Strip Malls and Society
By LC on Nov 9, 2007 in Strip Malls
In Defense of Strip Malls
By Brad Edmonds
Strip malls are universally denigrated by writers of all sorts. The ugliness, ubiquity, and impersonal nature of strip malls are the detractors’ favorite topics. Many writers extend their diatribes into such issues as the loss of community consciousness and neighborly affiliation associated with modern American suburban life. Others bleed into invective against automobiles, pollution, mobility, and their more-socialist offshoots such as r
ent control and public transportation.
Given all this, what can be said in defense of strip malls? We know they’re not going away anytime soon. To the contrary, new ones continue to appear in neighborhoods near you. Is this constant appearance of new strip malls a sign that the critics are off target?
These criticisms reveal our own inconsistencies. As we drive along the large highways through a city, it is all too easy to wave one’s hand and say: “look at all these unseemly strip malls that make this place look like every other!” But if we are looking for a hardware store, need a cup of coffee, or need some engine repair, our tune changes: we are grateful that we can easily spot the Home Depot, the Starbucks, or the Buick dealer. The locale saves search costs, for which we are glad indeed, and we demonstrate this feeling by voting for them with our own money. That’s why they appear. That’s why they stay.
Let us consider the issues one at a time:
Are strip malls really ugly? It depends. Some background: In the 19th century, American courts wouldn’t enforce any kind of land-use regulations (known today as “zoning”) based on aesthetic concerns. Over the course of the 20th century, and today, courts are more willing to enforce local zoning regulations that are exclusively aesthetic in nature, on the grounds that property values (hence tax revenues) are affected by ugly buildings.
Looking at things from that perspective, then, imagine that you’ve built a house out in the country. Imagine you did so in a little subdivision, linked to a two-lane highway, ten miles from anything remotely urban. Your house has a given value; you know pretty much what it is. Two years later, someone builds a strip mall on that two-lane road, a mile from your house. What happens to the value of your house? It goes up, every time. By the judgment of all American courts over the last century, then, the strip mall is beautiful: it has increased neighboring property values. How can this be true, when we all know that strip malls are ugly? Because gains in value color our aesthetic vision. If Jackson Pollock paintings can demand huge prices, strip malls are beautiful.
Limiting the ugliness discussion to truly aesthetic concerns — leaving behind economic issues of land value — are strip malls really ugly? Sure, there are some out there made of corrugated metal and cinder blocks, but does anybody out there believe architects deliberately design ugly buildings? Of course not. Architects do their best given the budget constraints their clients give them. Their clients are the developers who build the malls. Developers want to make a profit, so they spend as much on aesthetic features of buildings as they believe it will take to attract customers.
Hence, strip malls meant to attract women shopping for intimate wear, up-market home decorating and furniture, and jewelry, will build buildings of a certain character. Plumbing and other building supply stores that cater to builders will be corrugated metal and cinder block. Building supply stores that cater directly to consumers will be somewhere in between Joe’s Pipe and
None of this is mysterious to anyone. And when you build your next house, you will not be willing to pay extra for the plumbing and wiring merely so your builder can shop in a more attractive building. Take it to heart: If the building in which your plumber or electrician shops is ugly, that’s a direct result of the fact that saving money on that building is an economic benefit to you. The market has produced those corrugated-metal buildings for a reason: we prefer productivity to wasted expense every time. Lions, tigers, and bears feel the same way, or they wouldn’t sleep so much and chase the slowest prey they can find.
Are strip malls ubiquitous? That depends on where you live. Assume they are — how ubiquitous is too ubiquitous? That’s a judgment call, but that strip malls are so common owes to two inescapable causes — government meddling and efficiency. As to government meddling, we can look to zoning laws: anyone who owns land can build on it only what government allows them to build. Zoning laws commonly divide tracts of land into uses. You see it in your own route to work: as you leave your neighborhood and travel on main arteries, land uses shift. In a given suburban 100-acre area, the inner areas will tend to be reserved for single-family housing; bordering that, and nearing the arteries, you’ll see apartment buildings; then in a fairly narrow strip along the artery you’ll see commercial and light industrial uses.
This is where strip malls arise. The commercial strip between you and the artery is likely to be too small for anything but a strip mall. Blame the zoning laws, then, for the ubiquity of strip malls. Beyond that, recognize that zoning laws didn’t arise in a vacuum. Such laws tended, and tend, to follow what people actually prefer. The people who make zoning decisions — local politicians and bureaucrats — aren’t creative, and don’t want to lose their jobs. They do what they think the public wants.
Developers invented strip malls (and many other things that did not survive in the market), and the market selected=”true”=”true”=”true” strip malls as a preferred way to do business. Strip malls are efficient. They work for us consumers; they’re kept to locations where they’re as little a nuisance as possible; and we keep them in business by giving them our business.
Finally, are strip malls too “impersonal”? Do they make our lives impersonal by contributing to the non-use of public transportation and walking, and do they deprive us of the neighborly community life of yore?
No, no, and no. If we wanted to know all of our neighbors, as people seemed to in Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, we’d live like that today. Many people do live like that today; there are neighborhoods where neighbors know and associate with each other. There are other neighborhoods where they don’t. The drive for higher productivity and wages results in many of us spending more time at the office, and saving what precious little time remains for the family. We don’t tend to knock on the doors of strangers when they move in, or when we move in, to a neighborhood. Strip malls have less to do with this than cable television and the internet, frankly.
And the internet — via email, discussion groups, and news reporting — keeps us more in touch with the people and information we choose to encounter than with the people whom we didn’t choose, who happened to move into a house near us. This is largely a good thing — freedom of association has been enhanced by modern life. Rather than accidents resulting from a home bargain, our associations today are more a matter of choice and preference. And strip malls have nothing to do with any of that.
Yes, some strip malls seem ugly. So do some factories, and all power plants. Try living without them. When you truly do wish to live without them, realize that they are in part chosen by the market, and in part forced into existence by coercive government regulation of land use. Knowing that, you’re free to criticize them. Not knowing any of that, criticisms of strip malls are about as useful as criticisms of the popularity of team sports and alcohol, and about as likely to result in any real change.
