Originally posted by: iFX
When you drive through a blighted area what do you find? Old, abandoned shopping malls, plazas, strip malls and mini malls. The reason is, all of these shopping centers will eventually fail. All of them. The first five years or so after being built these places are booming! Clean, safe and convienent, people flock to them. Most of the time however as the facilities degrade so do the amount of shoppers. Often times neighborhoods where these places go up are cut in half or become blighted because the infrastructure can't stand the increased traffic. Eventually, all these places will fail and are destined to sit empty. Huge chain shopping is a very fickle business and more times than not neighboorhoods end up worse off after these mega chains come in and put all the small business out of business. This has happened in just about every area I have lived in my lifetime to some extent which is why I choose to live "down town" now where there aren't any huge tracts of land waiting to be turned into a Target, Wal-Mart or K-Mart mega center complete with 10-15 horrible chain restaurants and outlet stores.
