Exactly. The building is designed as a mall. Leave it as a mall.

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to hear a few ads on the radio yesterday for the mall. The market will help but I think they need another three or four "anchors" to start attracting enough people to keep the place alive.

The idea for the mall was based on a successful prototype in Ontairo. The idea was essentially to combat high retail rents by offering small square footage spaces to retail operators. This way the retailers would only pay for what they really need. Because they were smaller and cheaper, the retailers would theoretically also be able to purchase their own spaces and cut out the landlord saving even more money.

What happened though was that private investors snapped up all the units then tried to profit by renting those spaces back to retailers. Unfortunately, this arrangement makes very little sense to retailers since they're now back to paying high rent. So no retailers are interested in locating there. This has caused the reputation of the place to tank further discouraging business to move in and the downward spiral continued.

tldr; Everybody wanted to be the landlord and nobody wanted to run the store.