Living At The Mall
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis, and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts, and business news in the region. Mark Leger is the Director of News Content for Acadia Broadcasting and Huddle.
When I edited a weekly paper nearly two decades ago, I often went to the mall after it went to press each week. Wandering the halls people-watching and browsing in stores was relaxing and a great way to decompress at the end of a busy week.
Back then, and to a lesser extent now, the malls were the town squares where people went to shop, eat, and socialize. The uptown Saint John area was comparatively quiet and I craved wandering amidst the hustle and bustle of a busier place.
But the main shopping mall area was on the other side of town, so I always had to hop in the car and drive 15 minutes to get there.
It’s just the way things were going back then, the product of suburbanization and the car, where people lived in one area and shopped and socialized in another.
I’ve never much cared for that way of life because it’s so compartmentalized; it seems to me that vibrant communities have all the shops and services close to where people live.
Thankfully, there has been a shift in the last 20 years. Even though we’re still dependent on our cars for so much, the city centre is a vibrant place to live again, with many new housing developments to accommodate the growth and thriving restaurant and bar scenes. The suburban area east of the city is experiencing something similar with shops and services more plentiful than when I grew up there.
So, what about those sprawling retail areas with acres of box stores, movie theatres, restaurants, and shops that become ghost towns after everything closes? Well, some developers are seeing opportunities for mixed-use developments that include housing on massive, mostly underutilized parking lots.
The idea feels like a creature of the pandemic, with the rise of online shopping and the growing need for new housing.
But the trend predates the pandemic in places like Saint John, where a planned mixed-use development in the East Point shopping area was first announced in 2019.
“Across North America, we’ve seen an evolution of retail centres. Places such as the Yorkdale Mall in Toronto, Don Mills in Toronto—a lot of those centres are being redeveloped with a residential component to them,” said city planner Mark Reade at the time.
“You already have that core of daily services that you need. East Point is a prime example. You have a grocery store, you have a pharmacy, you have Costco, you have a bookstore, you have some restaurants. There’s a liquor store, there’s a bank,” he said.
The original East Point plan consisted of three buildings and as many as 200 apartment units.
In Halifax this week, something much larger was proposed on the Mic Mac Mall site in Dartmouth.
Rank Inc., owned by developer Joe Ramia, bought the mall in Dartmouth last year and has now submitted plans for an ambitious development that would include more than a dozen new buildings, some as high as 36 storeys, and more than 2,000 new residential units.
Related: Massive Development Will Transform Mic Mac Mall Site Into A ‘Small Town’
The company is not giving up on retail or the car, for that matter. The proposed development would add more than one million square feet of retail and commercial space, and more than 6,000 new parking spots in an underground network.
The development, which is in the early planning stages, is situated in what the city calls a “future growth node.” Government planners and developers work together in these nodes to build true communities, not just islands of residential or commercial and retail development.
The city has identified the area as an opportunity for growth with its proximity to transportation routes, public parks, and schools.
Huddle editor Trevor Nichols says many councillors were excited about the proposed development at the council meeting on December 13. Councillor Sam Austin said it would be like a new “small town” was being developed in the area.
The weekly paper I edited is now gone, with print papers in decline or disappearing entirely in many communities. This is okay if there are other forms of media that keep people informed about issues, events, and developments in their communities.
But we still need the gathering places where we all shop, eat, and socialize together, be they in city centres, suburban neighbourhoods, or malls; whatever the “small towns” of the future look like, it’s important that they exist.
And we shouldn’t have to travel in cars to get there.