A playbook for America's languishing malls

In 2020, Bisnow reported that RedBird's co-developer was ready to take the model to other declining malls in the United States. ICSC covered the same thesis: a 100-acre live-work-play conversion of a property the market had written off, in the community where the developer grew up.

Five years later that ambition is a pipeline, including a 992,000 SF mall reimagination in Topeka and a 60-acre former mall site being rebuilt as a downtown in Pasadena, Texas.

The four moves

• Subtract before you add. Roughly a third of the RedBird structure came down to create a promenade and open the site to the street grid.
• Replace discretionary retail demand with non-discretionary demand: healthcare, education, government services, employment.
• Use public partnership deliberately. RedBird received a $22M incentive grant from the City of Dallas in 2018 to fund infrastructure private capital would not.
• Build the jobs case first. The campus was projected to create more than 3,000 jobs, the single most durable community benefit a redevelopment can produce.

“I always felt the need and the importance to give back to the Oak Cliff community because it was such an important fabric in my life growing up. It has been both fulfilling and challenging, but I wouldn't change anything about the journey to get here.”

Why the model travels

Because the failure mode is identical everywhere. Enclosed malls did not die of bad architecture; they died of single-category demand concentrated in a format that stopped matching how people move. Any site with scale, road frontage, and community memory can be re-underwritten around mixed demand, provided someone is willing to hold the entitlement, partnership, and infrastructure risk that comes first.

That risk is the business. It is also the reason these deals rarely have competition at the moment they need to be signed.