ULI Asks: 'Can Stand-Alone Malls Survive?'

LOS ANGELES-The stand-alone mall isn’t dead. It’s just dysfunctional. That was one of the sentiments expressed at an Urban Land Institute panel that tackled the question, “Can stand-alone malls survive?” The question was posed Thursday, during ULI’s annual Reinventing Retail conference at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.

The comment about the dysfunctional nature of traditional stand-alone malls came from panelist Shaheen Sadeghi, founder of Costa Mesa, CA-based LAB Holding, a firm that eschews traditional malls in favor of projects like its youth-oriented “the Lab” in Costa Mesa, a center that the developer describes as an “anti-mall.”

The five-member panel, moderated by managing principal and president Greg Vilkin of San Francisco-based MacFarlane Partners, agreed that the heyday of the freestanding mall surrounded by surface parking is long gone and that the remodeling, repositioning and razing of existing malls that has occurred in recent years will only continue. The gist of much of the discussion was that stand-alone malls as they developed during the suburban boom in America during the past 50 years have run their course, but mixed-use developments including shopping venues as one part of the mix are the way of the future.