If you build it, they will come... and ride

Did you know that Cleveland, Ohio, recovering industrial city, has become a destination for mountain bike riders?  When I talk about building scenes and how those scenes can turn into businesses (among other things), this is what I'm talking about. 

In late 2004, a mountain bike rider and good carpenter, Ray Petro was bummed about not being able to ride his mountain bike all winter.  So he rented a room in an empty factory, and built wooden mountain bike obstacles.  The first ones were pretty simple.  But the idea took off.  It turns out there are a lot of mountain bike riders, and some BMXers, who wanted to ride during the winter as well.  According to Wikipedia, Ray took $50,000 in savings, raised $25,000 more, and went all in on his idea of an indoor MTB riding spot during the winter months. 

Ray's MTB in Cleveland now fills 92,000 square feet of old factory buildings, attracts thousands of riders a year, and has people traveling from across the country to ride there.  Every year Ray and his crew rebuild it, putting in new lines and obstacles.  After the success in Cleveland, Ray teamed up with Trek Bikes to open a second mountain bike park in Milwaukee, WI.  It was popular for several years, but closed in 2016 due to a dispute with the building's owners.  The original park is going strong. 

With a love for his sport, some savings, and carpentry skills, Ray created more than wooden paths for MTB riders, he created a scene.  He created a great space for mountain bikers and BMXers to come together.  In one video he referred to it as "a big bicycle party."  As an old BMX guy, I think this is one of the greatest ways to recycle old, empty buildings that I've seen.  Props to Ray for following his dream and getting so many people psyched to ride in the Midwest. 

Here are a bunch of links of people riding at Ray's MTB in Cleveland:
2010 Local Cleveland TV segment on Ray's
Interview with Ray at Grand Opening of Ray's in Milwaukee 
BMX phenom Scotty Cranmer at Ray's (1:21 in clip)
My favorite Ray's "Odd Couple Contest" video

Welcome to the Retail Crash... MALLPOCALYPSE

The Oak Hollow Mall in Highpoint, North Carolina just closed a few days ago.  As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I happened to wander through the huge, empty, but still clean and intact mall a week before its demise.  The recent Business Insider clip above gives a good synopsis of why so many malls are dying.  No one seems to know just how many malls have died at this point.  Obviously Amazon.com and other online shopping sites are part of this picture.  But they're not the whole story.  Here's some info to the Retail Apocalypse I've found.

There were about 1100 enclosed malls in the U.S..  Four hundred of those malls have closed already, like Oak Hollow, or are expected to close in the next few years.  There are about 300 "high performing" malls, which seem to be mostly the high end malls, which are still doing well.  The remaining 400 malls are questionable but alive at this point.  A massive shift in retail shopping habits seems to be the main factor in this huge Retail Apocalypse.  Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT's) own about half of the U.S. malls, so this will be a huge hit to them.

In addition to the hundreds of malls and retails stores that have closed since The Great Recession in 2008, hundreds more are scheduled to close soon, which will put even more pressure on struggling malls and shopping centers.  Here's a partial list:

-Macy's announced it will close 100 stores in August 2016.   Three have closed, 63 more are scheduled to close in early 2017.  Management expects those store closings to save Macy's $550 million.
-Sears/Kmart is closing 150 combined stores soon (as of January 2017)
-Walmart has closed 269 stores worldwide, 154 in the U.S..  (Jan.2016)
-J.C. Penney has actually made a bit of a comeback in the last couple of years, but plans to close up to 140 stores in the U.S. to continue streamlining its business.
-Aeropostale went into bankruptcy in May of 2016, and has already closed 113 stores.
-H H Gregg has closed or is closing 88 stores.
-Abercrombie & Fitch is closing 60 stores.
-The Limited has closed all 250 stores.
-Crocs is closing 160 stores.
-Wet Seal is closing 171 stores.
-American Apparel is closing 110 stores.
-BCBG is closing 120 stores.
-CVS is closing 70 stores.
-Family Christian (bookstores) is closing 240 stores.
Pac Sun is out of bankruptcy after closing 110 to 120 stores so far.

Get this, the German supermarket Lidl is OPENING 150 stores in the U. S., spurred on by the success of German grocer Aldi (which is an awesome store).


The vast majority of the stores and malls closed or closing are in rural and small town America.  Yeah, all those people that voted for Trump because they can't find local jobs are about to lose tens of thousands more local jobs and tens or hundreds of millions in local revenue.  Rural America, by and large, is dying in the tech heavy 21st century.  This is a HUGE issue we need to address as a nation.  These store closings will have a huge ripple effect on other chain stores because of reduced foot traffic to malls and shopping centers.  I think we're likely to head into another recession soon.  That's just a hunch.  We'll see.

We, as a country, have far more square feet of retail space per person than other developed countries.  A report in Business Insider says we have 23.5 square feet of retail space per person in the U.S., compared to 16.4 in Canada and 11.1 in Australia.  Another report I found claimed 48 sq.ft of retail space per American.  In any case, it's a lot, and millions of square feet of retail space under roof is either already empty or will son be empty.

What should we do will all those empty buildings?  If you have a good idea, now's the time, because those retail stores will be available for pennies on the dollar of their former value.  

The website deadmalls.com writes about the closed malls.  Their list contains well over a hundred.

Source info:
Business Insider article
Retail stores closing- Clark.com
Hundreds of shopping malls at risk- Clark.com 

Still not sure this is a problem?  Check this out:

Major Retail Stores closing by the hundreds

Macy's, Sear's/Kmart, Radio Shack and other once retail chains closing lots MORE stores in 2017.  Now what?

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

Don't Mess With the Women of Huntington Beach

The woman in I'm writing about looked a lot like the woman in the car at :50 in this clip.


It was a slow Tuesday evening in downtown Huntington Beach.  I think it was the summer of 2003.  I picked up a couple guys in front of Perq's in my taxi, and was headed slowly inland on Main Street to drop them off.  As we neared the bike shop at Orange Street, we saw a young couple, with what I called the "Rockabilly look" back then.  The guy was in new Levi's, a white T-shirt, and had his hair slicked back.  His girlfriend was in a beige print retro dress, had jet black hair with bangs, two inch heels, and her bright red lipstick was shining.  It looked like the couple was walking home after a trip to one of the bars. 


In front of the couple were two guys with dark hair and naturally tan skin, maybe Indian or Persian guys from Irvine, I thought.  The two guys were walking backwards in front of the couple, waving their hands around like gangstas, and obviously giving the couple a hard time.  The couple seemed to be trying to ignore the two guys.  As I got within about 80 feet of the couple, the woman in the dress stepped forward and punched one of the guys in the face.  He dropped to the ground.  Then her boyfriend stepped forward and dropped the other guy, also with a single punch.  "That's why you don't mess with the girls in Huntington Beach," I said to the two passengers in my cab.  We all started laughing. 


I drove past the couple and the two guys on the ground, and went another mile inland to drop my passengers off.  On my way back down Main Street, I was surprised to see not only police cars, but an ambulance where the "fight" had been.  The Rockabilly couple was sitting on the curb talking to the police, and one of the guys who had been harassing them was getting loaded into the ambulance.  That may just have been the best thing I've ever seen as a taxi driver. 


This is just one of the taxi fight stories that will be in my upcoming DIY book, Level 5: Getting Shot Sucks.  Click the link to pre-order a copy.  And don't talk shit in downtown Huntington Beach, even to the women.