Malls can definitely obtain natural lighting if architected properly (eg sky lights and light pipes) -- malls are no different than other commercial offices.

For example: I used to work at GoogleX's "San Antonio station", which was a converted shopping mall, and it had great lighting, even on lower floors.

With multiple employers in same building, you'd also have many more socializing options -- including random colleagues who drop by to run errands.

Besides, what would you suggest instead -- let them turn into suburban blight?!

They're already a suburban blight. Just teat them down. Put a park there instead.

Where does the money come from? Cities are cash-strapped, which makes demolition & park development unlikely. Existing property owners aren't exactly in the business of giving away prime realestate or operating charities -- they'd probably opt for more suburban housing developments.

Cities are cash strapped due to low density sprawl, of which malls are just one kind.

So one person acquiesces to "no solution because it's a chicken and egg problem." Another says "let it rot into decaying blight."

Even if suboptimal, revitalizing the mall as a co-working space sounds like a less-bad solution to me. Still open to practical alternatives though. ;)

Cities are not cash strapped, they just claim to be when they don't want to pay for something. Most cities have tons of cash flow paying for roads, services like garbage/recycling, maintaining existing parks.

If they really cant find the money sell it to developers to make condos or single family homes.

Somehow a small city I used to live in managed to do it. The mall declined to the point that all that was left were the anchor stores and a few other internal stores when they decided to demolish it.

They left the major anchor stores (Target, Von Maur, Hobby Lobby), turned most of the center of the mall into parking lots, and put up a few multi-store strips around it, and it went from empty to having thriving businesses that have mostly all remained the past 16 years.

This guy has more details and took some pictures of the mall just before they closed it:

http://www.labelscar.com/illinois/college-hills-mall

The city would only pay for redevelopment if it owned the land underneath and that land was unsellable. And if that's the case, the city has bigger problems than the mall (something like Detroit, where, for many years, there was simply nobody there to buy/use/redevelop).

Provide the right financial incentives and a developer should be able to do it on terms favorable to the city (vs getting little/no revenue from a derelict mall complex).

Us. The money will come from us.

Or RoboCop. You choose.

Vertical aquaponics farms. Organic fresh produce and protein for every area produced locally.

Indoor square footage is not, and will never will be a relevant constraint on food production.

At $400/square foot to build a mall, and $XY/square foot/year to maintain it, the only thing that makes financial sense to grow in one is black market marijuana.

Ok but the perfect isn't the enemy of the good here.

Being able to go for a climate-controlled one-kilometer walk every lunch break is a real luxury for a lot of people, it's way better than a cell in some high-rise near the highway. The mall could have a hackerspace too!

It has potential.

The simple solution is work from home because most people already have a home, and simple solutions win. The only reason you're mentioning malls is because they are there, but unless you're a mall-walker on the weekends, I'm pretty sure the average developer's definition of a good lunch break isn't "walking past the mall McDonald's 3 times before returning to your mall wework" or whatever.

> because most people already have a home

Assuming that everyone has a comfortable and spacious home with a desk&chair area is, well, a bad assumption.

A bunch of people I know are now working significantly more time from a couch, in a clearly non-ergonomic position. We will see and hear about the real damage 5 years from now.

We are 3 up (two adults, 1 child) in a 2 bed flat (apartment) with no garden and for the last year both my partner and I have been WFH full time (in my case I changed job to one that is 100% remote forever).

I couldn't agree more, the transition for me was trivial - I'm a developer who plays games, I already had a nice chair, two 27" 4K displays and a fast desktop so for me my hardware/comfort improved - for my partner work issued her a just about passable laptop and..well that was it.

With the lack of space I used a spare 27" monitor I had putting it on the boys desk with a decent external mouse/keyboard and we bought him a gaming chair - that way my partner can use his room as an office while he's at school/his fathers but yeah it's not be great for her.

We are moving next year and my only criteria for the house is at has to have either a large brick built garage or a concrete garage and space for an office pod in the garden, working from home around a near-teenager was challenging (and frankly that's just gonna get worse) and long term not something I want - I need quiet solitude to work most comfortably.

Just curious, where are you that you're moving from a small-ish flat to a home with enough garden space for a stand-alone ADU/man-cave/office?

I assume you're moving out of the city and into the suburbs or similar?

I wonder if the last year of WFH will actually make suburban sprawl worse in the short- to medium-term? Lots of people moving out of city flats into suburban homes for just the reasons you mention. I can't blame them, but it's probably not sustainable either. [and easy for me to say, as I already own a suburban home]

Many demographics were moving out of American cities through at least the mid-90s. A city like Boston was losing population until that time. The influx of, especially, college-educated young people is fairly recent. There's no particular reason to think it has to continue.

I know a bunch of people who were in urban apartments who have moved to larger places a number of hours out. There's a huge spike in real estate prices outside of cities now.

Apartment thats 10m from city center I had when we got together to a much larger house in a smaller town on the outskirts (actually the town I grew up in, small world).

I'm in the UK but in the north earning a southern developers salary so that gives us a lot of options.

"around a near-teenager ... and long term not something I want..."

"long term" they won't be a near-teenager, or even teenager. ;). I do understand the quiet solitude for work issue though.

Oooh, garden office pod sounds intriguing. Do you have a good example of what sort of office pod you'd like to have?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuFcc2aNkp8 something like one of these.

I don't want to discard the fact that this is a real problem right now but in an efficient remote economy, employees are more likely to move to lower cost of living locations, possibly with better life quality and away from crazy overpriced urban centers that optimise for high salary in exchange for very little space. I think a world where people are more evenly distributed and have larger dwellings than a single room is more positive than keeping everyone clustered and have them working in malls.

There is a certain demographic in which a fair number of people find (certain) cities attractive. But, honestly, take convenience to employment out of the equation and the attraction of cities shrinks a lot. And if enough higher earning people move out, the city won't be as attractive to others. Take a look at NYC, among others, in the 70s and 80s.

Yup. Even people with floor space had to make significant adjustments. We had to buy 2 office chairs, 1 desk, and ended up buying some other furniture to make the wife's home office more pleasant. Probably $5000 total. Would have rather spent that on something fun, but oh well.

Our employers did at provide additional monitors (both of us already had suitable laptops), which was nice and better than many received.

OTOH, sometimes the budget needed to fix the ergonomic issue (if it can be fixed) is massive. Especially for those with already limited space. It may become a useless spending when companies back to WFO after pandemi over or changing company that don't support WFH.

I don't want to work from home every day though and neither do a lot of people.

I have loved not commuting and I have a comfortable setup but I can’t honestly say that it hasn’t been a big problem being unable to get people’s answers to quick questions for days on end.

In my case I live in a 1br apartment where before the pandemic I was basically never home except to sleep and maybe on the weekend. Which I prefer, now having it be everything from office to social space and living space is very uncomfortable.

Anecdata, but the company I moved to a few months ago have 18 staff: only 3 of us have a dedicated work space (from the morning standups that I can see).

My brother works from home now and he's either in his living room or kitchen and my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office but prior to that worked from her dining room.

I've worked from home for a few years and have an office (spare bedroom we didn't use) so it's no big deal for me.

I'd love to see a large-scale survey around home office working.

> my sister has just moved house and has converted one of the bedrooms to an office

This is an interesting change happening in many places now and I wonder how it will impact the higher end of the market (and expectations) in a long term. Some people in larger houses recently went from 4 bedrooms with lots of space to 1 bedroom, 1 nursery, 2 offices. (yes, nice problem to have in practice, but still interesting)

I work for an all-remote company so there has been literally no change in my work life as a result of the pandemic.

It's not for everyone! Even for me, if there was a mall in my area, which had coworking, an attached hackerspace and, let's say, a gym? I would pick up a minimal "grab a desk" coworking package.

Why not? Sometimes being around people is nice. Sometimes there's lawn work or construction happening near my house. I could make a thermos of coffee and a protein shake first thing in the morning, head to coworking, get some stuff done, hit the gym, have my choice of food court meals, and head home for a shower and a quiet afternoon at home. Or call it a soft half-day and spend the afternoon working on something with circuit boards, or just shooting the breeze with the hackers.

Gosh this is sounding really nice! Anyone finds a setup like this, let me know!

If they add a free arcade, I'm in.

There are plenty of malls in SF Bay Area that actually have good & healthy options instead of McDonalds. That's a solvable problem -- just like how some tech companies have amazing cafeterias.

Not sure that everybody having large home offices is simpler or more practical.

Why are you assuming developers?

Not to mention less traffic, as malls tend to be more distributed and closer to suburban housing than CBDs.

Malls are already coworking spaces. People already work in them, full time, for different companies.

Let me be more concise: convert some of the dying big-box stores into open-office WeWork/Regus-style workspaces for white-collar desk workers.

According to the person I was responding to, that apparently would be an “arcology of dystopian cyberpunk”.

So it’s not cyberpunk when people work for dying big box stores, but it is when OP works in a WeWork located in the same mall?

What kind of malls do you have in your area to have no natural light? Pretty much every mall I’ve ever been to has tons of skylights and rooftop windows.

That's generally only in the common areas, not in the retail spaces that make up the vast majority of the actual floorplan and where any converted offices would actually be.

Yeah but that could be redesigned. They could punch some holes in the external facing sides of the former retail stores and add some glass. They could add more skylights on the roof and funnel them down too.

> No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world.

I think it's a US thing. Many malls have significant sun-light, though not for the stores (I think this is done on purpose so that you are not distracted and focus on the goods). This could be re-purposed, however. Concrete walls get removed and replaced by glass.

I would argue that there's very little of "natural world" when you are downtown of any decent sized city. And you don't see any of it on any week day.

I think you have described Logan's Run. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)

I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but have you ever been to the open air mall in Waikiki, Hawaii? It’s pretty great

Have you considered that when the mall was prosperous there were already a ton of people working there?

Most of the malls here in Los Angeles are outdoors. The shops are indoors, but the walkways are outdoors.

I think it’s fairly easy to rebuild an average 2-3 story department store into a large office building with many windows.

I’m not an architect but I doubt that. Refitting a building is expensive and buildings designed for one purpose are not going to be awesome for another unless your extremely lucky. Specialization is real. That said you could definitely retrofit the average department store building into reasonable offices.

> No windows, no natural light, never going outside in the real, natural world. Just one giant homogenised hermetically sealed world.

Malls in the US are like that. But not everywhere

(I'm gonna be honest, US malls are not the greatest)