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Dead malls: Half of America’s shopping centres predicted to close by 2030

January 28, 2015

Dead malls: Half of America’s shopping centres predicted to close by 2030

The obituaries are being written for what has been an intrinsic part of American culture for half a century, as the country’s ubiquitous shopping malls face a slow, painful death.

As shopping and driving habits change, retailers are facing difficult times, and some have estimated that over the next 15 years half of America’s malls will die.

The shopping mall was born into a world where people were moving out of the cities and into a new, rich, indulgent life.

Amy Ginsberg’s teenage years centred around White Flint Mall in Maryland.

“There were glass elevators and marble and high-end stores,” she said.

“When I was in high school in the 70s and 80s there was nowhere else to go, really.

“The mall was where the stores were, it’s where the movie theatres were.

“You would just go to the mall and hang out.”

But White Flint’s doors closed this month.

Like so many malls in America it had been ‘dead’ for a while – the term used when a mall’s occupancy rate falls below 70 per cent and it is on a downward spiral.

Mark Hinshaw, an architect, city planner and author, has been watching the decline.

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The Broken Template

January 26, 2015

The Broken Template

The more detached from reality American culture becomes the more strictly ceremonial leadership gets, as illustrated by the raft of bromides Barack Obama floated past the assembled vassalage of government last week in another grand effort to avoid the necessities of the moment.

Those necessities include freeing a hostage public from the tyrannical clutches of corporate despotism — the evil empire of big boxes, big burgers, big pharma, Big Brother — and the atrocious rackets fostered by them that masquerade as an economy. The template of the life we have known is broken and the pieces within are flying apart, and no amount of wishing or promising can keep them going. If this society is even going to survive, the people have to smash their way out of this template prison, probably against the efforts of the people and organizations now running it merely for their own benefit.

The future is telling us very clearly: get smaller, get finer, get more local, get less complex, get less grandiose, do it now. Do you want to eat food in the years ahead? Better make sure you live in a part of the country where small-scale farming and backyard gardening is possible because the General Mills Agri-Biz GMO Cheerios model will be folding its big tent along with its financing agents in the debt Ponzi banking system.

Do you want to have a personal economic future? Think about what you can do to make yourself useful in a local economy made up of your neighbors. And if you live in one of the thousands of soulless, neighborless suburban wastelands that amount to nothing but big box and big burger plantations, you better get out and find a real town in some other part of the country.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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