Many dead retail spaces, Williamson says, will most likely morph into businesses that have community functions, such as apartments, public libraries, indoor farms, and refrigerated spaces for processing food for local restaurants or grocery stores.
"You'll find DMVs, town halls, and libraries in malls increasingly — the type of place where the public government can interact with the public," Williamson said.
Some public spaces like libraries don't bring in much in rent, so they mainly serve as a way to attract people to the mall, she says.
"If the mall owners can't keep the place fully leased, this at least keeps people coming who could keep the other lessees from fleeing," she said. "The Main Street was killed by the mall, so developers are trying to build new downtowns inside the malls."
In St. Louis, one large store in the Chesterfield Mall became the Children's Illustrated Art Museum and a puppet theater, while another in the CoolSprings Galleria in Franklin, Tennessee, turned into a gallery that showcases local artists.
The three-story Providence Arcade in Rhode Island — America's oldest mall — transformed most of its shops into 48 micro-apartments in 2016, with a hair salon and cafés still on the ground floor. Similarly, New York's White Plains Mall may be torn down and redeveloped into a 20-story residential tower within the next five years.
Smiley says that if a mall is being redeveloped into housing, most of the building usually will be demolished. Most malls have little plumbing and electrical capacity, which residential buildings demand.