Quote Originally Posted by Ben View Post
I haven't posted on here for a while, but I think that this is a topic that comes up over and over again and is really not a realistic discussion. The fact is that [[mall type) retail does not work in downtowns. At one time people were willing to drive downtown to shop at places like Husdson's, Kern's and Saks but that time has been gone for 50+ years. The stores followed their customer base and moved to the suburbs. Detroit as a region is already over saturated with shopping options. Outside of Somerset and 12 Oaks [[to an extent) most area malls are no longer in vogue. With the advent of the internet we all know that brick and mortar stores are hurting. Other non-flagship cities have tried to push retail into their city centers and they have failed. City Centre in Columbus, Circle Centre in Indianapolis, Downtown Cincinnati, St. Louis Centre, and Downtown Pittsburgh have all been disasters. I hope that Gilbert and others realize mall based retail just won't work.


Malls were an urban concept to begin with. There are many old examples in places like Milan, Paris, London where developers built arcades over an alleyway and voilà. I'm not saying it is the best solution for Detroit because for one thing transit options would need to be added for this to work. Transit options that would be favored over automotive displacement by suburban residents. You could always make it work with multistorey parking and do away with surface lots as much as possible.

Malls work in Toronto and Montreal where they connect with office buildings, condo towers and metro or subway stations. There are at least a dozen major malls that start underground in Montreal, and the street retail downtown is not affected by this as much as you would think. I hate the repetitiveness of the offer in many of these places but they are convenient, well lit, conditioned and heated, and patrolled. I like street retail better, but here, with the weather in january and february upon us, malls make sense for a lot of people especially the elderly, the handicapped, buskers, the homeless and so on...

Also, there are different kinds of malls with low to high-end offer. I can walk from my place to Alexis Nihon Plaza or move on to Westmount Square's boutiques where the shops are more exclusive and where they specialize in medical clinics, etc... They are connected via the metro access tunnels. In the central part of downtown, the other malls are also connected via the RESO or PATH as they call it in Toronto. There are some metro stations like McGill and Peel that have underground connections to 3 or 4 malls in a row, and these are mostly found at the base of office buildings and even museums and concert halls.