I remember learning about “tilt wall” construction, and figured that “tilt wall” works both ways.
1 Like
These things happen because of decisions human beings make, not because it’s a “natural process” that “just happens.”
7 Likes
To be fair, it was Schumpeter who described the process of creative destruction in capitalism:
Not surprisingly, he was part of the Austrian school of economics. [ETA] It should also be noted that it’s a Marxist term, and yet it’s often deployed in a positive, or at least a neutral manner regarding the inner workings of the capitalist system.
5 Likes
Locally, one big box electronics store that went out of business got turned into an ethnic food court. The food shops are along the sides and rear of the building with a couple at the front and don’t have their own seating, then the middle is a big open area with a skylight and lots of tables and chairs. The businesses that have set up in there are all small locally owned businesses, mostly owned by ethnic minorities, and all gains go to the local economy rather than to some banker in New York City. Which is how it should be. Unfortunately, most of these big box properties will end up like the empty former K-Mart property across the street – it got knocked down to build new housing and shops, rather than repurposed, because there just wasn’t any repurposing to be done with such a large building so poorly designed and constructed.
1 Like
I think there are plenty of corrupt banks and bankers and financial institutions and regulators and… But I agree that is more a matter of practice, and human folly, than the logic of the role of bankers and market economics in theory, and in practice some of the time. Thank you for articulating another perspective.
1 Like
Not vultures so much as lampreys. Vultures tend to go for already-dead carcasses, while lampreys suck the life out of their victims.
6 Likes
I’ve long been interested in the prospect of the adaptive reuse of these kinds of buildings, which long seemed an imminent addition to the urban detritus. I can imagine them becoming the loci of Urban Nomad interventions, retrofitted into micro-arcologies using approaches akin to the SCADpad project. I also see them as potentially hosting the coming generation of facilities for distributed on-demand production, turning into local neighborhood Santa Claus Machines or becoming vast automated materials handling complexes when Amazon inevitably turns into an Internet-like municipal utility.
Seen when a tornado hits a big box. Which happens with depressing frequency.
3 Likes
Lincoln Mall in Matteson, IL, 1973-2015. Things started going south in the early 1990s, after, in a stunning coincidence, the arcade was kicked out. To be fair, there were other issues; it never had a food court, and one of the anchors (Wieboldt’s) went Tango Uniform in the late 1980s. Sears, of all things, moved in to the vacant Wiebolt’s space in the 1990s, but then Montgomery Ward’s went Tango Uniform. JCPenney quit the mall in the early 2000s only to return as an nearby freestanding store next to a Target that just recently closed. There were a number of half-hearted and half-assed redevelopment efforts, culminating in the brilliant plan to lop off the vacant Penney’s and Ward’s stores - but money ran out and the amputated stumps were never closed up. I knew that Lincoln Mall’s days were numbered when the McDonald’s that had been there since opening day closed.
A court finally ordered an end to the farce, and after the mall was closed, a great deal of effort was made to separate the Carson Pirie Scott store’s mechanical and electrical systems from the rest of mall, and then the closed-off mall was demolished; Carson’s owned their property.
The punch line: it’s almost April, 2017. The rubble of the mall hasn’t been fully cleared yet, and the Carson’s just closed last month. Target closed a short while before. At least they didn’t let the mall rot for 30+ years like Dixie Square in Harvey. It still weirds me out that I can remember exactly what it was like and it’s almost completely gone (and I don’t doubt the Carson’s will go too).
And of course, the cycle of development is its own effed-up thing; Lincoln Mall catalyzed the demise of Dixie Square and the extreme diminishment of Park Forest Plaza, including wiping out the Sears store in Park Forest decades before Eddie Lampert came on the scene.
ETA: I just took a look on the Wayback Machine, and www dot lincoln-mall dot com even helpfully arranged their robots.txt file to prevent the site from being archived. *LOL*
ETA2: The University of Chicago, home to so many of the economists who have FUBARed our economy, still has a Wieboldt Hall.
9 Likes
I completely understand why a homeless person might choose to live in an abandoned warehouse space that wasn’t up to code than have to live in the street.
That said, it would be ethically dodgy at best to say “we don’t need to observe important, life-saving residential building codes when providing housing for the homeless.”
8 Likes
My city turned one into a pretty sweet roller disco.
7 Likes
Heh (dark humor), it isn’t so hypothetical. You should see some Section 8, or “temporary” homeless shelters, etc.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
