No more mall rats

On layaway plans, employment headcounts, and the need for many places to think about a post-mall future

The City of Waterloo, Iowa, (metro population 168,000) has agreed to furnish millions of dollars to demolish and redevelop the Crossroads Mall. The whole project is budgeted at $87 million. It was once a significant retail center, but is down to a dozen or two employees in the entire facility.

■ Shopping malls once had their heyday because they delivered variety, availability, and proximity, all in a climate-controlled package. The model made sense until online shopping managed to provide more variety and nearly the same availability -- what the shopper sacrifices in having to wait for a next-day delivery, they gain in not having to look for a parking spot. And an online store is always at least as proximate as the nearest mall.

■ The malls that manage to survive much longer will do so because they offer something social or cultural that goes farther than a good layaway program. Some retail destinations are a little like Disney World and others are places to be seen consuming conspicuously. Many of them will go on.

■ But a lot of others will have to be replaced. Leaving them to die and turn into ghosts isn't much of a plan, especially for those places where a mall that once depended on anchor stores itself becomes a boat anchor dragging down the real estate around it.

■ America doesn't have much of a track record of developing high-quality centers for civic activity and social life; reimagining our many dead and dying malls as lively public spaces in the spirit of European opera houses with attractive community-building features may be a necessary way forward, at least for some.