Detroit is pretty flush on surplus malls too.

It can be hard from someone from the fast-growing West Coast to get their arms around what it looks like when a city has been emptying out. I know, I spent my first 25 years in Portland and LA. Much of the rest near Boston, which has stayed reasonably stable in population, reasonably dynamic economically, and is so dense that even with mild population decline you don't get abandonded neighborhoods, just less overcrowding in multi-family structures.

I saw some of this when I lived in Kansas City, which is nowhere near Detroit in problems but where the central city has partially emptied out into the suburbs. Indeed, even the 1950-1980 ring of suburbs is now emptying out into a a new ring. With nothing but cheap cornfields between KC and Dallas (500 miles away), it's always easier to build a new subdivision than to gentrify old homes. With downtown KC so failed and with no geographic features to focus on -- no oceanfront, lakeshore, hills, whatever to want to be near, there's no reason not to live in the farthest, newest suburb -- it's all the same.

So KC proper looked really wierd to me. Lots of neighborhoods with startlingly high rates of vacant homes -- not "After Humans" like Detroit, but several empty on any block. And in terms of retail, mall after abandoned mall. Even malls clearly built as recently as the 1980s sat empty and forlorn in favor of new malls five or 10 miles further away from downtown. It was like an army of Von Neuman machines slowly marching southwest, converting cornfields into new McMansions which they briefly occupied, only to move on leaving an aging trail of semi-empty tract home husks in their wake.

Redeveloping empty homes into a mall would just give you a brand new empty mall.

I'd just never been anywhere before where such large tracts of urban land were so... empty. And again, the level of that emptying in KC is minor league compared to Detroit, Flint, or Buffalo. I can't even imagine that.