Death of a Mall

I took my mom to a doctor's appointment in High Point (NC) Thursday, and headed to McDonald's to get a drink and do a little writing while she was there.  It happened to be the McDonald's on the periphery of Oak Hollow Mall.  I was drawing a blank on the writing, and had this urge to go into the mall.  So I grabbed a refill and headed over.  I didn't have a camera, I don't even have a smart phone these days.  As luck would have it, I parked a few spaces away from where the guy in this video parked.

I was met at the mall entrance by a sheet of paper taped on each door.  In a couple of paragraphs, the mall ownership said that Dillard's, the last anchor store, was moving, and that the whole mall would close in about a week.  So I wandered end to end, much like the guy in this video.  I saw about a dozen people near the only restaurant in the food court, a soul food place.  I saw about a dozen more people in the whole mall, all of them were either employees or elderly mall walkers.

In front of one of about five stores still open, a store manager leaned against the railing outside her shop, scrolling through her phone.  That's what's happening in a picture, I thought.  The era of huge malls filled with thousands of shoppers is fading.  We now live in a world where people can buy nearly anything with a few taps on their phone, tablet, or laptop, and have the item delivered to their door.

When I moved to North Carolina in late 2008, as the economy was collapsing, my parents took me to Oak Hollow a couple of times.  It was about half empty then.  It seemed so weird to me that a mall, the foundation of consumerism in my lifetime, could possibly go under.  In the eight years since, things have only gotten worse for malls.  Hundreds of them have closed down in the U.S., I've heard.  With the malls go the jobs, the income for the community, and local tax dollars, among other things.

I walked around the mall, thinking of the thriving malls of my childhood, and an abandoned mall in Ohio I saw recently on the Viceland TV show Abandoned.  We live in a world cluttered with empty factories and retail space.  While the (mostly) old white men running our country argue about how to try to bring back the good paying manufacturing jobs of decades ago, millions of other jobs are being lost to all kinds of technology.  Finding well paying work for people is one of the huge and overlooked issues of our country right now.

Is there anything that could bring Oak Hollow Mall and others like it back to life?  What few people know is that the city of Highpoint paid $400,000 to an urban planner named Adres Duany a couple years ago to help them figure out how help the city survive and hopefully thrive again.  His team suggested relaxing the zoning at Oak Hollow, and allowing live/work spaces for artists and entrepreneurs.  He even suggest bringing in lots of big shipping containers and letting people turn those into work/live spaces as well.  He said the mall would best serve the city as a creative and high tech business incubator.  It was a brilliant idea.

Like many brilliant ideas, the civic leaders of Highpoint completely blew it off.  Now the mall is closing, the city is still struggling, and a huge abandoned property will start attracting all kinds of people for sketchy reasons.  The lack of understanding of what's really happening in our country is one of our biggest problems right now.  Because of this, hundreds of towns and cities of the Industrial Age are struggling, if not actually dying.  Old ideas won't solve this problem.

I'm writing a book with many of my crazy stories from taxi driving and lessons learned in my first 50 years.  You can pre-order a copy on my crowdfunding page here: Level 5: Getting Shot Sucks... and other things I've learned in 50 years