Stranger Things is Getting a New Mall! But Today Malls Are Dying. What Happened?

[slow synth music]

The new season of Stranger Things drops on July 4th.

And it's been over a year since we've heard

from Eleven, Mike and the rest of the gang.

We don't know much about what they'll be up to

for season three, but we know one thing's for sure.

Hawkins is gettin' a mall.

[Narrator] Today, Hawkins is taking

another step into the future with a brand new

Starcourt Mall.

[Emily] Netflix teased the return of the show

last year with a glorious, nostalgic mock commercial

for the opening of the Starcourt Mall.

For a show steeped in 80s culture,

the opening of a brand new mall seems about right.

But these days, malls look a lot less like this

and more like this.

According to one analysis, roughly a quarter

of U.S. malls will close by 2022.

So how did we get here?

And can dead malls find new life?

To find out, we spoke with Ellen Dunham-Jones,

a professor of architecture and urban design

at Georgia Tech.

My name is Ellen Dunham-Jones

and I study how to retrofit suburbia.

So the third season of Stranger Things is set in 1985.

And, clearly, malls are gonna play a big role in the show.

What role did malls play in America in the '80s?

Malls played an enormous role.

They really became the place to go.

I think the role of malls in our culture

was especially important for teenagers.

They were shopping for an identity

because suddenly you had this homogenization,

it's all chain stores.

It's not some unique little boutique on a main,

mom and pop shop in your community.

They're selling the same clothes that the TV shows

are showing and it was a little bit

of a pre-chewed identity that later generations

suddenly said That's really boring

and the last thing on earth that some of us want.

But in the '80s it was pretty big.

So, Ellen, you were just mentioning

that the malls, when they grew to be so popular,

especially with teen culture, they really disrupted

the mom and pop stores in downtowns.

And, actually, in the trailer for Stranger Things

season three, there's a scene where you can see

people holding protest signs.

And I wonder if you could speak a little bit

to the effect that suburban malls really had

on the centers of cities and on mom and pop stores.

The story between the cities and the suburbs

is a pretty long story.

The heyday of the cities, the image of the

big, bustling metropolis, is really the '20s.

The 1930s, the depression hits.

Everybody's pretty flat.

The '40s, we're at war, World War II.

By the time the veterans come back

from World War II, the cities

have not been invested in in over 20 years.

And so the way to kickstart the economy

was let's build suburbia and give everybody

brand new, fresh homes.

Through the '50s, through the '60s,

through the '70s, '80s, '90s, the cities

were really not invested in.

So all the money, all the infrastructure,

all the private development, it was all

going out to the suburbs.

And malls were just very much a part of that.

The '90s has been mall development starts to slow down.

And then it comes to a big halt by the mid 2000s.

And cities start to actually become invested in again,

we see a lot of those little mom and pops

and Main Streets coming back with more local shopping

and more local identities.

Let's talk about all of these empty malls.

How many have closed?

How many more are closing?

[Ellen] In general, it's safe to say

that there are 1500 properties in the U.S.

That at one time have been an enclosed shopping mall.

We're now down to a little under a thousand.

So we've lost fully a third of our malls.

Yeah, a lot of people say Yeah, we'll probably

lose another quarter, about 250.

I look at just, in my database,

all of the proposals to redevelop, re-inhabit

these properties.

I've got over 450 that I'm tracking

and so that tells me that there's more likely

about a third of those malls

not being enclosed shopping malls much longer

in a pretty short period of time.

There are several YouTube channels

I noticed that are devoted to kind of being obsessed

with dead malls and it reminded me of

the ruin porn when Detroit had gone bankrupt

and everyone was obsessed with looking

at the old abandoned buildings.

What's going on with that?

What is our cultural obsession

with, you know, vacancy and death.

I mean, I think there's always been

the frisson of the abandoned and the sublime

is its own form of terror and beauty.

That goes back to the romantics in the 19th century

wrote about, you know, standing on a glacier,

looking at the tip of the iceberg

and feeling small relative to the

[laughs] rest of the world-- Yes.

But the romantics, when they were looking

at that glacier, I love them and I studied them,

part of the feeling of that sublimity

was that they were like this glacier could crush

and kill me and, yet, I survive!

So is that how we feel that

Exactly! capitalism and death

could come for us!

Exactly, I mean if the mall could collapse,

oh my god, you know, just ima

it's the end of the world.

What is going on?

What is responsible for the fall of the mall?

Newspapers like to jump to the headline

oh, it's online shopping.

It's the, more like the nail in the coffin

than it really is the beginning.

The decline of malls really starts in the '90s,

mostly because we built so many of them

they began to cannibalize each other.

So you start to get a lot of repositioning

of malls as they're kind of evolving into new things

if they're in a good market.

If they're in a weak market, though,

you started to see a lot of mall owners

just, simply, default on their loan.

It's the shifting of jobs and shifting of wealth.

It's also just demographics.

Suburbia was always built on the assumption

that it's kind of you're building mostly starter homes

for new, young families.

Today, there are half as many households with kids

that there were in the '70s.

Is part of the decline of malls

also due to the fact that, now,

we spend that time gathering online?

Absolutely.

I mean I think that there's

a lot of that social function is being

substituted with online.

The former Surgeon General declared

that the U.S. is in a loneliness epidemic.

And much of this he blamed on substituting social media

for really being in social spaces.

The reality is, the malls, they are gathering spaces

but it's still, generally, you have to be

spending at least some money to be able to hang out there.

But they certainly did serve that function for generations.

Absolutely.

What are these malls that fail turning into

and being redeveloped as?

All sorts of things.

And it depends a lot on the market.

There are folks who are able to, sort of,

revive a dead mall with just new retail

and throwing in a lot more restaurants.

What I'm really interested in are where

folks are looking at the death of this property

as an opportunity to help a 20th century suburb

address 21st century problems.

So a big chunk of them are being redeveloped

as, really, the downtown that suburb never had.

So they're tearing down most of the mall,

putting in a street grid, ground-level retail,

apartments and offices up above.

They're becoming more like cities.

But that only works where there's a strong market.

Where the jobs have gone away

or where population is stagnant and/ or shrinking,

which is a lot of the country,

then often what happens is the malls

are getting re-inhabited with more community-serving uses.

The most common is actually just to become office space.

Other reuses are either as, for medical uses,

lots of educational uses and lots of churches.

Lots of religious groups going in, taking over malls.

The third group of them are the re-greenings.

Now that those properties are dying,

it's a great opportunity to actually

depave these places, reconstruct the wetlands,

put in community gardens, parks

that then increases the value

of the properties adjacent to them

and triggers some redevelopment.

So they're actually, there are quite a few

entrepreneurs who have figured out

how to tap into the apocalyptic imagery of the dead mall.

So, there's quite a number of malls that,

while they're sitting there dead,

they offer paint ball zombies.

In a mall outside of London, you're given

the paintball and you try to shoot the zombies

who are professional actors

and there's a whole script that goes along

and you don't really know.

So, okay, that nursing unit over there,

are they there to protect me, or are they

going to infect me so I become a zombie.

It's amazing what people

will come up with [laughs], I think!

Wow, so these dead malls, in some ways,

are like a living metaphor and then

we can sort of inhabit them in ways

that terrify and scare us and tap into something,

which, maybe, is what stranger things

is probably planning to do.

I mean, I imagine that they're gonna

play up the nostalgia of the malls

and then terrify us inside the mall.

Okay well, Ellen, this has been so lovely.

Thank you so much for your time

and this has been fascinating.

I hope you get a chance to watch season three.

Oh, my pleasure!

Absolutely!