Interestingly, around here the Totem Lake mall was written off for dead for the last 30 years. Big boxes, big parking lot bereft of cars. It was a lonely place for a llooong time.
But the whole thing was redeveloped into another mall, pretty much all upscale stores, and the parking lot is jammed.
I can't explain it, but the developers knew what they were doing.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/22/malls-are...
[2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/19/how-amazon-changed-americas-...
[3]https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/23/economy/luxury-malls-holiday-...
> I can't explain it, but the developers knew what they were doing.
Asians, especially Chinese, tend to go for malls with upscale stores (if my experience living in Beijing is any indicator). I bet that’s what the developers were going after.
Good times ... buying white box PCs for my small business on a regular basis in the 90s.
I am in the process of buying a few acres of land further south of this area, in Buckley, WA.
I hope to build a garage/shop on the property, have space for my amateur radio hobby, and a few years from now, build a modest home. I would then sell my current home here in Kirkland.
Yet no one knows what tomorrow will bring. So I have no idea of how any of this will actually unfold.
I’m thinking that I will slowly transition away from writing software and build up a small meditation / retreat center on my property.
I think what’s dead is the typical 80s mall with massive parking lots and exclusively retail stores. BellSquare will be fine. But Northgate is a dead mall. Out in Cary, NC a dead mall was just bought by Epic Games for their new office. The old theater in Bellevue got turned into offices for Bungie.
Downtown Redmond is full of boxes. So is downtown Kirkland. I think most of the office space is Google? I’m not sure if Totem Lake boxes have much office space.
There’s boxes up in Kenmore. Capitol Hill has lots of boxes. Central District has several new boxes around Jackson and 23rd. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
Northgate was doing fine but the writing was already on the wall as recently as 2017. The owners have demolished the middle (Nordstrom store #2 is almost completely gone) to make way for the hockey practice facility and several new office buildings, a couple of hotels, and apartments.
With, as you might imagine, retail on the bottom and a lot of walking space in the middle.
> You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
Sure, because developers and individuals have figured out that mixed use, if done OK, means stuff is more accessible. The problem is that we've only a handful of places where we zone to build mixed use so the spaces are super expensive because developers like to maximize profit.
We gotta catch up on housing, though. The close-in 'burbs are zoning for offices offices offices and not for people to live there.
What I'm sick of is all of the suburbs doing their level best to try to convince businesses to not locate in the city while also complaining about the "housing crisis" and "traffic crunch" that their own policies caused.
Everybody griped that Seattle wasn't zoning for housing at the rate it zoned for offices, so the city has started upzoning and now the 'burbs are doing the exact opposite of what they lobbied the city to do for a decade.
Then one day I found out that the city was planning on building new student housing on the park where my daughter and I went to play every day. All of a sudden I found my unbridled YIMBYism becoming a lot more circumspect and nuanced and it turns out I was actually just a massive hypocrite. Urban densification is Great! and I still believe it is the right solution (just not in _my_ back yard).
PS: Now that I've moved 2 miles down the road and no longer go to that particular park I'm far more open to the long term benefits of it being used for student housing.
For the most part I don't think that the law should limit what buildings can be put up - factories/stores/housing can all share a neighborhood. However even if chemical factories don't release anything, there is still enough fire danger that they should be separated from anything else. Worse some chemicals are safe on their own but if they leak to a neighbor the combination is dangerous so such things need to be kept apart.
I don't really feel like trying to come up with a proposal of what the rules should be, but what we have isn't right.