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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

One interesting article I read but can't be bothered to find now mentioned how we could better utilize malls by making top floors of condos. It was such a simple but seemingly good suggestion. Already have huge amounts of parking, tons of floor area for convenience, and stores would change to those that better served the tenants. And as that happens, more people from outside would be incentivized to visit.

Perhaps there are reasons it wouldn't work, or is a bad idea. Perhaps I was enamored with the idea of rolling out of bed and getting Chick Fil A or Cinnabon in my pajamas.

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Having residential above retail is super common in non-American cities. It works pretty well in Montreal -- condo buildings usually have a grocery store and coffee shop in the lobby, while a strip of three-story buildings might have two stories of residential above things like a collectibles store or a martial arts dojo, with a grocery store on the corner.

The problem with doing this with malls is you have minimum quality requirements for residences. Daylight requirements are a particular concern -- you can sell corners and edges, but you're left with a big space in the middle you can't use, unless you're willing to make the corner apartments expand that far. Once you start doing that, the condo costs comparable to detached houses, and there you lose out to The American Dream(TM). The real wins here would be in splitting apart the stores and putting housing above each one, and replacing "destination" shopping with neighborhood shopping.

The American Dream(TM)

If I could have a condo that was as quiet and accessible as a house (buying groceries, whether in person or by delivery, was a huge hassle in my SF apartment), with a "backyard" I could reserve for an hour or two of total quiet and privacy, I'd take that over a detached house. But my experience so far in two separate tower buildings was noise, a lack of mutual respect in amenity spaces, frequently breaking elevators, and overcrowding.

> Daylight requirements are a particular concern -- you can sell corners and edges, but you're left with a big space in the middle you can't use, unless you're willing to make the corner apartments expand that far.

Or, since you're talking about the top floor, use skylights. You could even make it the top two floors, but each center unit is on both floors and has a "basement" without natural light.

> Once you start doing that, the condo costs comparable to detached houses, and there you lose out to The American Dream(TM).

Prices are set by supply and demand. If people like something else better then the price is lower. It's hardly going to be lower than the construction cost.

The real thing preventing things like this is that it's all too often prohibited by zoning for no good reason.

There are reasons for zoning requirements that skylights don't solve, and they are largely around egress. Some mall layouts may be conducive enough to having condos put on the top level, or one could design a modern mall for that now (I've seen a few).

However retrofitting onto many of the 80s-90s era malls with huge floorplans is unlikely to be economically feasible.

Can you explain how the egress problem is supposed to work?

Suppose you have a giant square floor plan, and housing units like this:

  [01][02][03][04]

  [05][06][07][08]
  [09][10][11][12]

  [13][14][15][16]

Then units 01-04 and 13-16 are on the exterior of the building, units 05-12 are on the interior with skylights, and there are hallways between them as shown. Where is the egress problem?

Zoning generally requires egress be possible from every room which is a sleeping quarters (or living space like living room) via a window or door to the outside. I’m not sure that a door to a common hallway would be considered legal egress. Further, even if it was, this would require each sleeping quarters within your apartment to have an emergency exit door to the common hallway, in addition to the door within your apartment. This would be pretty loud and unattractive.

Another zoning concern is that there is generally a rule like “every area of apartment must be within 30 feet of door/window to outside”. So if you create these deep cavernous apartments you won’t be able to meet this rule either.

For example in NYC, every room needs two forms of egress. Bedrooms this is the windows + door back to rest of your apartment. Living areas this is windows + door out to common hallway. It is illegal to create a room that has only 1 exit/entrance.

The concept here is that in the event of a fire if your 1 & only exit is blocked you are dead.

Similar rules apply to why in most jurisdictions you cannot legally finish off your basement unless it has sufficient exits directly to outside / windows big enough for a firefighter in full gear to fit through. This limits many existing basements for conversion depending on their depth as its hard to retrofit these into existing foundations..

It's becoming more common in the US, and at least a few cities now have zoning laws requiring multi-purpose buildings in certain situations. There have been some significant redevelopments of the sort you talk about. They aren't the old style large malls with anchor stores, but are typically laid our like an apartment building or hotel, to maximize the window areas.

I’m really interested in reading more, do you know what cities have required multi zone use???

In America too, just look at New York. SoHo comes to mind.

In Hong Kong the common model is one massive retail/amenities podium with several towers spiking out. You need daylight, but the towers themselves aren’t very wide; they’re mostly plus or star shaped around a central core.

> One interesting article I read but can't be bothered to find now mentioned how we could better utilize malls by making top floors of condos.

I found this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall...

Here, it appears people were grasping at straws to save a historically important building situated in a fairly convenient spot of a decent size city. So somebody invested $10 million to do this renovation, creating a whopping 48 apartments, many of which are 225 square feet!

Change the configuration file to location=outskirts and mall=half_abandoned_piece_of_shit and I shudder thinking of the business model that would support this at scale.

Whatever that would be, Cinnabon seems about the right smell for it.

This is actually what happens in many new developments in the US today, so called mixed use developments. Example, there is a lot of these in Austin, Texas; the one that I will mention is called “The Domain”: bars, stores and residential complexes all within walking distance, connected to downtown via bus and rail. It’s pretty amazing.

It’s probably a model that will be replicated across the US if the urbanization trends continue.

Multipurpose is way common outside the US. And yes, I've visited and still visit sometimes the local coffeeshop or Maccies in my pajamas. It's nice early in the morning.

An interesting innovation, by my uncle who runs a healthcare group, was converting disused malls into hospitals. The unused central atria works well since hospitals need that airy feel, and apparently it's cheaper to refurbish a mall into a hospital than build one from scratch (mostly because malls tend to be distressed properties today, which you can pick up for pennies on the dollar). He's currently focusing on expanding in ex-London cities in the UK.

This isn't a new concept, even in the USA. SV residents can see this (ground floor retail, upstairs residential) embodied in the Two Worlds complex in Mountain View, which is at least 30 years old.

Problem is, retail space demand is in a death spiral as shopping moves to the online giants. People shift to using local retailers primarily for looking, trying on, or stealing from.

> we could better utilize malls by making top floors of condos

You are a few steps away to rediscovering the European city (if by an extremely convoluted way).

While a bit snarky, this comment does have a point. In most european cities it is entirely a normal thing to live on the floor above a shop.

American Shopping malls were modeled on European town centers. They just got a little lost as the concept was copied.

But mixed use development is becoming more common in the US. I know of 2 or 3 mixed use developments that have opened up around my city.

> What was new about it was that it was an entirely enclosed system of shops with no exterior windows and a climate-controlled interior. This was a particularly good fit for Minnesota with its cold winters. Until then, shops in malls and arcades were connected by outside walkways. This new design was on two levels, had a department store at each end, and escalators to bring shoppers up to the second level and down again when they’d completed walking the mall. And it had a central court with skylights, fountains, plants and seating.

> Gruen was inspired by centrally planned urban re-development in his hometown of Vienna, Austria, that took place there after the democratic uprisings in 1848.

https://msourceideas.com/the-origin-story-of-the-enclosed-sh...

> American Shopping malls were modeled on European town centers. They just got a little lost as the concept was copied.

This is fascinating. Do you have a source? It is a prominent example of cargo culting in a "civilized" country.

... most malls have only one floor (albeit one with a very high ceiling). Certainly the mall that the original article is talking about has only one floor (source: I lived near the city discussed by the author and know the mall he's talking about). You can't convert the top floor of a one-story building.

It seems like the typical American shopping mall would need a lot of work to convert partially to residential. Most malls have virtually no exterior windows for one.

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