Do you think Pioneer Place is starting to show its age?

[rainierman]

Pioneer Place is not doing well. I imagine the rent is 'too damn high', so high we see a few new stores opening up far outside the boundary of the painful lease contracts of Pioneer Place.

Suburban malls in large American cities have already adjusted to market changes by adding bigger theaters, luxury bowling/pool tables, dance nightclubs at the mall. Saw it Hawaii, Virginia, NY/NJ, Florida, Calif, even Seattle, but I haven't seen this change in Oregon. I interpret the lack of change as not enough profit to warrant new construction.

Pioneer Place is sort of a 'serious' mall catering to tourists nowadays instead of suburban families, at least until the next economic boom cycle when they sell the mall off to some other big entity, maybe a Chinese company, who knows.

I don't see a face-lift anytime soon, other than new carpet and a good tile & grout scrub. I don't see a return of families rushing back to spend $$ in all directions like its 2004. Today it's all about phones and groceries.

I wouldn't be surprised one bit to see a Blackberry-Amazon Mobile Store at Pioneer Place for the Asian, Afro-Euro, Middle-Eastern and Canadian tourist market where BB is still a big deal, while we Americans hold our iPhone or Android thinking 'uhh, Blackberry????'.

America is deliberately not well-connected with the international consumer market. Pioneer Place is a decent example of that disconnect.

[jjpop]

I thought I heard last year sometime that they were going to transform the food court in the basement into some sort of interior food court pod. Do I have that right? Anybody else remember that talk?

[Zaba]

Originally Posted by urbanlife78

Are you talking about malls in general or Pioneer Place specifically?

Both.
Portland's hipster-renaissance brings with it a certain economic metabolism for things that might not exist as lucratively elsewhere- like craft breweries, vintage vinyl record stores, Powells and coffee shops- but these are also, pound for pound, internet natives who have lived the entirety of their formative lives with a relative mature eCommerce infrastructure and feel no impulse to 'mall shop'.

The idea that you go to this giant building filled with a bunch of little stores selling crap for 30%-50% more than what it would cost you to order the exact same thing sitting in your underwear at home is obsolete.

Portland is unique case because Portland is 'upmarketing' itself so rapidly but malls in general are an outdated concept. In time, they'll be viewed as being anachronistic as four teenaged attendants in white hats washing your windows and checking your oil and tire pressure while the other one pumped your .10 cent a gallon gas.

The weird part is, so much economic mojo is derived from commercial real estate that it should be interesting to see how the reckoning occurs.