Upzoned
What do you do with 720,000 square feet of dead mall? Towns across America are struggling to find the answer as their malls shut down, leaving budget craters and infrastructure nightmares in their wake. Abby is joined by Carlee Alm-LaBar, Strong Towns' chief of staff and a former city staffer, to explore whether the answer is a grand redevelopment plan — or thinking radically smaller.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.
Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, the show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation, and we upzone it: We talk about it in depth. My name is Abby Newsham. I'm a planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined by a brand new guest that I've never had on the show before, Carlee Alm-LaBar. Is that how I pronounce your name, Carlee?
Got it perfectly, thank you.
You guys all have such cool names. So Carlee is the Chief of Staff for Strong Towns, and this is our first time meeting, I think, formally. So great to meet you.
Yes, other than emails and slack messages. So this is awesome. I'm excited to meet you and excited to be with you today, Abby.
I'm excited to have you on. So maybe before we talk about this article, you could share a little bit about yourself. What brought you to Strong Towns? What's your background? Yeah, it'd be great to get to know you a little bit more.
Absolutely. So I have now been at Strong Towns for about a year and a half, which is time just flies, as we all say. Before that, I'm based in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I came to Strong Towns because I worked in a mayor's office here. Mayor President Joey Durel was his name, and we were engaged in a comprehensive plan. Chuck and Joe Minicozzi from Urban Three came and did some work with us during that time, back in 2012, 2013, 2014. You've probably seen, and I'm sure some of the listeners have seen, the work about Lafayette. I was the project manager on the city side there, so I've known Chuck and been familiar with Strong Towns' work for more than 10 years now. When the Chief of Staff opening came up a little bit ago, Chuck reached out, and here I am. So my career has been about half local government and half nonprofit, and so this was a nice match of the two.
What a cool experience to get to work on a comprehensive plan in a mayor's office and then go work for Strong Towns. That's awesome.
Yep, it's been great.
Are you engaged at all with the work that Monty Anderson and Bernice Radle are doing? They're with Neighborhood Evolution and are working in Lafayette, I believe.
Every time they come to town, I find them and hang out with them as much as they'll have me. It's been great to have them here, and I think we've had so many people here locally that have had projects advance because of their support and encouragement and ideas. So it's been really fun. It's also kind of shown me firsthand sometimes how hard this stuff can be, and they've just been great, though. People love having them, and they've been coming now for a couple of years and are doing really great work.
For note for anybody who doesn't know about what Monty and Bernice are doing, and not to make this an advertisement about them, but what they're doing is really cool. Their firm is called Neighborhood Evolution, and they are basically working one-on-one, doing mentorship programs with people who are interested in incremental development. I believe they've worked with people in South Bend. They visited Kansas City a few times, but they haven't done the formal program they're doing in Lafayette and Dallas and other areas of the country. But what they're doing is so cool, and I think it really helps to fill the gap of what small-scale developers are missing in this whole thing, because there's so many classes on real estate that you can take. But real estate is such a hands-on thing that you really need somebody that you can call when you get a bid for plumbing to say, "Oh, is this ridiculous? What do I do? Do I need to get more?"
"Did I do this? Does my development need plumbing?"
Exactly. Yeah, it's just that very A to B, B to C type of mentorship that is critical. So it's really cool what they're doing, and I'm glad that you're friends with them as well.
Yeah, we love having them down here, and we're really fortunate that our Local Economic Development Authority has partnered with them and is really helping a lot of different people across the community.
That's awesome. Great. Well, great to meet you. You sent me a really fun article that I'm excited to talk about today. This was published in the New York Times by Jim Zarroli. The title is "A Town's Single Largest Taxpayer Is Also Its Biggest Headache." So this story discusses a familiar sight across North America, which is empty shopping malls. These were once the beating heart of many small towns and suburban communities and are now struggling quite badly with vacancies and dwindling foot traffic and really uncertain futures. The article here really focuses on the Berkshire Mall, which is located in Lanesborough, Massachusetts.
It's 720,000
square feet, opened in 1988, and it is the town's single largest taxpayer. Its peak was in 2007, and at the time it generated $2.3 million in annual tax revenue and even helped to subsidize the police department, the schools, pay for road maintenance. Now it's very much going in the other direction, which is quite a reckoning for this town of how they're going to pay for these departments and the maintenance that they used to rely on the mall to pay for. So for small towns, especially, the decline of the mall represents more than just shuttered storefronts. It's this question of what replaces these huge, massive properties and whether communities can reasonably adapt in financially resilient ways. So one thing that the article mentioned that I thought was interesting is that we used to have over 1,000 malls in the US. Now we have about 950, and 10 to 20 shut down every year, which doesn't sound like a lot. But when you think of all the land that is left in the wake of a mall closing, in urbanized areas and towns, it's pretty impactful. So it raises this question of how towns and even suburbs can face these vacancies without avoiding the trap of chasing the next big thing and do something more productive and sustainable with the land. So Carlee, I'm so glad you brought this article, because it's fascinating. I have a mall in the city that I grew up not in, but near, which is out in Chesterfield. The Chesterfield Mall in St. Louis shut down, and for many years I think there's plans to do something with that land, but it's just been a slow death. There's so many implications to that. But something that I've really noticed is how emotional people feel about their malls when they close down. It really makes people very nostalgic about these places.
Yeah. Well, this is a small piece of the article, but there was a quote in the article to speak to your nostalgia point. When the mall was headed there, the town thought it was a great idea because of the tax revenue. They never foresaw the endgame. When I read that quote, I don't doubt that there were many civic leaders at the time and municipal officials who were excited about the tax revenue, but there is also this pride associated with, if you're a town of—it looks like this community is about 3,000 people—if you land a mall, that means that you've made it. So when you say nostalgia, I think about the pride that when that community opened their mall, it must have been the biggest deal and one of the biggest things that happened to them. Even if they could have foreseen the endgame, they might have been incentivized to ignore it simply by the prestige and the opportunity that they saw for their community to kind of take the next step forward, to continue growing. So I do think that there's a lot of emotion tied up in how our communities grow and the opportunities that are presented to our leaders and our economic developers, and keeping those in line with what our cities can really sustain is sometimes really hard for communities to do.
Yeah, definitely. I think partly because of the nostalgia, there is this desire, has been a desire in the past to try to refurbish the buildings and reutilize these buildings, try to make them something different, or even revive the community center into something that brings people in and kind of tries to replicate that model without being a mall. It seems like that's becoming less and less viable. These buildings are very uniquely built. I mean, they're kind of like airports. They're very unique structures that are built for a very particular purpose and are not readily adaptable into housing or other uses. It just isn't easy to reutilize these buildings. So there's a lot of nostalgia that comes with just the loss of that. As you know, it used to be the downtown square, the downtown Main Street that was kind of the mall for people before malls were a thing. In this suburbanized era, it flipped and became this kind of interior space that people can go to. I mean, I have many childhood memories being at the mall. It's interesting to think about the fact that kids today, kids these days, are not spending time at the malls.
Right. Well, I think the other thing that struck me, I was reading the article and thinking about my own community and our malls, which are not at this state but have struggled over the years. One of the things I looked up is the community of Lanesborough only has a population of about 3,000 people, and the square footage of this mall was 720,000 square feet. So I was like, "Okay, well, let me do some quick math." That's enough for every resident of Lanesborough to have 240 square feet to themselves. But there's a town there. They can't all be in the mall all the time.
No, they sure can't.
So the conversation that I think the malls can force for many communities, and the conversation that we have at Strong Towns all the time, is one of scale. When we talk about the suburban development pattern, we may say building things to a finished state. Well, certainly this mall was built at such a scale that it wasn't necessarily something that the community was likely to be able to keep up with, simply from a numbers game. They were, from day one, depending on traffic, I'm sure, from outside the community, and there are certainly communities that surround this area. But it is a lot when those communities have the next mall to travel to. They don't have the same sense of nostalgia or responsibility to Lanesborough that the residents who live there do.
Absolutely. The fact that now the community is essentially left holding the bag on all the infrastructure that's around the mall. There's probably this sense that the land needs to be put to productive use, and depending on where it is, it's not always easy to just tear down the building and build something new. I mean, I'm looking at actually the Berkshire Mall right now on Google, and it's actually in a very remote kind of area, kind of surrounded by, it's not really a place. It's surrounded by some government buildings. There's what looks like—I don't know what this is, but it's store outside storage of some sort, maybe associated with the government buildings. But yeah, it's not really a place. I mean, it's certainly not a place that I think people would want to live in an apartment building, which is what I would imagine would be the proposal in this area. It's not integrated into anything like a downtown is, so it's tough. What do you really do with these? Do you just kind of let them be and let them become something industrial in this context, or semi-industrial? Does it make sense to try to revive something to bring people to this place, or should resources be focused in other parts of the city that already have activities so you can have more incremental things happening within the town?
I mean, I think these are the questions that I'm sure the folks in Lanesborough are dealing with. Even the mall itself, it looks like a little bit, as you said, it's kind of remote from the other areas of the city with activity, at least from what we can tell from our bird's-eye view, so to speak. So it is just a very challenging thing for these folks. Now they are, of course, as the article says, dealing with it from a tax revenue perspective, which has been a big challenge. They are now facing declining budgets and struggling to keep up with services now that the value of the mall is not what it was from a revenue perspective.
One of the things that was mentioned in this article that I thought was interesting is that one consideration is that this is not just about sales tax loss but also property tax losses, because these real estate companies that are holding these malls, it's kind of like the Walmart story where they go to the assessors' conferences and are making the case that these buildings aren't worth anything, and therefore the taxes should be lower. They don't really want to keep paying taxes on these properties. So cities are being impacted in that way as well. Essentially, it's becoming blight, and the owners are just going to be reluctant to make improvements, and to redevelop a property takes years. So it really does create a lot of impact on communities when you have this very large swath of land that kind of suddenly becomes unusable.
From the perspective of the real estate companies, the article shares the property has sold for successively lower amounts over the last, as it has changed hands. So it frankly makes sense that the property taxes have gone down. So I think that while that is really hard on communities and community leaders, you certainly also understand that someone who buys the property doesn't expect to pay the property taxes associated with the building at its peak, but the property taxes associated with the building at its value today. That makes sense in a lot of ways, as much as it has negative ramifications for our communities and our budgets.
Yeah. I also am thinking about just the argument around why this has all happened. How did we get here? Because I think a lot of people would point to companies like Amazon and at-home delivery, the rise of e-commerce, essentially as being the reason that malls are failing. I think that's kind of one side of it, but there's also this point that malls were really always artificially propped up by cheap debt and auto dependence and cities leveraging tax incentive tools and paying for infrastructure. There's always been different ways that things are subsidized and supported. Towns giving away tax incentives and building the infrastructure, shouldering all those long-term liabilities to actually lure the malls in and to attract them, because they know it will create a lot of tax revenue. Now that they're empty, the public is really stuck paying for all of these oversized roads and utilities and land maintenance long after these investors have walked away.
It can be scary, and I think that's why the idea of thinking at scale and what you can reasonably sustain is so powerful, because you're so much better able to recover from a failure when the scale is within reach. This community of 3,000 people, it is difficult from here, from this vantage point, to imagine how they collect the capital to entice someone to invest, because someone who is looking at that mall is going to look at how many shoppers are nearby and what's the population. They're not probably going to see a market that they understand how to be really profitable in. So the folks locally are left trying to figure out what to do with this land, in this space. In the meantime, as you said, it's becoming blight.
Yeah. Really, these malls represent a monoculture in the real estate world, because they are kind of one big bet on a single format. I know there's multiple stores, but it really is this big footprint format that in order for it to be healthy, you need to have all of these different corporate retailers plugging into it. That first generation of the mall, when you have all these new users plugged in and it's working, I mean, that's really the heyday. Once you start losing certain retailers, they go to other places, things start turning around. I mean, it's a very slow death. Just like monoculture farming, there's so much vulnerability in that model, and when consumer habits are changing, the whole system collapses. When you look at the traditional downtown area, they actually may cover as much or less land than a mall. A historic downtown district in small towns are probably a lot smaller than a mall, yet they probably produce more value per acre than the entire site of a mall. If you look at these downtown areas, there's so much opportunity to really build up what's already happening on those main streets. The fact that these areas have continued to have businesses over time, I think it really points to how resilient that model is versus the mall, which feels like it was built all at once to a finished state, and then it all just kind of declines all together at the same time.
Well, I think too about, if you think of the—I'm sure a lot of your listeners are either living in suburban communities or are very familiar with a suburban community they may have grown up in. I think about the two communities I have the most familiarity with, and they're always kind of growing out to the next cool development. At one point, the mall might have been the next cool development, but when you sprawl to the next cool development, that inevitably leaves the mall in a slightly less great place than before. You juxtapose that with the downtown of your community, which has certainly probably been through ups and downs but has remained the downtown and has been forced to adapt over many years and have investment and disinvestment and reinvestment through several cycles. That level, because the scale of the investment of a mall is so big, getting that next wave of investment, and because the locations are not always optimal for continued investment, getting that next layer of investment or reinvestment is proving much harder. I think that's why you're seeing the numbers that you quoted at the beginning, the numbers of malls that are closing.
Exactly. Well, when you think about just how much land we've developed in this country and how much sprawl there is, these kinds of stories do pose this question in my head of does every site deserve to be redeveloped or should every site be redeveloped? I know when we look at malls specifically, there's a lot of big ideas and big schemes that get dreamt up, redevelopment plans for casinos or outlet centers, sports arenas, or even suburban retrofit, which is great, doing a town center downtown kind of thing. But it does make me wonder, is this just a new version of the same fragile bet that we're making on these huge sites to do big, lofty redevelopment plans that may or may not work out down the road? We certainly can't foresee whether or not something will work out. I'm sure when people were building malls, they couldn't foresee that e-commerce would be a thing or that consumer behaviors would change. But I guess the point that I'm getting at is that it makes me continually wary of kind of the next big thing, the big master plan, the thing that's going to come in and save this giant site that's become an eyesore and a crater in the community.
Yeah, especially when those giant sites are serving populations or needs that extend so far beyond that community. How do you maintain that into the future? This was probably not just built—I mean, I know that the article indicated that initially when they built it, they had approached the larger city of Pittsfield to build it. That community is about 45,000 people, possibly would be in a better position to continue supporting that mall. But it is still a lot of square feet of retail. Now they're looking at projects like housing, and that is, as you said, retrofits are a big possibility for projects like this, but also extraordinarily expensive given the scale of 720,000 square feet. It's very hard to bite that off into smaller chunks.
Exactly. Just looking at this site in particular, if the idea is we're going to tear this down and build a bunch of housing, we're going to do a new plan on this site, it does make me wonder if housing is the need in this place. Yes, it's a great story to take a site, an old mall, and repurpose it and save the day, and hey, we did something different. I agree that that's an engaging story that will appeal, I'm sure, to investors. But it's like, why is this really the right place to put housing? Are these the right sites to reinvest in, or are there other areas within communities spatially that may be more appropriate for these different repurposings? From the perspective of thinking about incremental development, I think that's really where things get flipped upside down that we do have lots of redevelopment opportunities all in our cities and towns, but they happen to be really small and they're not big craters, so they don't get as much attention. The vacant lot, the abandoned house, the duplex that needs love—they're very small investments, and they're not playing in this game of big deals, big things happening, and they certainly don't get the political attention that redeveloping a big mall site would get, for example.
100%. 100%. I think that's one of the reasons, I mean, on a personal note, that I'm so happy to be at Strong Towns, because those are the acts, the people now, that we are trying so hard to celebrate and so hard to communicate about so that communities and cities understand how valuable those types of people working in their communities are and how the same attention that communities bring to the outside developers, they can bring that attention and care to developers within their own communities and people that are investing locally. It doesn't have to be, for the city leaders out there that may be nervous, it doesn't have to be to the exclusion of supporting these bigger things. It can just start with figuring out ways to support your local ecosystem of developers. The work you referenced at the beginning that Monty and Bernice are doing here in Lafayette, it's all about supporting the people who are trying to invest locally at a much smaller scale.
Yeah. I think even from a master planning perspective, if there are opportunities, even if there is the need to take these sites and do a larger master plan, I would really promote the idea of finding ways to, I guess, break up these sites into smaller parcels and opportunities for more varied ownership of buildings that get built. Whether you're using these sites to build a new apartment complex or a town square or a mix of many different things, I just would really encourage us all to be thinking about how do we break things down into smaller scales so that we can have more varied ownership of all of this land. Because I think that we can see when we have one owner and very large swaths of land in a city that can really be impacted by mismanagement or the vision of one owner or a number of different things. I think that can be very fragile to put so much area of land and economic power into the hands of one company managing it.
Yeah. It is also, for community, sometimes when that investment comes from outside, the town is just another, I guess, distance or layer where, even the property owners that have the greatest care and intentions, they're still not there every day to see the property and to understand. So to me, it's what I thought this article did a good job of is understanding, you know, kind of these big projects pose risks to communities at the same time that they offer opportunities to communities. It can be so tempting to just evaluate the opportunities and not be wired to evaluate the risks. I think sharing Lanesborough's story, you really feel for those community leaders who are now—they weren't the ones in the 80s who wooed this mall, and it's not even clear that at the time there were incentives, at least according to the article.
They were probably certainly the people are not the same.
Yeah. So they might have been teenagers who were super excited to have their first date at the mall. Now they're recovering, they're trying to put the community on a pathway to recovery from this disinvestment.
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, okay, let's leave it there. This is great. I really appreciate you bringing this to today's conversation. Carlee, I guess we didn't talk about the Downzone. This is your first time on Upzoned.
I'm ready. I actually, ooh, it's to share a little—well, why don't you remind people what the Downzone is, and then I'm ready.
Of course. So the Downzone is the part of the show where we share anything that has been captivating our time and attention these days. So it can be a book, it can be music, it could be activities, whatever you'd like to share.
All right, well, I'm going to go with an activity, because I spent a good chunk of my weekend—I'm involved here locally with a project called the 24 Hour Citizen Project that recruits civic ideas, and it's very Strong Towns because it's very small in scale. I think the biggest project we've ever done is about $5,000. We do a weekend in November where we bring forward the eight best civic ideas, and a team of backers invest in usually about four of them, and then we work with them all year to bring those ideas to the community. So I've been a volunteer with this kind of scrappy group of people for a few years now, and over the weekend we did our first round of interviews for who's going to make the stage this year in November. It's a ton of fun. It's really something that, if you Google "24 Hour Citizen Project," you'll see some of the things that the initiative has brought to life in Lafayette, and it's a lot of really great stories of people who care about their community and are using a little bit of money to make a really cool vision come true.
It's very cool. The more I hear about Lafayette, Louisiana, the more I want to visit.
Please do. I would love to host you. We would welcome you with open arms.
That's great. I'll have to find a time to go down. Maybe next time Monty and Bernice are visiting, I'll latch onto their
Absolutely. Yeah.
Awesome. Okay, very cool. Well, I'd love to hear more about that, actually, but I'll look it up after we get off today.
I think we might be doing—listeners can also listen to Bottom Up Revolution, because I think there's going to be an episode about that with the founder coming up soon. I don't think it's aired yet, so
Oh, great. Okay. Well, everybody go listen to Bottom Up Revolution, if you don't listen to that podcast, also by Strong Towns. So hopefully if you listen to this one, you also listen to that one. Well, I guess I will share, so I've been growing tomatoes all season, which is not that much of an activity. They're pretty easy. They're very delicious.
They are.
Yes, they're pretty easy to grow in Missouri, at least, apparently on my property. I put some seeds down, and this was the first time growing in this particular garden bed because it was new. I have so many tomatoes right now of all different types. Every day I'm going out and I'm picking more. Half my refrigerator is tomatoes right now, so I'm finding ways to use them. It started with, well, I made chili one day. That's an easy one. Making tomato mozzarella, Caprese, that kind of thing. But yesterday, I actually, me and my boyfriend made Hungarian goulash, and it was so good.
Goodness. Yeah.
Yeah. Learned how to do new things with tomatoes to get the skin off and create tomato paste.
You're making me hungry, Abby. My lunch was not big.
It was so good. I actually have quite a bit left, and I wish that I could send it to you, because it was very good. But yeah, so right now I'm in the market for tomato recipes so I can not waste these. I think the next thing I'm going to look at is making sauces and salsas, anything that I can do to use them, because I just was not expecting them to do as well as they did.
Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing. I'm very—we had a few potted tomato plants, but being in South Louisiana, we're done with that for the summer. They couldn't make it through August.
Oh really? They just
Yeah, they just burn up, at least the ones in pots. I haven't navigated to the whole raised beds yet. We'll see.
Yeah, okay. Well, hey, thank you so much for joining me, Carlee. Hopefully you'll come back on. You did great.
So I enjoyed it. I'm glad to join you anytime you need.
Good, good. Excellent. Well, I'll see you next time then. Thank you so much for joining me, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Thanks, Carlee.
Thanks.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.