By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Midwest City, Okla.
— Heritage Park Mall is a tomb, a crumbling and boarded-up monument to a
particular weird moment in American history when we did that most American of
all things: attempt to perfect a community by rebuilding it from scratch. With
its shops and restaurants and public spaces, and its proximity to banks and
offices, the American shopping mall was the reincarnation of the downtown
business district, moved indoors where it could be air-conditioned, efficiently
policed, and surrounded by a sprawling Salton Sea of asphalt to provide ample
parking. The old downtown died most places, and, now, the new downtown is
dying, too: At the highwater mark, there were about 5,000 malls in the United
States, and there are now 1,100, at least 400 of which are expected to close in
the next few years. In the 1980s, developers built an average of 60 malls a
year — and more than 100 in some years. Now, cities from San Bernardino,
Calif., to High Point, N.C., are dealing with the husks of these dead retail
behemoths. There are documentary films and TED talks about dead malls.
“I remember it fondly,” says longtime resident and city
councilman Sean Reed, recalling Heritage Park Mall. “We used to go there when
we were little kids and wander it all day.”
Cameron Crowe’s 1982 magnum opus, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, is a deep meditation on a number of
subjects: marijuana, Thomas Jefferson, and statutory rape among them. But the
name is all wrong: With apologies to Mr. Hand, what happens at Ridgemont High
is a relatively minor part of the story — the real story is about fast times at
Ridgemont Mall, the lightly fictionalized cinematic version of the Sherman Oaks
Galleria that is at the center of the Ridgemont High universe and was, for a
minute, something close to the center of American pop culture. Frank Zappa made
a hit record that consisted of little more than his daughter aping the speech
patterns of the mall’s young female customers over a fairly generic (for Frank
Zappa) guitar track. “Valley girl”–speak spread like an infection over the
land.
Sherman Oaks Galleria is far from Oklahoma, but its story
is a familiar one.
After an ignominious decline during which it was reduced
to something like an indoor version of New York City’s Canal Street — and also,
this being the United States of God Bless America, after a whole lot of
litigation — the Sherman Oaks Galleria was more or less put out of its misery.
Gone is the mauve Art Deco–by–way–of–Patrick Nagel interior, though the movie
theater remains. Most of what remains was converted into office space — Warner
Bros. is a client, but it is mostly mortgage lenders and other
financial-services companies. The rest has gone the way of Chess King and red
nylon parachute pants. The hubris of the 1980s is well under the heel of
Nemesis: Duran Duran just played a two-night engagement at the Agua Caliente
Casino Resort Spa in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
The emergence of the mall as the preeminent public space
in American life may seem like one of those weird inexplicable 1980s things,
like 18 percent mortgage rates, American
Psycho, or the presidential candidacy of Walter Mondale. But it was in a
sense only a reversion to ancient norms: In Singapore, there is a large
shopping mall called “The Forum” (which was, and is, a common name for malls),
while the one in Santo Domingo has a more Hellenic moniker: “Agora.” But if you
go back and watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High, what’s really remarkable isn’t
the underage sex or the terrible fashion sense or how close in retrospect the
1980s were to the 1960s (nice hippie wagon, Spicoli) or any of that.
It’s that all those middle-class, white, suburban
high-school kids had jobs.
***
‘I don’t think it will ever be a mall again.”
Councilman Reed, who serves this modest suburb of
Oklahoma City with an economy dominated by Tinker Air Force Base, says that the
thing his constituents ask him about most often isn’t their taxes or schools or
911 response times but the festering corpse of Heritage Park Mall, a retail
graveyard in a downward-bound corner of this city that hasn’t housed much in
the way of commerce or food courts (seriously, not even an Orange Julius!) in
many years, the only remaining customer-facing enterprises being those two
great totems of the American 20th century: a Sears and a charismatic
megachurch.
Heritage Park Mall died the way malls die. But the
greater Oklahoma City metropolitan area is not very much like Southern
California. A high-profile chunk of real estate in Sherman Oaks is going to
become something. In Midwest City,
Okla., the best-case scenario may be that the mall becomes nothing. Three
options are on the table as the city tries to work out what to do about the
vacant mall. One plan is to try to rehabilitate the interior retail space, but
Reed does not have much confidence in that plan, and neither do many other
people in Midwest City. A second option is to try to convert the property into
a mixed-use development, meaning office spaces, townhouses, and whatever retail
can be lured in. Midwest City is not shy about using public resources to
encourage retail development: The mall may be dead, but across town a new strip
mall has been built with tens of millions of dollars in tax incentives.
Option three? Knock the damned thing down. The Sears and
the church would remain, and the rest would be converted into a park.
The owner of the property has plans of his own — he wants
to wall off all but a few thousand square feet of retail space and rehabilitate
the sequestered space, fixing the mall up in segments — but so far no one seems
to be taking them all that seriously.
A dead mall is a problem. It’s a blight and an eyesore,
for one thing. Heritage Park is boarded up, and sometimes the grass is allowed
to get a little tall. There are financial problems as well: Heritage Park Mall
used to produce more than $1 million a year in revenue for Midwest City; what
little commerce still exists on the property (there’s a Pelican’s Wharf
restaurant detached from the mall proper but on the lot) produces about $70,000
a year. That’s a big hit: Sixty-five percent of the ad valorem taxes generated
by the property had been earmarked for the schools. And while the mall isn’t
producing much revenue, the city still has to police it and protect it against
fires. (Fire marshals tend to take an especial interest in boarded-up,
abandoned buildings with large, open interior spaces.) Replacing those lost tax
funds has not been easy: In a sprawling metro area such as Oklahoma City,
there’s a new municipality every couple of miles in the exurban stretches,
meaning that businesses that left the mall but set up shop elsewhere often did
not do so within the boundaries of Midwest City, which is festooned with a lot
of signs offering residents the advice (economically illiterate but popular)
that they should “buy local.”
The more common sign says For Lease.
***
Because the thing is, it isn’t just the mall. Heritage
Park is bounded on three sides by commercial properties with a lot of
vacancies. The shopping center to the north is between a quarter and a third
vacant, and the tenants in the occupied spaces — Ron’s Burgers and Chili, New
York Nails, an animal hospital, People’s Church and its nearby PC Kids center,
a physical therapist, Hearing Aid Center, Midway Clinic, Rupert Thomas OB/GYN,
a tanning salon, and an Edward Jones — all have something in common: They are
in businesses that require physical presence. (Yeah, you can trade stocks
online, but that isn’t exactly what Edward Jones does.) Amazon is in all sorts
of businesses, but it is not yet offering to watch your kids or minister to
your labradoodle or your reproductive plumbing or your immortal soul. On the
other side of the mall, there’s a blood-plasma donation center two doors down
from an Arby’s — if you are in search of the Eliotic objective correlative for
despair, there it is. The shops that are thriving are like the jobs that are
thriving: They are difficult to outsource.
And shops and jobs go together: One in ten employed
Americans works in retail. Retail salesman is the single most common job in the
United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while much has
been made of the decline in old-line industrial jobs that carry a certain
nostalgic charge, there are 17 times as many retail jobs as jobs in automobile
manufacturing, 100 times as many retail jobs as steel jobs, and 210 times as
many Americans working in retail as in coal mining — not just miners, but all
coal-mining jobs, from CEO on down. Shop jobs mostly are not especially
high-paying (though they sometimes are), and they tend to be held by workers
who for various reasons — sometimes lack of skill and education, but also
things such as the need for flexible scheduling or physical limitations — often
do not have a great many desirable options. People sometimes scoff: “Yeah,
creative destruction is great — we’ll just tell all those unemployed
steelworkers to become software designers!” But the fact is that steel mills
and mines and factories employ a great many highly educated and highly skilled
people, from engineers to machinists, and they are a lot more likely to be able
to find good new jobs than is the 48-year-old mother of three who works four
days a week at the local Sears. That job may not provide enough to support a
family of five, but it may very well pay enough to take care of the mortgage
and the electricity bill — for two-income families, those modestly paid retail
jobs aren’t about pin money.
Those jobs are going away.
We see here the very familiar contours of a bubble. After
decades of rapid expansion, retail is in sharp decline, with stores closing at
a higher rate today than they did during the financial crisis and recession of
2008–09. Bebe, which at its high point operated a couple of hundred shops, soon
will be online-only. Clothiers such as Rue 21, Payless, and Limited are closing
hundreds and hundreds of outlets. The sporting-goods business has seen a
bloodbath: Gander Mountain is bankrupt and closing stores, another victim of
the contraction that took down MC Sports and Sports Authority while putting
serious downward pressure on the finances of the survivors.
Some 8,000 stores are expected to close this year.
The migration of retail out of shops and onto the
Internet has been significant — last year saw online retail pass a symbolically
important milestone, accounting for 51 percent of all purchases — but it wasn’t
radical or unexpected. In fact, the retail building boom really kicked off at
the same time as the rise of online commerce: in the middle to late 1990s.
Which is to say, the retail-space bubble inflated in parallel with two other
important bubbles: the dot-com bubble and the much more significant housing
bubble.
When housing prices were skyrocketing around the turn of
the century, Americans did not use all that new wealth to pay down household
debt or start high-tech enterprises in their garages or anything like that:
They monetized that equity and bought gigantic televisions. They bought new
furniture and clothes and shoes, and the consumer-goods market began to look
like another one of those can’t-miss propositions that come along and cause
trouble every few years. Retailers and developers responded by building new shops
and strip malls, taking advantage of millennial-era cheap money to leverage the
hell out of themselves in the quest for growth and volume. They loaded
themselves up with debt that is perfectly bearable when profit margins are 11
percent but deadly when they’re 7 percent.
In addition to cheap money, they also took advantage of a
lot of free money: Note that even as it struggles with a zombie mall and high
vacancy rates in nearby retail centers, Midwest City is using tax dollars to
subsidize the development of yet more retail space on the other side of town,
the world of Panera and Starbucks. More retail space means more sales-tax
revenue, and if you take a short-term and relatively narrow view — the typical
political view — then spending a few million dollars to make sure that whatever
new conglomeration of Pei Wei, HomeGoods, and Lane Bryant is getting built gets
built in your taxing jurisdiction rather than the one next door looks like a
pretty good investment. Which it is.
Until it isn’t.
Big operators of malls and retail space such as
Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust are taking a beating: PREIT is down
20 percent for the year, and if you judged by its press releases, you’d think
all PREIT’s people did all day was chase down tenants to replace moribund Sears
locations and occasionally replace the company’s chairman. The investment
houses can (and will) take care of themselves. But what about all that vacant
space blighting up cities and towns across the country? And what about the people
who used to work in all those stores?
***
The first job of Oklahoma City’s Heather Boulware was at
a TG&Y, which middle-aged residents of the southern half of the United
States may recall as “Toys, Guns, and Yo-Yos.” It was what our grandparents
would have called a general store. “It was like a Super Walmart without the
groceries,” she says. She started working there when she was 15 years old. Hers
was a common experience: She was earning a little money — “a whopping $3.35 an
hour” — which she invested in the things kids invest their money in: “I got
paid every two weeks, and I’d buy books and go out with my friends. Some of it,
I saved up for Christmas presents for my family.” TG&Y offered its
employees a discount, and another benefit that made Boulware the heroine of
Christmas morning: “I worked there the Christmas that Cabbage Patch dolls were
huge. We got a shipment, and they let me hold one back for my little sister.”
Now that she is an adult with children of her own, she understands that what
she was actually investing in was learning how to have a job. “I had to be
accountable,” she says. “I had hours, had to be there on time, had to be clean
and dressed appropriately. And I had to interact with people in a way I hadn’t
before: In a job like that, you have to answer questions, and if someone is
kind of mean to you or critical, you can’t stomp off and cry. I wasn’t a kid at
work — I was an employee.”
But there are fewer opportunities like that today, and
there will be even fewer in the near future. Boulware’s daughter skipped retail
entirely and worked in a series of food-service jobs while attending college.
“She’s a college student, and she says that this isn’t her ‘big-girl job.’ But
she makes good money, it’s flexible, and she can go to school and study while
having the freedom to do things she won’t be able to do when she gets her
big-girl job, which will be as an English teacher.” Working changed her
daughter. “She already was fairly responsible — much different from me when I
was that age. But when she started working, she was more mature, less
confrontational, and able to see things from a different point of view. And she
became much more independent.”
The Boulwares are statistical outliers: In the 1980s,
about 40 percent of those 16 to 17 years of age were employed, as were nearly
60 percent of those 18 to 19 years of age. Less than 15 percent of that younger
cohort is working now, together with about 35 percent of the older group. Fewer
of those jobs at Ridgemont Mall and its food court are being filled by
middle-class teenagers. Who is working there? Illegal immigrants are eight
times as likely to work in service jobs as in agriculture. The Pew Research Center
puts the illegal-immigrant share of the restaurant work force at 11 percent,
while the pro-immigration labor-activist group Restaurant Opportunities Center
United puts the share at 30 to 40 percent in major urban areas.
It often has been observed that the real value of a first
job is not the money earned in that job: The real value of the first job is
that it leads to the second job, and the third. At the high end, retail work
can be extraordinarily lucrative: Texas
Monthly reported that competition for top salesmen at high-end department
stores resulted in salaries exceeding $100,000 a year — and that was in 1997.
But the same is true today: Walmart district managers earn incomes well into
six figures, as do high-performing managers at similar companies. Three-fourths
of them begin as hourly associates. Walmart likes to tell the story of Claudine
McKenzie, a daughter of poor Caribbean immigrants who went to work for the
company as a temp when she was 20 years old and three months pregnant. She went
on to become a highly paid manager. Along the way, she received benefits
ranging from paid maternity leave to generous insurance to the company’s “Life
with Baby” program, which helps educate young parents about the resources
available to help them with their new responsibilities.
But the decline of retail will mean fewer stores and
fewer starting jobs at those stores, constricting the path from unskilled
hourly worker to richly remunerated manager. Fewer people will have the
opportunity to learn and to demonstrate those basic elements of personal
accountability — keeping a schedule, making peace with difficult customers —
that Heather Boulware spoke about.
Those dead malls are a visible testament to what the
decline of retail means to American communities: blight, lost taxes, public
nuisances. But there is an invisible testament, too: It is not so much a matter
of jobs lost in the present but of jobs that never come into being in the
future. What all those teenagers and low-skilled workers need isn’t a $15 minimum
wage but a foothold, a way to enter what is after all the world’s most
productive economy and begin the process of advancement. For the kids headed to
Stanford and Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the way ahead is, for the moment,
fairly clear. For the dead-average 17-year-old who intends to — maybe has to —
move out of his parents’ house next year and into a life of self-sufficiency,
who not long ago might have gone down to the local Sears or Circuit City or
hardware store and started a new job 24 hours after asking for it? That way is
less clear. But what is quite clear is that our current system of education,
which focuses the great majority of its energy and resources on those students
at the very top of the performance curve and those at the very bottom, is not
doing very much for those in the middle. It is as relevant to the 21st century
as an Orange Julius or a Chess King outlet — dead as Heritage Park Mall, even
if it doesn’t know it yet.
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