as much as i get the enthusiasm for "what if we turned the mall into a community center and low-income housing?", you need to remember that malls are... not well built. to put it lightly. They were built quickly and cheaply to capitalize on economic booms and the end of the age of "buildings should probably be built to last a long time, right?". They require a ton of maintainence and upkeep to stay standing, the large flat roofs need to be re-tarred, the climate control costs with all the massive open spaces are immense, and they are laid out around massive empty spaces meant to hold cornerstone stores that no longer exist. They're also usually way out in the suburbs, where people are expected to drive to them, and are often poorly connected by public transit.
Some malls have changed with the times. A lot of cities have turned parts of mall parking lots into local transit centers, and such. But if you really want to turn the place where your mall is into a great space, then you may well be better off either tearing down the mall itself, or keeping it as retail space, and building other things around it, in those massive empty parking lots. Yes, you will still need a ton of parking, you're still way out in the suburbs, but there's much better ways to go about it. Ideally, if the budget is there for it, and the housing/population demand is there as well, what you want to do is turn the mall into a kind of local downtown, a quasi-city in the center of your otherwise suburban sprawl, and connect it to the downtown core of your main city via rail, making it a commuter hub as well. For a great mall-to-downtown project, you want to do the following:
Rail
You want to maximize the number of people that come through your burgeoning suburban downtown core? Put a park-and-ride rail station in it. Take one portion of the mall parking lot and turn it into a multi-story parking garage, for density. Set up a local transit hub, where local busses converge and people can exchange between them and the rail line, and build a rail station and line that run from your little satellite city to the downtown core of the main city you're nearest to. This makes your development a major commuter hub. Bonus points for large-scale bicycle parking, and for protected bike lanes that branch out from your development and into the suburbs.
Density
Your mall is surrounded by giant empty parking lots, but you've got a parking garage and good transit infrastructure now! no need for all that wasted space! Time to build up. Now, people are going to get up in arms if you try to build too high, so keep your development low and taper it up from the edges. Keep it to three to five stories, maybe seven at most right in the center of the development. Make sure the streets in between the buildings have a good variety of space, with wide avenues for major thoroughfares and narrower walkways for resident access and utilities. Most importantly: NO. CARS. your development is big, but it used to be a mall. it is inherently made to be walkable in scale. Ideally, offer a scooter/bike share program and allow small vehicles for those that cannot walk moderate distances. Electric golf carts and kei-trucks are great options for this. These also work well as potions for local utility vehicles. If folks who live in the residential units need a car, they can keep it in the car park and walk to it. have carts and trollys available for people to bring heavy stuff to and from their vehicle with ease.
Don't try to turn the mall into something it's not.
The actual mall building is not going to be well suited to serving as residential housing or something of the like. That said, it is excellent for commercial space, so lean into that, and consider what kind of commercial businesses you could fit in a mall that you wouldn't otherwise consider. Could a cornerstone store space become a multi-use event hosting space? Could it become a local manufacturing space? Could you create office space on an upper floor? Is there unused space that service businesses could be making use of? Is there room for some of the behind-the-scenes businesses that support the retail businesses to move into? Could there be a community center in one of the former store spaces that would draw people into and through the mall with regular events and group meetings?
Parks & Ponds
Your mall probably has a drainage problem. It's a huge expanse of concrete through which rainwater cannot penetrate. Find the lowest part of your development, rip out the parking lot, and put in a park with a drainage pond. The grass and plantings will soak up rainwater, the pond will provide room to catch sudden inundations, and both will work to keep your space cool in the hottest part of the year through evaporation. Parks are also another great place to host events and attract families, bringing more traffic through your development.
Everyday Stores
This is where so many projects, especially commuter projects, get tripped up. You have residents. You have commuters. It's not enough. You know what your local mall doesn't have? A grocery store, and a hardware store. At the end of the day, when people get off work, they are going to buy the necessities of life, and the best possible way to get them into and through the retail portion of your development is to make those things accessible. You want someone from the surrounding suburbs to take the train back from work, then before going to their car or getting on the bus, you want them to come through your development. They come through to get groceries, they come through to get hardware necessities, they come through to get takeout after a long day, and then they go to their car, or their bike, or the bus, and take those things home. It's just so convenient. Just make sure these stores are set up relatively near to the car park, so people don't feel like they're making a chore for themselves with the extra stop on the way home.
Congratulations! You have turned your local suburban mall into the retail and community hub at the center of a satellite downtown, a new nexus around which your suburban community can center itself, a place a huge portion of local residents will pass through every single day as they move to and fro, reducing traffic and congestion and expanding the available housing market.
Yes, this is very expensive. in the real world, you have to make compromises to get things done and get project like this built. Also, if you do this wrong, you can seriously contribute to the gentrification of an area, raising surrounding home prices and damaging the community. That said, there is a reason this works for suburban malls, and that's the large contingent of suburbanites that are relatively wealthy (or at least middle-class) office workers who commute downtown. Is this project going to uplift people in poorer communities? that's highly dependent on the context of it. If it reduces the upwards pressure on downtown housing by creating a second downtown residential core, then perhaps. If it helps get through the funding for a commuter rail line that will also stop in under-served communities, then perhaps. If it will offer access to services for under-served community members living in the otherwise well-off suburban community, where those services are otherwise unavailable, then perhaps. But it's hard to say.
Ultimately, a lot of mall revitalization project ideas stem from that issue of cost. A lot of them suggest things like turning a mall into low-income housing, or a service and support center, and these things can work, for a while anyway, but they come at a great cost. Maintaining an entire mall is extremely expensive, and it has to be maintained to a high standard for people to live there or work there, and they're just not designed to house people. The work required to retrofit these spaces and to maintain them is not trivial, nor is it cheap, and in the long run a lot of these projects will end up spending a lot more money than they would have building smaller, more focused spaces, and building them with intent. There are successful examples, I'm sure people will trot them out in the reblogs of this, but those tend to be successful due to extremely specific circumstances that make them more viable than typically better alternatives.
in other words, if you want a mall to be both well re-developed AND beneficial for undeserved communities, it has to be a government run project that isn't looking to make a profit, but rather to create a self-funding or partially self-funding community hub.
