Living in a Mall

Do you want to live within easy walking distance of shops, restaurants, and other such amenities? Do you want to live in a condo with a doorman, its own private grounds, a screening room, and similar bells and whistles? Up until now, answering "yes" to such questions meant that you had to live in the city -- something which many people don't like doing (dirt, smells, noise, bad schools, you know the drill) and which in any case is often very expensive.

But now there's an alternative: condos in shopping malls.

This is urban life for folks who prefer the suburbs, which, according to the U.S. Census, is the majority of us: some 47 percent live in suburbs, and 40 million of the 58 million housing units there are detached.
Some call this debut creature the new suburbia or "metroburbia," a vertical suburbia that can appease the desire for the best parts of both urban and suburban life. "For the last hundred years that kind of lifestyle"--walkable, dense--"was only available in dense urban environments," says Bartels. "A lot of people are hoping to get out of the cul-de-sac and get into more integrated lifestyle."
The mall, says urbanist Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, "is the logical place to do this. You build a town center where there wasn't one."

The history of the wine market in America (bear with me here) has a central role for merlot: a relatively sweet and easily-drinkable varietal which got Americans -- who had been more accustomed to beer and sweet white wine -- comfortable with the idea of red wine. Nowadays, merlot has something of a bad name, but it's still hugely popular.

I think of these mall condos as the urbanist equivalent of merlot: a gateway, if you will, to the urban lifestyle, without the tannic downside. I'm not sure they'll ever become quite as ubiquitous as merlot. But they're clearly part of America's real-estate future.

(Thanks to Paul Jackson for making the article linkable.)