Necessity as the mother of invention: Housing at once single use shopping malls

Here and there across the country, there have been over the years the addition of housing to shopping centers, not usually directly connected, but perhaps on out parcels.

Shopping malls initiated the concept of single use land use development.  Whereas downtown and secondary commercial districts had been mixed use including civic and nonprofit uses as well as housing (on the outskirts), shopping malls were devoted only to retail.

Just before the 2008 crash, Melvin Simon Associates, a leading shopping mall company, promoted the concept of "Alls," adding housing and other functions to shopping mall campuses, but the program sputtered as a result of the recession.

-- "LIVE.WORK. PLAY.STAY.SHOP. | Building the Shopping Destinations of the Future"

Since then, as retailers have gone out of business, many shopping centers are redeveloping mall space for all kinds of uses, from fitness centers to medical clinics to offices.  These efforts do succeed as real estate ventures, but at the expense of the success of the remaining retailers, because the new uses aren't great at generating retail customers.  OTOH, these ventures make the properties more resilient, and may generate more tax revenue for localities.

-- "Adding other uses turns retail centers into communities," Shopping Centers Today

Housing proposed at Plymouth Meeting Mall.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports ("Philly’s biggest mall owner wants to build thousands of apartments on its properties to help pay its debts") that one of that area's large regional real estate players wants to add housing to its sites to generate more revenue, which it needs to pay off its debts.

I remember the decades of struggles, working on urban revitalization in DC, to try to get property owners and/or large retailers (like supermarkets) to be innovative, to consider alternatives to their standard business models.

Mostly, it was a failure, because the businesses had little reason to accept challenges to how they did things, they were satisfied with how they were operating.

A couple exceptions, although they did it on their own, were Federal Realty, which developed Bethesda Row (ULI Case Study, "Why are people so damn good about asking the wrong question?," 2006) in Montgomery County Maryland, and Edens, a shopping center owner based in the Southeast that bought a goodly amount of the Union Market district, and then began changing their approach to retail and property development, adopting a mixed use, urban-centric business model.

Federal Realty waxes and wanes.  They've developed similar and much bigger projects in places like Boston and San Jose, but at the same time mixed use projects cost more to develop and are more risky, so they sometimes refocus on traditional suburban strip centers, anchored by grocery stores.  While Edens has projects all over the country now that are "urban," such as Denver ("The Future of Retail is Coming to RiNo," Denver Business Journal) when before they were only into suburban single use malls.

It's interesting to see that at times, financial exigency can spark innovation.

It's rare though, because in general people and organizations aren't good at making decisions, and trying times make it even more difficult to be innovative.

It's even rarer in government.