A New Mall

 “Sentences I Did Not Expect to Read for 500, Alex.”

We desperately need another mall in Columbia.

Really? 

It’s amazing what you can find on Nextdoor. I absolutely had to know the motivation of the poster. It didn’t take long to find out. 

We desperately need another Mall in Columbia. Finding a parking spot at the Columbia Mall is ridiculous. I avoid at all costs to visit that place but sometimes it’s not avoidable. Just driving around there it’s a nightmare!

“We need another mall in Columbia because it is difficult to park and that is frustrating to me,” might be another way to say this. I immediately thought of online conversations when the Snowden movie theater closed and the public was uncertain about its future. A substantial contingent said that they avoided the AMC because they hated the Mall.

Local blogger Jeremy Dommu of the Merriweather Post assessed quite rightly that it was the parking they hated, not necessarily the Mall itself. In a tweet (twiX?) from July, 2023 he noted:

I read lots of comments about difficulty parking at the mall but that's only true for that main surface lot. I find mall parking easy to find if I avoid that main surface lot and park in one of the garages or lesser used surface lots (e.g. by Nordstrom or JC Penney).

I’m not convinced that we need another mall in Columbia but I do think that the original poster had a legitimate issue that they were looking to resolve. It probably looks like this:

At the times when I want to shop at the Mall, I cannot find parking close to the entrance I want to go in. (Nearest to the stores I want to shop in,)

If we accept that as the basic premise, then some of the suggestions made by helpful neighbors or Nextdoor won’t work:

• Shop on different days or at different times
• Park in different, less-frequented lots 

Perhaps this poster has limited time availability for shopping due to work or family caregiving. Perhaps they are unable to walk longer distances. I think there are folks who would be quick to laugh at our original poster but we don’t really know what their needs are. I’m going to reserve judgement.

What stood out to me about the resulting conversation was its general helpfulness. I started to say civility but Howard County has done a number on that word from which it has not yet recovered. In addition to suggesting alternative times and parking locations, here are some of the other issues that came up. 

• As a whole, malls are struggling if not dying out. Seems unlikely we’d need an additional one.
• The Mall in Columbia actually has empty retail space at the moment.
• Some are suggesting that a new Downtown library branch could go there.
• Is there any land left in Columbia to build a mall on?

The two comments I found the most intriguing were about who was in the parking spaces. One suggestion was that, because parents now had to chaperone teens, their cars were the ones taking up space. Someone else commented that it wasn’t the real mall shoppers gumming up the works, it was the people patronizing places like Main Event and restaurants outside the mall. 

Okay, I just went back and reread the entire thread and I have to admit it isn’t all sweetness and light. Some social media snark did work its way into the conversation. Comments along the lines of “Just walk five minutes. The exercise will be good for you,” do appear here and there. And again, comments like that don’t take into account that our shopper may have limited time or physical ability. 

One thing no one mentioned was public transit. If it were easy to hop a bus from where you lived - - and it had multiple stops around the mall - - you’d be able to get off at the entrance of your choice. No parking involved. Another possibility would be a shuttle system operating around the Mall property so that, no matter where you parked, you’d never be more than a short distance to a shuttle stop. 

Every time I’ve attended a special event that employed a shuttle service I’ve been impressed by how convenient and efficient they are. I’ve written about this concept before but, alas, I appear to be the only person excited by it. Still, I think it’s a better solution than building a new mall.

Friends, who am I kidding? I rarely shop at the mall, so this is more of an intellectual exercise for me. What do you think?

Village Green/Town² Comments