Mississauga Developments

[westwardloo]

While online shopping has hit bricks and mortar retail hard, it has also largely made mall-style retail obsolete. The style of shopping that malls are optimal for - wandering into various stores, seeing different things etc. - just doesn't happen as much anymore. People do that on the internet and either buy it online, or go to the shop that sells the item they are looking for to try it on. In that context, a format like the Boardwalk or Sportsworld works really well. People can drive close to the store, walk in, and then leave. Doing the same at a mall is typically a much bigger ordeal that someone like myself anyway, is simply just not going to bother with. You still drive there and park. If you're lucky, you parked in a good spot, if you're not, you're walking a long time. You have the trouble of finding the store in the mall. You have to deal with more people and are more likely to run into people hawking things at you like cellphone vendors or random knick-knack carts. All just to go try one thing on and walk away again. Boardwalk-style malls don't have any of those issues.

I don't expect new malls to be built anytime soon in the region, nor do I want them to. What I want is for city/region planners to think a little bit before having minimum parking requirements for each store in these plaza. At best on the busiest day it might be half full. That is an incredible wasteful land use policy. Especially as the city/ region are recognizing that we have a housing crisis. I also don't understand why planners don't build mixed use in these new type of plaza. I understand zoning separation of industrial and residential, but residential and commercial never made sense. We have been doing it for 80 years, there is enough literature out there that supports mixed use developments even in suburban locations. Sure there are people that would not want to live above a south st. burger chain, but there would be lots of people who would have no problem with that. Especially since we tend to put transit hubs in these large strip mall plazas. If the region were to rezone these areas to allow mixed use, I believe developers would see the potential dollars.