Thinking in Public
The malls are back, as a place to spend an afternoon.
Oakridge Park in Vancouver reopened on May 28, 2026, with a rooftop public park and year-round programming built into the plan. Inside it, Time Out Market Vancouver runs 20 kitchens alongside live music, DJ sets and cooking demos, checked September 2026.
I've been going on Sunday afternoons. There's a concert on one floor and a workshop in the food hall, and there's a flavor to being there that a parking lot and four walls used to be missing.
I've said this before for a different reason: if I were a new doctor, lawyer or accountant, I'd go where the foot traffic is. In the mall. Forget the building and the Google ads. Go pull people from the street. I already wrote about stores that give you a reason to stay here. This is the same idea at the scale of an entire building.
Placer.ai tracks phone-location visits to US malls. Its March 2025 mall index found indoor mall visits up 1.8% over March 2024, and still 7.4% below the first quarter of 2019.
Placer.ai says many weaker malls have closed, so the strongest ones may be taking the traffic that used to go to them, and it points to new investment in the indoor mall experience. I read that as: the best malls are back.
Visit the busiest mall near you on a weekend. Note what draws people in: events, food, services. Stand by an empty unit for an hour and count who walks past. Then ask the mall's leasing office what a short-term space costs.
If you sell anything in person, go find out what the mall already knows about foot traffic.