, “The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls,” Jan. 3, 2015, The New York Times, http://tinyurl.com/mtuay55. [7] “How We Shop Now. What’s Next?” Westfield Corp., February 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zuvegxu. [8] Schwartz, op. cit. [9] “Shopping Centers = Good Investment,” International Council of Shopping Centers, March 15, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/hzhofuz. [10] “Upscale Retail Malls Escape Retail Mauling,” Credit Suisse, Barron’s, May 27, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/hp7qxs4. [11] “ICSC Live! At #RECon 16: Daniel J. (DJ) Busch, Green Street Advisors,” International Council of Shopping Centers, video posted June 2, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jurwwjc. [12] “Dead Mall Stories,” DeadMalls.com, undated, accessed July 1, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/odatsbj. [13] Krystina Gustafson, “Danger signs at the mall? More empty storefronts,” CNBC, Jan. 27, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/h2t54f3. [14] Emily Badger, “The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire),” CityLab, July 13, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/gwk9d4d. [15] “Women in the Labor Force in 2010,” U.S. Department of Labor, http://tinyurl.com/z2wzpby. [16] “Taking Stock With Teens,” PiperJaffray, Spring 2014, http://tinyurl.com/jxhht6j. [17] “U.S. Mall Outlook,” Green Street Advisors, op. cit. [18] Ibid. [19] Amy Merrick, “Are Malls Over?” The New Yorker, March 11, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/zjv8z67. [20] Sarah Mullholland and Rachel Evans, “America’s Dying Shopping Malls Have Billions in Debt Coming Due,” Bloomberg, June 16, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hcho6my. [21] Ibid. [22] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” CoStar Realty Information Inc., 2015, provided to SBR by International Council of Shopping Centers. [23] Liam Pleven, “Tougher Times for Mall Owners,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gnrbfwp; David Matthau, “Will ‘American Dream’ at Meadowlands ever become a reality?” New Jersey 101.5, July 11, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/z6jjt6a. [24] James Greiff, “Goodbye, Malls of America,” Bloomberg, July 3, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/hwrxket. [25] “Is Your Macy’s Closing?” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 6, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/ztdwfxq; “Macy’s, Inc. Outlines Moves to Drive Profitable Growth and Enhance Shareholder Value,” press release, Macy’s Inc., Aug. 11, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gngt9dy. [26] “Elaine Misonzhnik,” Return of the Mall,” National Real Estate Investor, May 5, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/ha4elds. [27] Rick J. Caruso, “The Indoor Mall Is Dead, but Physical Retail Thrives,” Feb. 19, 2014, Caruso Affiliated, http://tinyurl.com/jdozhtj.

[28] Bryan Buttler, “DreamWorks Brings Shrek-Themed Santa Experience to Cherry Hill Mall,” Philadelphia Magazine, Nov. 24, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/jk4t44r. [29] “Tourism Facts,” Triple Five, undated, http://tinyurl.com/hplcqpd; Rob Baedeker, “America’s most visited tourist attractions,” USA Today, March 5, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/hom3qlq. [30] Douglas Hanks, “In Miami-Dade, making the Mall of America look small,” Miami Herald, Jan. 5, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zhmsv3k. [31] “Industry Conditions: Shopping Centers: Where Americans Buy, Socialize, Play and Work,” International Council of Shopping Centers, May 19, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gldqodq. [32] Suzanne Kapner, “Apple Gets Sweet Deals from Mall Operators,” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/lxffkvg. [33] Ibid. [34] Krystina Gustafson, “Malls boasting a Tesla shop generate more sales than their peers,” CNBC, May 24, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jfmtpg5. [35] Suzanne Kapner, “Upscale Shopping Centers Nudge Out Down-Market Malls,” The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jlg79wl. [36] “U.S. Mall Outlook,” Green Street Advisors, op. cit. [37] Cole Buckley, Pete DeFina and Lindsay Root, “Walmart Vs. Amazon,” The Economist, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/h8usuz8. [38] Ibid. [39] Laura Stevens, “Survey Shows Rapid Growth in Online Shopping,” The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zb58zfo. [40] Liam Pleven, “Tougher Times for Mall Owners,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gnrbfwp. [41] “U.S. Mall Outlook,” Green Street Advisors, op. cit. [42] JC Reindl and Georgea Kovanis, “Macy’s closing may kill one of first suburban malls,” Detroit Free Press, Jan. 9, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/n5vyle7. [43] “Shopping Centers: America’s First and Foremost Marketplace,” International Council of Shopping Centers, October 2014, http://tinyurl.com/hxmwlye. [44] “On Solid Ground: Brick-and-Mortar Is the Foundation of Omnichannel Retailing,” A.T. Kearney, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/zaf5xyq. [45] Ibid. [46] “Death of Pureplay Retail,” L2, Jan. 12, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/huxfxwd. [47] Hilary Milnes, “How discount retailer Primark has evaded e-commerce,” Digiday, Sept. 14, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/q8ze2kh. [48] “Shopping Centers: America’s First and Foremost Marketplace,” International Council of Shopping Centers, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/hxmwlye. [49] Randyl Drummer, “Low Level of Retail Construction Starting to Crimp Net Absorption,” CoStar, Aug. 5, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/jccdks3. [50] “Shopping Center Facts and Stats,” International Council of Shopping Centers, undated, http://tinyurl.com/oxajo5c. [51] Melissa Schettini Kearney, “Income Inequality in the United States,” testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, Brookings Institution, Jan. 16, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/hut6azt. [52] Ortega, op. cit. [53] Robert Fishman, “Towards an Open-Minded Space,” in “Sprawl and Public Space: Redressing the Mall,” National Endowment for the Arts, 2002, eds. David J. Smiley and Mark Robbins, pp. 9-12, http://tinyurl.com/zjcmqtd. [54] Alana Semuels, “A New Life for Dead Malls,” The Atlantic, March 9, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/qcevowb. [55] Paul Schwartzman, “At Landover, It’s All Over but the Crying and Closing,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2002, http://tinyurl.com/h8bovfy.

[56] “Trajan’s Markets,” A View on Cities, undated, http://tinyurl.com/c49p9fc. [57] “The Grand Bazaar,” Grand Bazaar, undated, http://tinyurl.com/gl3qlrp. [58] “Marshall Field & Company,” blog, Department Store Museum, undated, http://tinyurl.com/h2whz2j. [59] “Hudson’s Department Store,” Historic Detroit, undated, http://tinyurl.com/jzqrmn4. [60] Ortega, op. cit. [61] Thomas W. Hanchett, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s,” American Historical Review, October 1996,http://tinyurl.com/jj7hvb3. [62] Mike Conklin, “Market Square in Lake Forest,” Chicago Tribune, undated, http://tinyurl.com/jn9ys5m. [63] “Columbus Retail History Part #2: Shopping Centers,” All Columbus, Ohio Data, Jan. 22, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/zwoodq2. [64] Hanchett, op. cit. [65] Ibid. [66] Richard A. Feinberg and Jennifer Meoli, “A Brief History of the Mall,” Advances in Consumer Research, 1991, http://tinyurl.com/hshusvk. [67] Hanchett, op. cit. [68] Hanchett, op. cit. [69] Ibid. [70] Gladwell, op. cit. [71] Colin Marshall, “Southdale Center: America’s first shopping mall – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 30,” The Guardian, May 6, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/m9f4dfw. [72] Ibid. [73] Hanchett, op. cit. [74] Ibid. [75] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” CoStar Realty Information, 2015, provided to SBR by International Council of Shopping Centers; Hanchett, \ibid. [76] Natasha Geiling, “The Death and Rebirth of the American Mall,” Smithsonian.com, Nov. 25, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/znrsalc. [77] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [78] David Gwynn, “The History of the American Shopping Center,” University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Dec. 3, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/jpgz9z2. [79] Hanchett, op. cit. [80] Gwynn, op. cit. [81] Hanchett, op. cit. [82] Anne Quito, “The father of the American shopping mall hated what he created,” Quartz, July 17, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/q26b6yd. [83] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [84] “Shopping Center Facts and Stats,” International Council of Shopping Centers, undated, http://tinyurl.com/oxajo5c. [85] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [86] Kris Hudson and Vanessa O’Connell, “Recession Turns Malls Into Ghost Towns,” The Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/gmmnvur.

[87] Elaine Misonzhnik, “Return of the Mall,” National Real Estate Investor, May 5, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/ha4elds. [88] Ibid. [89] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [90] Anne T. Coughlan and David A. Soberman, “A Survey of Outlet Mall Retailing: Past, Present and Future,” Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2004. [91] Ibid. [92] Ibid. [93] “Green Towns,” Shopping Mall Museum, undated, http://tinyurl.com/gql4omq. [94] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [95] “U.S. Shopping Center Classification and Characteristics,” ICSC Research and CoStar Realty Information Inc., 2015, provided to SBR by International Council of Shopping Centers. [96] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [97] Gary Baum, “L.A.’s Walt Disney of Shopping: Rick Caruso on Expansion Plans, Whose Advice He Seeks in Hollywood,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/znufy9b. [98] “U.S. Shopping Center Count and Gross Leasable Area by Center Type,” op. cit. [99] Sandy Smith, “Reinventing the Mall,” National Retail Federation, June 3, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/zb98gb2. [100] “U.S. Mall Outlook,” Green Street Advisors, op. cit. [101] Taylor Soper, “Deliv launches same-day delivery service in Seattle, partners with mall retailers,” GeekWire, Oct. 27, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/h4srn62. [102] “ICSC Live! At #RECon16: Elizabeth I. Holland, Abbell Associates LLC,” International Council of Shopping Centers, video posted on May 25, 2016, YouTube, http://tinyurl.com/gotm5gr. [103] “Westfield Labs Vision Video,” Westfield Labs, video posted on July 24, 2014, YouTube, http://tinyurl.com/z2hq3re. [104] Matt McCue, “Westfield Labs—For giving the mall a high-tech makeover,” Fast Company, Feb. 9, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/jc8642o. [105] “ICSC Live! At #RECon16: William S. Taubman, Taubman Centers,” International Council of Shopping Centers, video posted on May 24, 2016, YouTube, http://tinyurl.com/jhhxccu. [106] Kavita Kumar, “Mall of America gets ready for holiday shoppers by adding Wi-Fi,” Star-Tribune, Oct. 28, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/z9extu7. [107] “ICSC LIVE! Liz Bacelar, Founder and President, Decoded Fashion,” International Council of Shopping Centers, video posted on Dec. 16, 2015, YouTube, http://tinyurl.com/hbaulxz. [108] “How We Shop Now – What’s Next?” Westfield, Feb. 8, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gtuhhak.

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