Retrofit Atlas

What became of America's dead malls, site by site.

1902 former malls and suburban sites with owners, deals, county parcels and 20+ context layers on one citable page each, where the public record allows. Built on the Retrofitting Suburbia research of Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson.

Request early access See a sample record Early-access draft · build 2026-10-20

On the authors' map: 87 redeveloped, 87 reinhabited, 12 regreened (186 pins, 180 records). These are the authors' own tallies for their 186 map pins, a different scope than the Atlas-wide counts below. Partial retrofits are marked partial. Their cases, in their words.

1043malls, plus 859 other suburban sites, in 72 states and countries
112 · 71 · 20malls redeveloped · reinhabited · regreened, recorded as built (Atlas-wide, all sources; includes the authors' map pins above)
328malls closed or demolished, with no retrofit recorded
Exterior view of a shopping mall entrance with large glass windows and potted plants.Palm Beach Mall, FLHistorical marker in front of a parking lot with trees and buildings in background.Nanuet Mall, NYExterior view of a former shopping center with parking lot and signage.Fallbrook Center, CA

What each record holds

Who owns it

Owner of record and mailing address from county assessor parcels, entities only, where the county publishes them.

What it became

Strategy (redeveloped, reinhabited, regreened), new uses, retrofit year, and before and after details with the quoted source sentence.

Deals and distress

Recent sales, listings, auctions and distress signals, each with a dated source.

Parcels, tax and title

County parcels within 40 m of the site point: acres, zoning, appraised, assessed and taxable value, last sale.

20+ context layers

Walkability, 15-minute needs, Opportunity Zone, housing permits, social vulnerability, hazard risk, flood, transit, Overture places, web presence and Wikipedia attention.

A citation and an API

Stable ids, JSON per record, CSV tables, SQLite, GeoJSON and KML, and a read-only JSON API.

Start from your question

For brokersFind owners to call, sales to cite, and a listing page to sell a mall with the record behind it.For developersSite size, context layers and a multifamily screen for each site.For cities and plannersPrecedents by strategy, the policy tools behind them, and how to add your site.For neighboursWhat is happening to your mall, in plain words.For researchersTables, codebook, SQLite and a citation for every record.For journalistsWhat changed, state fact sheets, image rights and a contact.

From the datacomputed at each build · all trends

53%of 2020s retrofits include housing, up from 34% in the 2010s3 yrsmedian wait from closure to retrofit for malls closed in the 2010s (64 records)113closed or cleared sites with no retrofit recorded yet+27 ptsbiggest mover 2010s to 2020s: Retrofit in the pipeline (10% to 37% of retrofits)147sites inside a federal Opportunity Zone90sites with a rail station within 800 m

Largest closed or cleared malls

  1. Century III Mall410 acWest Mifflin, PA · Demolished
  2. Rolling Acres Mall260 acAkron, OH · Demolished

Recently sold

  1. Southridge Mall$7.0MGreendale, WI · 2026-10-06 · Southridge Mall Member LLC (Spinoso / Wynkoop Financial JV)
  2. Valley West Mall$11.0MWest Des Moines, IA · 2026-09 · Threshold Capital
  3. Northlake Mall$95.0MTucker, GA · 2026-07 · Centurion Foundation
  4. WestShore Plaza$135.0MTampa, FL · 2026-07 · Local real estate firm (unnamed)
  5. CoolSprings Galleria$11.0MFranklin, TN · 2026-06 · Greystar
  6. Southridge Mall$3.3MGreendale, WI · 2026-05 · BLVD Southridge LLC (Barrett Lo Visionary Development)

Most recently closed

  1. Boulevard Mall2026Erie County, NY
  2. Crystal Mall2026Waterford, CT
  3. Eastpoint Mall2026Dundalk, MD
  4. Ford City Mall2026Chicago, IL
  5. HarbourFront Centre2026Singapore
  6. Livingston Mall2026Livingston, NJ

Where it comes from and how it is checked

Built on research.

Retrofitting Suburbia, by Ellen Dunham-Jones (Georgia Tech) and June Williamson (City College of New York). 180 records come from their public 2021 map. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors.

Public sources, quoted.

County assessor parcels, Wikidata and Wikipedia, FEMA, EPA, Census ACS, CDC, HUD, Overture Maps and the Wayback Machine. Fields taken from articles keep the sentence that supports them.

Agents do the legwork.

A news watcher runs every six hours. Extraction workers fill fields from public pages only with a verbatim quote. Assessment workers write a summary from the record for sites not on the authors' map.

A person decides what is verified.

No record is marked verified until a person has reviewed it. Today every record is labelled by what it is: from the authors' map, or imported and unreviewed.

Coverage today

Owner of record: 47 of 1902. Verified or named photo: 324 of 1902. A dated source: 947 of 1902. Showing coverage honestly beats claiming completeness.

Methods and limits · Tiers · Corrections: five working days

Request early access

Licence undecided: nothing is agreed with the authors yet. Tell us what you would use it for and we will write if and when early access opens. Research use is free to browse today.

Request early access

Malls by state and country

Three strategies

Redeveloped: 1126 tagged, 112 builtReinhabited: 505 tagged, 71 builtRegreened: 151 tagged, 20 built

A site can carry more than one strategy. "Built" is the same built count shown above (Atlas-wide, all sources); "tagged" counts every site with the strategy, whether built or not. What the strategies mean.

Add or correct a site

Developers, brokers, planners and students keep this database alive. Submissions are drafted with their sources and reviewed before they appear; contributors are credited on the page.

Add or correct a site