Why Do Dead Malls Persist?

Former Montgomery Ward department store. Photo by Evan Wohrman from Mission Viejo, CA, United States of America, (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Reform is hard in car oriented cities: Transportation policy change is hard to make in very car oriented environments argues Hamid Iravani in the Journal World Transport Policy in Practice. To think differently and resolve auto oriented contradictions, he looks at Thomas Kuhn‘s theory of paradigms and how they could be used to chart a different policy path towards multimodal transportation with access as the main metric. (Hamid Iravani | Journal of World Transport Policy)

Charlotte’s lost opportunity: Charlotte’s light rail system has been wildly successful at attracting riders and encouraging new development. Increased density and new neighborhoods have sprung up along the line but from the beginning none of the value generated by the line has been captured for the public good. Benjamin Schneider argues that this represents a missed opportunity that should be rectified in the future. (Benjamin Schneider | Planetizen)

Why do dead malls persist? Many dead malls remain that way because of covenants and other agreements that were made far into the future when the properties were initially developed. In order to realize re-use of the land, Nolan Grey argues changes must be made that allow for changing times. Covenants, many of which last forever are “stale” and should be updated to reflect current needs, especially if a mall has been dead and empty for a long period of time. (Nolan Grey | Arbitrary Lines)

Cities need their own sovereign wealth funds: With federal funding dwindling and cities underestimating the value of their assets, greater consideration should be given to the creation of municipal wealth funds that could help cities weather fiscal crisis and liquidity issues. These funds, argue Jeff Fong, would be less like a rainy day fund for emergencies, and more like sovereign wealth funds in Norway and Alaska which allow governments to spend during tighter times. (Jeff Fong | Urban Proxima)

EV’s have dampened global oil demand: As the Iran war continues to drive global oil prices up, Asia has seen increased impacts as a major importer of middle eastern oil. But prices haven’t gone as high as experts have predicted because a boom in electric vehicles and other investments in China has dampened demand by at least 10%. While China’s domestic market has slowed slightly, more exports are pushing the greater market towards electric vehicles that will impact oil consumption into the future. (Dana Nuccitelli | Yale Climate Connections)

Quote of the Week

You can’t complain about the price of housing if you refuse to move hundreds of miles away to a city I just learned about for the purposes of this bad-faith argument.

–Devin Wallace in McSweeney’s, a satire outlet.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re finally doing it! We’re going to Kingwood Texas and talking about the greenbelt trail system I’ve been telling everyone about for years. This is a storytelling episode, featuring guests John Walsh, Jerry Lunow, and Bill Neuhaus so I hope folks enjoy hearing about NASA, timber companies, bike trails, and Houston’s bayous.  But also, stick around to hear how a suburban development in Texas from the 1970’s mirrors and pre-dated Dutch bike planning with special guest, Streetsblog Chicago’s Steve Vance.

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