It has put the area on the map as a culinary and cultural center. In Falls Church, Virginia, there’s a somewhat more deliberate and more expensive example that still retains the strip mall form: Eden Center, a plaza home to dozens of Vietnamese restaurants, shops, and services, along with cultural events.Įden Center is a huge attraction for Vietnamese Americans, as well as one of the most notable tourist attractions in the Northern Virginia suburbs.
This is a very informal example, as the space has not been renovated or retrofitted in any way.
Its overbuilt parking lot, in a neighborhood where many residents do not own cars, now hosts a series of small businesses, from food trucks to produce sales to auto repair. Its anchor store, previously an Ames discount store (similar to a K-Mart), is now a cavernous thrift store. For example, take a look at this aging strip plaza in a more working-class community in Montgomery County, Maryland. We can see this process unfolding in many places. This type of development has its pros and cons my own view on it is cautiously positive, as I explored here in Maryland’s affluent DC suburbs.īut are there ways for strip malls to be reinvented or reimagined in inexpensive, low-tech, incremental ways? Absolutely. In affluent and growing regions, such as Northern Virginia where I live, it's common for older strip plazas to be torn down and redeveloped into mid-rise apartments or mixed-use centers. Many will probably fail as they’re currently constituted, especially given the ongoing growth of e-commerce. We’re also stuck with them in the literal sense: Thousands of these structures will remain a part of the built environment, whether or not we keep building or financing them. Until we change the government regulations that induce strip mall development (or until every strip mall fails completely), we're stuck with these low-returning investments in our towns and cities. Back in 2016, Rachel Quednau wrote a piece in this space titled “Stuck with Strip Malls.” By “stuck with,” she meant that they will continue being built as long as our regulatory and financing systems incentivize them:
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