The rise of Amazon and ecommerce is fast turning into an extinction level event for malls, which now face the same fate as all the neighborhood stores and shops they once shuttered on Main Street. 

And our own bevy of retail bazaars here in Massachusetts is hardly immune to the pressures that, according to one estimate, are expected to kill as much a quarter of the nation’s enclosed malls over the next few years. 

But the demise of the mall could actually be good news for efforts to tackle the housing crisis, giving developers ample new sites upon which to build apartments homes and condominiums. The trend is gaining momentum locally as the owners of Shoppers World in Framingham push ahead with plans to build a 7-story apartment building on a high-profile site by the Natick Mall. 

Ohio-based DDR, which controls 300 retail and other properties across the country and in Puerto Rico, won a green light from the city in 2016 for a similar project. But the big mall owner was forced to put its plans on hold in the fall of 2016 when a pair of key tenants – a bowling alley and an indoor skydiving venue – fell through. 

DDR’s new proposal boosts the number of apartments to 175 from 130 previously while also adding a sidewalk to the nearby Logan Express bus station and a bike path connecting the new rental project with a local rail trail. 

It all sounds great on paper, but maybe the most encouraging thing so far has been the grousing about DDR’s latest design, with one planning board member wanting something more “dynamic.” 

What’s so great about that? It’s what’s not being said that’s important; there’s been none of the hackneyed complaints that greet almost any attempt to build new housing in Greater Boston – that the project is too large, will add too many new apartments and will make traffic worse. 

Scott Van Voorhis

In fact, one of the most common reasons apartment and condo developers are forced to go back to the drawing board is to shrink the number of housing units, not add to them. DDR added the residential component to what was originally a retail/entertainment plan after Framingham updated its zoning to allow for mixed use/residential projects in the area around Shoppers World, the Boston Globe reported. 

No one-off proposal, it comes as other mall owners around the state – and country – try similar plays to bring in new revenue as major retailers go bust as customers shop more and more online. 

Not far from Shoppers World, the owner of Natick’s Cloverleaf Mall is pushing plans for 125 apartments. That happens to be next door to the already established 184-unit Cloverleaf Apartments and not far from Avalon Bay’s 407 unit high-rise overlooking Home Depot.  

And the once ridiculed Nouvelle condo tower at the Natick Mall has hit its stride after a rocky opening amid the Great Recession. Buyers who scored bargains when the mall owner resorted to a mass auction of the units are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars when they sell. 

Lessons from the Left Coast 

While a hundred apartments here, a couple hundred there can’t hurt, we can and must do better than that. 

With Eastern Massachusetts and the Boston area facing the need for hundreds of thousands of new homes and apartments over the next two decades there’s no reason why developers, with the right support from state and local officials, can’t build thousands of new units at struggling or already dead malls. 

Credit Suisse predicts that a fifth of the nation’s 1,200 enclosed malls – or well over 200 hundred – will be closing up shop by 2022, and you can bet more than a few of them will be in the tech-savvy Bay State, in serious contention to land Amazon’s new headquarters. 

A leader in the mall-to-housing conversion movement, California’s development shows we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible in the Bay State. 

Golden State developers are turning mega malls into thousands of new apartments and condos. More than 14,000 new housing units at dead California malls are in the works, including plans to build 9,600 homes at the Hilltop Mall in the Bay Area town of Richmond. 

But there are warning signs in California; NIMBYies are nothing if not shameless, and they are already starting to scope out new battle lines in their efforts to torpedo reason and progress and preserve all those precious, boarded up mall department stores for future generations to appreciate. 

Hopes to turn the South Bay Galleria mall in Redondo Beach into nearly 1,500 new homes and apartments have been repeatedly scaled back to the point of absurdity. Forest Cities latest proposal calls for just 300 units amidst fierce opposition from the appropriately named RAGE, or Redondo Residents Against Galleria Expansion. Their beefs? A supposed increase in traffic, which makes little sense given retail beats housing any day when it comes to being a traffic magnet. 

Back in Massachusetts, there are also warning signs that NIMBY attitudes will sour what could be one of the last, best chances to rein in runaway home prices and rents: There’s grumbling about plans for new housing at the Swansea Mall, a major destination if there ever was one, with the town planner wanting to see more office and retail, along with housing, and questioning the “value added” to the town. 

The demise of the shopping mall could provide the greatest single opportunity in years to boost the amount of new housing built in Massachusetts and finally get a handle on runaway home prices and rents. 

Here’s hoping the NIMBYies don’t find a way to ruin it for the rest of us. 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.