Revenge of the Strip Mall
I’m bullish on strip malls, for all their faults, as places that can adapt and endure even as the cities around them decline and falter. Here’s why.
www.strongtowns.org
The strip mall, in American culture, is more often than anything else an object of derision. It's an icon of chintzy postwar suburbia and the throwaway culture it nurtured. Strip malls are often described as ugly, tacky, devoid of culture or character or charm. And they're the flagship native species of a certain type of place: usually, today, a place that has long departed the growth phase of the Growth Ponzi Scheme and found itself sliding downhill into physical deterioration and economic stagnation.
Is it weird, then, that lately I'm finding myself bullish on the unsung strip mall?
There's a natural study in contrasts, an A/B test if you will, on the southern edge of my city that will help me explain why. An aging strip mall sits across the road from an aging conventional, indoor shopping mall. And there's no question in my mind which type of building has a brighter future in our struggling suburbs
Strip mall is home to a remarkably diverse and lively collection of businesses, virtually all of them locally owned. It's able to attract a healthy clientele at all hours of the day and days of the week; the parking lot is usually fairly full. The tenants include restaurants, an ice cream parlor, and a bar; shoe repair, a locksmith, and an old-timey barber shop; salons, furniture, and health stores, and an entertainingly bizarre survivalist outfitter-slash-tattoo parlor. If the American dream of the mom-and-pop entrepreneur is still alive, it's alive in places that look like this.
Now let's cross the stroad and look at the indoor mall. This mall, for a bit of history, is older and closer to the heart of town than the other two large shopping malls in Sarasota. When the brand new UTC Mall opened a few miles away in 2014 (the only new enclosed shopping mall in the entire U.S. in a more than five-year period), the owner of this one—the international mall conglomerate Westfield—saw the writing on the wall and moved quickly to rebrand the mall and diversify its offerings, adding restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater. Westfield are the undisputed pros at running this kind of place: if anybody could turn the Southgate Mall around quickly it was going to be Westfield.
