Apartments, hockey rinks and Amazon warehouses: Macy's closures will set off a wave of change at shopping malls

The year 2020 may bring the death of the department store, marking the end of that 200-year-old retail innovation after decades of decline. Macy’s has furloughed more than 100,000 workers.

In the mid-twentieth century, developers might have taken on shoeshines and newspaper stands as amenity-oriented tenants. Today, they are more likely to seek out gourmet coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, and cafés. It isn’t unusual for developers to offer such tenants leases with reduced rent, or no rent at all. In some cases, the tenants pay ... See more

Zoning is losing its power. New ventures are able to reach a meaningful scale before regulators (and competitors) react. The boundaries between different uses are blurring, with people lodging in apartment buildings, living in hotels, working in restaurants and retail malls, and sleeping or socializing at the office.

malls are also in retreat. By 2005 around fifteen hundred enclosed malls had been built in America. But hardly any have been built since then, and hundreds of existing malls are either dead or dying. Again, the smartphone is the culprit: it provides a far more convenient venue to chat with friends, flirt with other teenagers, show off one’s sense o

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