I live in a condo tower in Vancouver, BC. I live above a supermarket, Starbucks, dry cleaner, hair stylist, and Domino's pizza. It actually works out quite well. Because of the supermarket, I only have to buy food for one meal at a time.
http://www.metropolitantowers.com
I lived in that exact building for a couple years. The major downside of it and similar developments is that it's extraordinarily noisy from all the street traffic. Made me hate buses with a severe passion.
This is the major downside to mixing a lot of cars with apartment buildings. Many cities do this way better than Vancouver which is terribly overrated as a city to live in. For instance in Beijing the city blocks are very large with residential (schools, etc) on the inside and the major streets on the outside with little through traffic. As a result it's quiet at your apartment through the day in a city of 15M.
The first way is to have larger sidewalks. This puts traffic further away from the buildings and there is less echo reverberating up sides of buildings. The sidewalks are larger in Gastown and deeper in Yaletown. Granville Street is being repaved to have larger sidewalks, too.
The second way to do this is to make the first floor retail. Then make floors 2 through 10 be commercial office space. People don't have to sleep in this space so sound doesn't matter as much.
I live on the 17th floor and I don't really notice traffic noise. I do get noise from Granville Street on Friday and Saturday from the Christian Audigier crowd. If I go to bed early on the weekend, I just sleep with ear plugs in. Inconvenient, but not that huge of a deal.
I used to live in the West End across from a senior's home. I swear an ambulance used to rip up the street at least once a week with it's siren blaring to pick up a senior. Ear plugs don't help in that case.
The third way to reduce noise is to have better windows. The building does have almost floor to ceiling windows and they are not the most sound proof. The City of Vancouver needs to improve the building code with respect to windows. It would save a lot more energy, too.
The point is to increase density in a sustainable way. Buildings malls is not sustainable because there is wasted space. All that indoor walking space could be outdoor parks.
In urban areas, you try to reduce wasted space by building stuff like underground parking. You put services along the sidewalk and close to residential so that people can just walk to these services.
You build residential and office buildings upwards since there is a shortage of space.
You make the neighbourhood more pleasant by putting in outdoor walking malls, green spaces, and building a sidewalk patio culture.
It doesn't make sense to split your downtown core into two. If half of your core is industrial/commercial and the other half is residential, suddenly you have to jump in your car and drive to the grocery store. This causes congestion.
On the other hand, a grocery store, Staples, a cold beer & wine store, an electronics store, a book store are all 2 blocks away. I just step out and walk there and it only takes 5 minutes to pick up that one thing I need at that exact moment.
You wouldn't believe how much less food I waste now that I buy that one fresh chicken breast for dinner and those two bananas I'm going to have tomorrow for breakfast and as a snack.
No, sorry, I meant like, having a mall that has apartments in it doesn't make sense in a city. I think the idea makes sense in general, but I'm just saying I don't think building a mall with apartments in it makes sense in a city like Toronto.
Like ohmigod, I was on the phone with Becky, Tiffany, and Amber the other day? (My daddy has conference call. It's totally wicked.) And I was telling them, like, you know how the mall has like, all these stores like Bloomie's and The Gap and Hot Topic all under one roof? Well I thought, wouldn't it be cool if one day we could just like, live at the mall? Like wake up, grab breakfast at Cinnabons, and then shop all day? That would be awesome, don't you think?
Oh, who am I kidding? Mall housing -- gag me with a spoon.
I actually live in the Belmar development in Colorado that is mentioned in the article. For the most part, we've been quite happy with it. With a Whole Foods, restaurants, bars, public library, and many stores only a 5-minute walk away, we can go days without needing to use the car.
You're definitely making a trade-off though, paying substantially more per square foot than you would for older, traditional housing stock in the same area, and foregoing space and a yard. I get the feeling most people in this area will still choose the horrors of a 45-minute commute so that they can live in a cookie-cutter home with a postage-stamp yard, as opposed to a relatively small condominium.
The article doesn't hit this point very hard, but I also think it's important to get public transportation into the equation with these developments. Mass transit options are limited in this area, and I hate that I pretty much have to use my car to travel to downtown Denver or Boulder.
The cost of demolition and new construction is much lower than renovation, especially when the systems requirements (showers, plumbing, etc.) are so different.
I feel quite confident stating that - aside from a stunt or two here and there - we will never see malls turned into housing in any sort of massive way.
Right you are about the renovation. Fifteen or twenty years ago HP bought the failed Mayfair mall for a song, intending to get cheap office space. The cost turned out to be huge because it turned it wasn't a single building. Each store was a separate building with a common exterior wall. Among the problems were uneven floors, so that a bunch of little shops couldn't be combined into an office space. IIRC the remodeling cost over $25m.
My interest isn't so much as stopping the mall, and turning it into housing, but (EDIT: being US centric) incorporating the (until suburbia took over vast swaths of land) ages old tradition of living and work/market areas mixed together into the new architecture of suburbia and the malls. I can see a potential access benefit for living within walking distance of daily needs for folks who are losing or have lost mobility. If you don't have to drive, then you use less fuel, if there are other ways that can be implemented to reduce energy consumption, then there is potential "green space."
Malls don't have to be just shops, medical facilities, services, light manufacturing. From what I've seen in new stores going into malls, the retail spaces in malls were designed for stores to move in and restructure in that space.
Then there is the counterpoint of "Do I want to have my store/business in such close proximity to all these people living?"
I think that there is a lot of promise and a lot of problems in this idea of a new suburban "urban center" based around renewing/reinventing the mall. And there is the stigma, to many, of the name "mall."
Since one of the current topics being discussed is the vanishing shopping mall (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540166), I've been wondering why there isn't more of an overall interest (and I don't mean on HN, I mean in general) in apartments and condos mixed in with shopping centers, like malls. Well, a quick search found this article.
Interesting article, but not very internationally-informed. Mixed-use residential/retail mall complexes may be novel to the US, but they've been common in Singapore (& I would guess elsewhere) for some time. I lived in one a few years ago. Strikes me that it'll only ever be a niche market, except where land space is a high premium.
wow. this is brilliant. on the order of... nyc birlliant. i live in manhattan and the entire island is like one big mixed use residential/commercial/recreational mall.
I've often wondered if such a structure could be turned into housing. Although the article wasn't explicit in making this point, it implied that housing in/by malls has been purpose-built thus far. 2M sq. ft. is enough for 1000 very nice condos. How could enough natural light would be let into these spaces? And, how would renovation costs compare to just building from scratch after a demolition. What's striking to me is that it's like building lofts in old warehouse buildings except that these "warehouses" are only 30-something rather than 100+ years old.
Accommodation combined with an upmarket/trendy strip mall is very common in Brisbane, Australia now. Personally, I don't understand the appeal, but I am a bit of a sook when it comes to noisy neighbours.
Basically it appears to work well in gentrifying inner-city areas with plenty of public transport and activities nearby.
It's called New Urbanism and it was implemented here in Vancouver by the former head of Urban planning, Larry Beasley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Beasley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism