OK, I want you to picture something just for
a second. You're in your car. It's, I don't know,
a Tuesday evening. You're tired. Right. The end
of a long day. Exactly. And you have that list
of errands. You know, you have to pick up the
dry cleaning, maybe grab a bottle of wine. And
get some takeout because cooking is just absolutely
not happening tonight. Oh, that is a very familiar
feeling. So you pull off the main road into this
sea of asphalt that's probably a little cracked.
Maybe there's a pothole you have to dodge. You
find a spot and you park right in front of a
row of like beige stucco storefronts. And the
lighting is probably a little bit harsh. Yeah.
You know, that sort of orange glow. Maybe there's
the neon. sign buzzing somewhere exactly it is
not beautiful in fact if you asked an architect
they might tell you it's a crime against humanity
but you're there you're participating in this
ritual that millions of us do every single day
without a second thought we are talking of course
about the strip hall the ubiquitous strip or
uh what i like to call the retail spleen of the
suburbs and look I know what you might be thinking.
You're thinking, we're going to do a whole deep
dive on strip malls, on those ugly L -shaped
blocks. But here's the thing, and this is why
we're here today. We dismiss them because they
are ugly. We ignore them because they are everywhere.
They're invisible because they're so visible.
Yes. But if you actually peel back the stucco,
this is one of the most fascinating economic
and architectural machines ever invented. It
really, really is. It's a perfect case study
in how the automobile... completely conquered
the world. It's a story about zoning laws, global
oil crises, tax loopholes, and even construction
technology. So that's the mission today. We're
going to take this thing that is arguably the
most invisible structure in our lives, invisible
because we refuse to really look at it, and we're
going to figure out why it exists, why it looks
the way it does, and why, despite everyone screaming
about the retail apocalypse, these things are
actually somehow multiplying. We are going to
make you see that L -shaped concrete lot. in
a whole new light okay so let's start with the
absolute basics if i'm looking at a row of stores
how do i know it's a strip mall and not just
you know a street with shops is there a technical
sort of textbook definition or is it just a vibe
oh there is Absolutely a technical definition.
Yeah, in the industry. And especially if you
look at how the International Council of Shopping
Centers, the ICSC, defines it, there are a few
non -negotiables. Okay. First, it has to be an
open -air shopping center. Open -air, so no roof
over the walkway, no big atrium with a sad little
fountain in the middle. Correct. If it's enclosed,
you're talking about a regional mall. That's
a different beast. Here, you're open to the elements.
Second is the configuration. The stores are arranged
in a row or a strip. Hence the name. Hence the
name. And crucially, there is a sidewalk, a footpath
that runs directly in front of all the stores.
Which seems kind of obvious, right? I mean, you
need a place to walk, but that sidewalk, it's
not a public street sidewalk, is it? It's private
property. That's a great point. It's a private
transition zone. But the real defining characteristic,
the thing that separates a strip mall from a
traditional main street or a downtown district,
is its relationship with the car. Oh, okay. In
a strip mall, the parking is located in front
of the building, between the stores and the street.
That's the key. So the building itself is pushed
way back from the road, and the asphalt is the
welcome mat. It's the foyer. It's the first thing
you encounter. In a traditional city layout,
the buildings are pushed right up to the sidewalk.
They engage with the street and parking is either
on the street or maybe hidden in the back. Right.
The strip mall completely flips that. It turns
its back on the street and says the car is the
primary customer. The building itself has to
retreat to the rear of the lot to create a stage
for the automobiles. It's interesting you call
it a stage because when you drive past a successful
strip mall, what do you see? You see a full parking
lot. It's a form of social proof. Precisely.
It's a visual cue. If you hid the parking lot
in the back, a driver doing, say, 45 miles an
hour on that main road wouldn't know if the place
was popular or completely dead. The visible parking
lot is a billboard that screams, people are here,
it's safe, it's busy, you should be here too.
And these things are almost always on what you
called arterial roads. They aren't tucked away
on quiet neighborhood streets. Oh no, never.
They thrive on traffic volume. They are, in a
way, parasites on the daily commute. Developers
talk about this all the time. You have the going
to work side of the street and the going home
side. And you want the going home side. You fight
tooth and nail for the going home side because
that's when you stop for the wine and the dry
cleaning and the takeout. It's a massive difference
in revenue. That makes so much sense. I also
want to touch on this idea of isolation. In the
research, it said these are often self -contained.
And I've noticed this in my own area. There is
a strip mall that literally backs up. to a residential
street. I can see the back of the grocery store
from my friend's backyard. But for him to actually
get there, to walk there, he has to walk almost
a mile all the way around the block to the main
road and then into the parking lot. And that
is absolutely by design or maybe a limitation
of the design. The strip mall is an island. It
has to turn its back on the community it's supposed
to serve in order to face the road. Why though?
Why wall it off? Well, The rear of a strip mall
is a service corridor. It's not pretty. It's
where the dumpsters are, where the delivery trucks
make noise at 5 in the morning, where the grease
traps from the restaurants are. You don't want
a path for kids to walk through there. Exactly.
For safety, for liability, and for aesthetic
reasons, you don't want pedestrian connections
there. So you create this really weird dynamic
where the neighborhood that is the primary customer
base is physically walled off from it. So it's
the architecture of convenience for the driver,
but total hostility for the walker. That's a
perfect way to put it. It assumes you'll always
arrive by car. OK, before we get into the whole
origin story, I feel like we need to clear up
the names because strip mall has a bit of a stigma,
doesn't it? Sounds a bit, I don't know, a bit
trashy. It does. It absolutely does. It implies
a certain grittiness or lack of sophistication.
So the industry, the developers and real estate
brokers, they try to rebrand it. With what? You'll
hear strip center, which just sounds a bit more
clinical, more professional. Or you'll hear.
Plaza. The plaza. Oh, that always sounds so fancy
until you get there and you realize it's just
a big shop, a laundromat and a subway. Right.
Or shopping village, which is my personal favorite
because it's the absolute furthest thing from
a village you could possibly imagine. A village
implies, you know, community, walkability. A
public square. Yes. This is the opposite of that.
And then you have the size distinctions, which
are important. Right. So we have the mini mall.
The classic, the one that sort of spawned on
every corner in the 80s, 7 -Eleven plus, you
know, three or four other little stores. And
on the other end of the spectrum, the power center.
Which is the industry term for those massive,
sprawling complexes. They're anchored by a Target,
a Best Buy, a Kohl's, a Home Depot. But if you
look at the structure, it's just a strip mall
on steroids. The same DNA. Okay, so we know what
it is now. A row of stores. Push back from the
road, parking in the front, facing the traffic.
But this design had to be invented. I mean, humans
have been trading for thousands of years in markets
and main streets. We didn't always trade like
this. Where does this lineage actually start?
Well, to find the grandfather of the strip mall,
we have to go to the spiritual home of car culture.
Has to be Los Angeles. Of course. Yeah. Los Angeles
in the 1920s. Okay. In the 20s, car ownership
was just exploding, but the city infrastructure
hadn't really caught up yet. So you had these
things called drive -in markets. And I want you
to picture, you know, a piece of property where
a few independent vendors, a butcher, a baker,
a produce guy, would set up shop together. Oh,
okay. They weren't in one unified building. but
they were clustered together on one lot, specifically
catering to people who were pulling up in their
new Model Ts. So it was a cluster of convenience
designed for the car. Exactly. But it was still
a bit chaotic. It wasn't the single unified architectural
form that we know today. For the real year zero
of the modern strip mall, we have to go to 1930.
And surprisingly, it's not in California. Oh,
okay. Lay it on me. It's in Washington, D .C.
D .C.? That's not what I expected. Not at all.
The neighborhood's called Cleveland Park, and
the development was called the Park and Shop.
Park and Shop. I mean, it's an instruction manual.
It says exactly what to do. It literally was.
Yeah. And you have to understand, in 1930, this
was a radical, radical concept. The prevailing
wisdom of all retail was that your storefront
window had to be on the sidewalk. That's how
you got foot traffic. That's how people saw your
goods. Of course, window shopping. Yes. The developers
of Park and Shop took an insane gamble. They
built the stores in an L -shape and deliberately
set them back from the street to create a dedicated
parking court in the front. And the banks and
the city planners must have thought they were
absolutely crazy. You're wasting your most valuable
real estate, the frontage, on storing cars? The
banks hated it. They thought it was a complete
waste of frontage. They couldn't get their heads
around it. Yeah. But the developers understood
something fundamental was changing. The customer
base was changing. They weren't walking from
the trolley stop anymore. They were driving.
And if they couldn't park, they couldn't shop.
They'd just keep driving. The car created a new
problem, and the park and shop was the solution.
Who was the anchor tenant? The big draw that
got people to try this new thing. It was a Piggly
Wiggly supermarket. That is perfect. That's actually
perfect because Piggly Wiggly was the company
that invented the whole concept of self -service
grocery shopping. That's right. So you have the
store that invented self -service shopping inside
the center that invented self -service parking.
It's a beautiful parallel, isn't it? The whole
experience was being redesigned around individual
convenience and the automobile. And here's the
most amazing part. That parking shop. In Cleveland
Park. It's still there. It's still operating
today. It survived the Great Depression, World
War II, the flight to the suburbs in the 50s,
the urban renewal of the 60s, the rise of the
Internet. It's anchored by a target now. But
the layout, the L -shape, the parking in front
is identical. That is genuinely wild. It proves
that this isn't just a trend or a style. It's
a highly, highly efficient machine for commerce.
It is. But if the parking shop was the, let's
say, the prototype, the mass production didn't
really happen until much, much later. The strip
mall didn't become the default setting of the
American landscape until the 1970s. And this
is where the story gets really interesting to
me, because usually when we talk about the history
of architecture, we talk about, you know, a specific
visionary architect or an artistic movement.
But the strip mall explosion, it wasn't about
art. It was about geopolitics and, weirdly, chemistry.
It absolutely was. To understand the mini mall
boom of the 70s and 80s, you have to look at
the 1973 oil crisis. OK, connect the dots for
us. How does an oil embargo in the Middle East
lead to a 7 -Eleven and a nail salon in Reseda,
California? So 1973, the OPEC oil embargo hits.
Gas prices, as we all know, they skyrocket. But
more importantly for this story, the supply chain
for independent gas stations completely collapses.
Before 1973, there were gas stations on almost
every major corner. You remember? The full -service
kind. Right, where a guy in a uniform would come
out, check your oil, wipe your windshield. Exactly.
The crisis wiped thousands of them out. They
just went bankrupt. Almost overnight. Now, think
about where gas stations are located. Always
on a corner. The intersection of two main roads.
Always. It is the absolute best, highest visibility,
highest traffic real estate in a suburban grid.
And suddenly, in cities like Los Angeles, you
had hundreds of these prime corner lots sitting
vacant with abandoned pumps on them. It's a vacuum.
And nature abhors a vacuum. And real estate developers
abhor it even more. So in come the developers.
In comes a group called La Mancha Developers.
They were one of the pioneers, among others.
And they saw these small, square -ish lots. They
were too small for the big supermarket, but way
too valuable to just leave empty. So they developed
what we now call the mini mall concept. Right.
A tight L -shape, maybe four or five small storefronts,
with the parking just squeezed into the middle,
right on that corner. And this is where the construction
technology comes into play, isn't it? Because
these things went up incredibly fast. It felt
like they just appeared overnight. This is the
part of the story most people miss. It wasn't
just that the land became available. It was that
the method of building them was perfected at
the same time. We're talking about the era of
tilt -up concrete construction. Tilt -up. Okay,
break that down for me. What does that mean?
Okay, so traditionally, if you want to build
a concrete wall, you build a big wooden frame
called a form, and you pour the concrete into
it vertically. It's slow. It takes a lot of labor,
a lot of scaffolding. Right. Tilt -up is. It's
kind of brilliant in its simplicity and cheapness.
You pour the concrete for the wall panels flat
on the ground, literally on the floor slab of
the building you're about to build or even just
on the asphalt of the parking lot. So the parking
lot becomes the factory floor for the walls.
Exactly. You let them cure right there. Then
a crane comes in, hooks onto these massive panels
and just. tilts them up into their vertical position
you bolt them together put on a simple roof paint
the whole thing beige and you're basically done
you can build an entire mini mall in a matter
of weeks not months It's unbelievably cost effective.
And that explains why they all look the same.
They are quite literally cast from the same mold
on the ground. And why they can sometimes feel
so flimsy or temporary? It's just a concrete
shell. But that technology, combined with all
those cheap corner lots from the gas station
bust, it created a gold rush. How big of a rush
are we talking? In the Los Angeles metropolitan
area alone, they built something like 600 of
these mini malls in just a few years. 600. That
is a massive, sudden transformation of the visual
landscape of a city. It was so aggressive that
people really started to hate them. There was
a huge backlash. They were seen as blight. They
attracted litter. They increased traffic congestion
right at the intersections. They were just seen
as ugly. So what happened? By 1988, Los Angeles
actually passed an emergency anti -mini mall
ordinance to ban the construction of new ones.
You know, you've really made it when the city
government has to pass a law to specifically
stop you from building any more of your product.
But by then it was too late. The template was
set. The virus had escaped the lab. The mini
mall had spread to every suburb in America. OK,
so we've got the history. We've got the construction
method. Now I want to get inside the machine.
Let's talk about the anatomy of these places,
the taxonomy, because it's not just a random
collection of stores thrown together, is it?
Oh, no, not at all. It is a very carefully curated
ecosystem. A successful strip mall is like a
biological organism. Every single part has a
very specific function. So let's start with the
biggest part, the big guy in the corner. The
anchor. The anchor tenant, yes. In a smaller
neighborhood center, this is almost always your
grocery store. In a larger power center, it's
your Target, your Walmart, your Kohl's. The anchor
is the center of gravity for the whole complex.
They're the main draw. They are the only reason
probably 90 % of the people who enter that parking
lot are there in the first place. And because
of that, because they have all that power, they
get a special deal on rent, don't they? They
get a very special deal. Often the anchor pays
very, very little rent per square foot. Sometimes
they pay almost no rent at all. In some very
rare cases, the developer might even pay them
a little bit to be there as an incentive. Wow.
Because without that anchor, the little stores,
the inline stores as they're called, they won't
sign a lease. It's too risky. So you're telling
me the dry cleaner, the nail salon, the Chinese
takeout place, they are effectively subsidizing
the giant grocery store's rent. In a way. Yes,
they pay a much, much higher rent per square
foot because what they're really paying for is
the privilege of drafting, like in a car race,
off the anchor's foot traffic. They need the
mom who just went in to buy a gallon of milk
to walk past their window and realize, oh, yeah,
I need a manicure or I should drop off this shirt.
It's the errand economy. You're trying to capture
the customer while they're already stopped and
out of their car. That's it. Exactly. And you'll
notice the mix of those smaller tenants. It's
almost a formula. You need a morning draw like
a coffee shop or a donut place. You need an evening
draw like a pizza place or a Thai restaurant.
And you need services. You need services that
require repeat visits, haircuts, nail salons,
dry cleaning, a laundromat, things you have to
do every week or every month. I also want to
ask about those little freestanding buildings
I always see in the parking lot. They're not
connected to the main strip. They're usually
right up against the road. A bank. or a starbucks
or a mcdonald's those are what the industry calls
out parcels or pad sites And they are the most
visible and therefore most valuable spots in
the entire development. Why more valuable than
being in the main strip? Because you don't even
need to turn into the main mall's parking lot
to see them or access them. They catch the impulse
driver. They have their own drive thrust. They
command the absolute highest rent. And what about
the sign? The big, tall, skinny sign by the road
with all the logos stacked up on top of each
other. The pylon sign. Ah, the totem pole of
suburbia. There's a whole science to that sign.
The anchor tenant always gets the big top slot
by contract. The little guys have to fight for
the smaller slots at the bottom. And it has to
be readable at speed. That is the entire key.
The font size, the color contrast, the spacing,
it's all calculated for a driver moving at 45
miles per hour to be able to process in about
one and a half seconds. That's aggressive graphic
design. It has to be. Yeah. If you can't read
the word PCA in half a second, that business
is probably going to fail. I want to shift gears
to the money behind it all again, because there's
a financial term I kept seeing in the research
when people talk about strip malls, and that's
triple net lease. Ah, yes. The NNN lease. It
sounds like a wrestling move or something. What
does it mean and why is it so important to this
whole model? It's so important because it explains
why investors absolutely love building and owning
these... These sometimes ugly things. So in a
standard lease, like for an apartment, you pay
your rent. And the landlord uses that money to
pay the property taxes, the building's insurance,
and to fix the roof when it leaks. Right. Standard
landlord stuff. In a commercial triple net lease,
the tenant, the business owner, pays their base
rent plus the three nets. Which are? Net one
is property taxes. Net two is the building insurance.
And net three is common area maintenance, or
SAM. Wait a minute. So if the city raises the
property tax on the shopping center, the guy
who runs the comic book shop has to pay his share
of that increase. Yes. If the parking lot needs
to be repaved, all the tenants split the bill.
If the snow needs to be plowed, they pay for
it through their cam charges. The landlord's
income is essentially protected from... all of
those rising operating costs. They just collect
the check. They basically just collect the check.
It makes owning a strip mall an incredibly passive,
stable and predictable investment, which is why
they were so popular with wealthy individuals
or big pension funds. So the landlord is essentially
just owning the dirt and the concrete shell and
the tenants are the ones actually running and
maintaining the building. That's a great way
to put it. And that financial structure, that
triple net lease is the powerful economic engine
that keeps these things. running, even when they
start to look a little bit rundown. OK, so this
brings us to the big elephant in the room, the
retail apocalypse. I mean, we have been told
for 15, 20 years now that Amazon is eating the
world. We've all seen pictures of dead enclosed
malls. We saw Toys R Us disappear. Logic would
dictate that strip malls should be going extinct.
And yet they're like cockroaches. They just seem
to survive everything. So let's look at the actual
data. Are they dying or not? The top line numbers
say, surprisingly, no. Not at all. In 2013, there
were about 65, 840 strip malls in the U .S. Okay.
As of early 2024, that number has grown to over
68 ,000. So we are still adding them to the landscape,
not subtracting them. But is that the whole story?
Because I drive past some strip malls that look
pretty sad. A lot of for lease signs in the windows.
Right. And this is where we have to be a little
more nuanced. Because not all strip malls are
created equal. In real estate, properties are
often graded. Class A, Class B, and Class C.
Okay, break that down for us. Class A is your
shiny new power center in an affluent growing
suburb. It's got a Whole Foods, maybe a Lululemon,
a nice new Target. Those places are booming.
Vacancy rates are practically zero. Landlords
can charge whatever they want. Okay, that makes
sense. Then you have Class C. That's the unrenovated
1970s mini mall in a town where the main factory
just closed down. It's got a dollar store, a
pawn shop, and a lot of empty storefronts. Those
are dying. A lot of them are. So when we say
strip malls are surviving, we really mean that
well -located strip malls with the right tenant
mix are evolving and thriving. Precisely. And
it comes right back to that tenant mix we talked
about before. You can't get a haircut on the
Internet. Right. You can't get your clothes dry
cleaned on Amazon. The tenants that are succeeding
are the Internet -proof tenants. Gyms, urgent
care clinics, nail salons, restaurants, vets.
These are all experiential. You have to physically
be there. So the big enclosed malls that sold,
you know, clothes and books and electronics,
they are the ones getting killed by online shopping.
Exactly. But the humble strip mall that sells
services and convenience, it's actually surprisingly
insulated from that. I've also noticed something
else that's kind of weird. I am starting to see
brands that were born on the Internet opening
physical stores in strip malls. I saw Warby Parker
in a strip mall the other day. Yes. The clicks
to bricks phenomenon. It's called the halo effect.
It turns out. If you are a big online brand,
opening a physical store actually lowers your
online customer acquisition cost. How does that
work? People see the sign when they're driving
to the grocery store. It builds brand awareness.
They can go in and touch the product. And crucially,
they can return items in person, which saves
the company a fortune in reverse shipping fees.
So now these cool, hip, digital native brands
are fighting for space in strip malls right next
to the dry cleaner. So in a strange way, the
strip mall is becoming the physical interface
for the Internet? It is, in a way. It's the fulfillment
center that you can actually walk into. It's
a key part of the modern logistics chain. I want
to zoom out now, literally out of the country,
because we think of this form, this architecture,
as pure Americana. But did we export this model?
Do they have strip malls in, say, Europe? Yes
and no. I'd say it's a case of same hardware,
different software. Let's take the U .K. and
Ireland as an example. Okay, what do they call
them there? They're known as retail parks or
sometimes retail outlets. And if you look at
them, they look very similar. Big box stores,
lots of parking right in the front. But the context,
the role they play in the society is totally
different. How so? Well, in the U .S., for many,
many suburbs, the strip mall is the town center.
It's the only commercial hub. In the U .K., you
have these ancient, historic town centers, the
high street, with narrow cobblestone streets
and buildings from the 1600s. Which are beautiful
but terrible for cars. Absolutely terrible for
cars. You can't park a Range Rover in a medieval
village. Many of them are pedestrianized now.
So the retail parks get pushed to the absolute
edge of town out by the motorway. So they're
not integrated into the community. Not at all.
They're strictly utilitarian. You drive out there
to go to the big hardware store or to buy bulk
pet food, but you don't hang out there. The social
life, the cafes, the pubs, that all stays in
the historic high street. So they've managed
to separate the chore shopping from the leisure
and social shopping. For the most part, yes.
Whereas in many American suburbs, the strip mall
has to be all of those things. It's the only
place to go. And what about Australia? I got
really confused reading the notes on this one.
Australia is a linguistic trap for Americans.
If an Australian says they're going to the strip
shops, they are not talking about a place with
a big parking lot. What are they talking about
then? They are talking about a traditional main
street. A line of shops built right up to the
sidewalk with parking on the street. It's what
we would call a traditional downtown. So the
complete opposite of our definition of a strip
mall. The exact opposite. If you want to find
a U .S. style car oriented strip mall in, say,
Sydney, you're looking for something they call
a homemaker center. or a big box complex. But
their planning laws are generally much stricter.
They really try to protect their local high street
strips from being cannibalized by the big out
of town boxes. It really seems like most of the
world sort of tolerates the strip mall as a necessary
evil for car culture, whereas America didn't
just tolerate it. We embraced it as a lifestyle.
That's a very fair assessment. In America, we
zoned for it. We made it the law. In many U .S.
cities for a very long time, it was actually
illegal to build anything else in commercial
zones. What do you mean illegal? I mean zoning
codes that mandated huge setbacks from the road.
They mandated minimum parking requirements. So
many spaces per thousand square feet of retail.
You had to build a sea of asphalt. It was impossible
to build a traditional walkable main street.
We legislated the ugliness into existence. That
was a very depressing thought. We mandated the
beige stucco box. We prioritized the efficient
flow of automobile traffic over creating any
real sense of place. And we're living with the
consequences of that today. So on that note,
let's look to the future. We have, what, 68 ,000
of these things in the country? That's millions
of acres of asphalt. We know retail is still
changing. We know there's a massive housing crisis.
What happens to the strip mall in, say, 2050?
This is actually the most exciting part of the
story for urban planners right now. We are seeing
the slow rise of what's called retrofitting suburbia.
Retrofitting? What does that look like in practice?
Well, just look at the asset. You've got a huge
flat piece of land. It's usually on a main bus
or transit line. It already has all the utility
hookups, water, sewer, electricity. In a dense
city, that is development gold. So you tear down
the old Target and build apartment buildings?
Sometimes. Or, even more interestingly, you build
apartments on top of the existing parking lot.
You turn that single -story sprawl into a multi
-story mixed -use village. So you keep the shocks?
You keep the retail on the ground floor. You
put the parking into a more efficient garage
structure instead of a surface lot. And then
you build five or six stories of apartments or
condos on top of it all. So you're basically
taking the strip mall and trying to turn it back
into a traditional town center. Exactly. We're
seeing this all over. It's called grayfield redevelopment,
turning these dying asphalt fields back into
walkable, livable neighborhoods. It's closing
the historical circle. We went from walkable
towns to drivable strips, and now we are spending
billions of dollars trying to engineer the walkability
back in. But that's for the dying ones, the Class
C ones. What about the successful Class A power
centers? They will likely stay the same for a
very long time. As long as the majority of us
drive cars, as long as we live in low -density
suburbs, the sheer efficiency of that L -shaped
lot with parking in front is unbeatable. Is the
pantry of the suburbs. The pantry of the suburbs.
I like that. Yeah. And you don't renovate your
pantry to look like a. museum or a beautiful
living room. You keep it organized and efficient
so you can get in, grab the cereal and get out.
That's its function. That is a perfect analogy.
It's not supposed to be beautiful. It's a machine
for living. It is. So we've gone from the 1920s
drive -in markets to the concrete tilt -up boxes
of the 1970s oil crisis, all the way through
the supposed retail apocalypse, and now into
a potential future as the foundation for new
housing. It's a lot of history and a lot of economic
power for a place where you just go to buy socks.
and milk. Okay, so here is my challenge to you,
the listener. The next time you pull into that
spot, and you know the one I'm talking about,
right in front of the pizza place where the pavement
is a little uneven, don't just rush in. Just
take five seconds, sit in your car, and look.
Look at the pylon sign. Look at the simple concrete
walls. Notice where the anchor tenant is. Notice
how the cars flow through the lot. Notice the
little pad sites out by the road. And just realize
that you are standing in a perfectly evolved
economic habitat it might not be pretty but it
is a survivor it has outlasted so many other
forms of retail and architecture and it's probably
going to outlive all of us and here's the final
thought i want to leave you with we've established
that this thing is maybe the most resilient form
of architecture we have but it's an architecture
built entirely around the car So what happens,
maybe not in our lifetimes, but someday, if we
move away from personal car ownership? What happens
to these 68 ,000 L -shaped lots when the cars
are gone? That's a great question. On that note,
thanks for taking this deep dive with us. My
pleasure. See you next time.