The enclosed American mall was designed as a machine with a specific purpose: move shoppers past small stores by placing large ones at the ends. That design is now failing.
Anchors were the traffic generators
Department stores drew shoppers who had come for a specific purchase, and placing two or more at opposite ends forced the walk between them.
Every smaller store along that route received foot traffic it could never have generated alone, which is what made the interior units leasable at all.
Developers understood this precisely, and anchor stores were courted with terms far below what inline tenants paid because their presence was the product being sold to those tenants.
The lease structure encoded the dependency
Inline leases commonly included clauses tying the tenant's obligations to the continued operation of the anchors, allowing rent reductions or exit if one closed.
Those provisions made commercial sense when written, because a mall without its anchor is a fundamentally different property from the one the tenant signed up for.
They also created a cascade risk, since a single anchor departure could trigger renegotiation across dozens of leases simultaneously and undermine the property's income.
Anchors often owned their own buildings
Department stores frequently held title to their stores and the surrounding parking rather than leasing from the mall owner, which was part of the inducement to build there.
When those chains contracted, the vacant buildings were not the mall owner's to repurpose, and control sat with a party that had left the business.
Redevelopment of struggling malls stalls on exactly this point, since assembling the site requires negotiating with owners who have little incentive to move quickly.
The format assumed a particular trip
Enclosed malls were built for a long, unhurried visit combining several errands, which suited a period when shopping was a destination activity for whole families.
Shorter, more frequent trips favor open-air centers where a shopper parks near the one store they need and leaves without entering a shared corridor.
That shift removes the mechanism the mall depended on, because a shopper who never walks the concourse never passes the small stores that paid for it.
What the buildings become
Successful conversions tend to demolish the corridor and rebuild as open-air blocks, or repurpose anchor boxes for uses that generate their own traffic.
Medical offices, fitness facilities, schools and distribution space all appear in former retail buildings, because the structures are large, well located and cheaply acquired.
The properties that survive as retail are typically those in dense, affluent areas where the land itself carries enough value to fund a full rebuild.