Turning Dying Malls into Neighborhoods

These days, nobody wants a mall. Malls across the country are emptying out, going bankrupt, and turning into wastelands. What to do with them?

Why not turn them into hip urban neighborhoods, which everyone does seem to want?

One such experiment is under way in Lakewood, Colorado, an affluent suburb west of Denver. The former Villa Italia shopping mall, a 1.2-million-square-foot indoor mall built in 1966 that had fallen on hard times, has been turned into Belmar, 104-acre pedestrian-friendly community that has apartments, condos, town houses, office space, artists studios, and a shopping and entertainment promenade on twenty-two walkable, urbanized blocks. Now, instead of turning into the mall’s giant parking lot, you end up cruising along a downtown main drag, Alaska Street, which is lined with old-fashioned streetlights, coffee shops, boutiques, and restaurants. There are more than a thousand housing units, which range from town houses to loft condominiums to small-lot single-family homes, as well as a row of ground-floor artist studio and business incubator spaces. A public art project called “Urban Anatomy” has installed small works of art and fragments of poetry on manhole covers, sidewalk joints, and grates throughout the development, highlighting overlooked details of the urban environment.

The picture at the top was taken in 1999, showing the old Mall and its vast parking lots. Now it looks like this. A grid of streets has been established, hundreds of condominiums have been built, and many blocks have the feel of an urban space rather than a mall parking lot.

Sometimes things do get better.