Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Why are there so many strip malls?" video.

  1. Depends what you're measduring the efficiency of. Land-usage wise it's pretty bad (though it doesn't look too bad in most cases when you consider how the alternatives usually go), but in terms of customer throughput wise it's actually pretty good.
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  2. Indeed. Heck, stripmalls have a maximum depth, but any office or residential space doesn't have to compete with the commercial parking space, just stick more parking Behind the building and mark it off as "tenants only" ... Gate it even, if you're worried about security. Put not parking in the customer parking area into their tenancy agreement. Heck, straight up build a parking structure back there and you can extend the whole thing a bit more in terms of residential and office space. Only downside is that if you do too juch of that you end up functionally driving up the value of the retail spaces to overwhelm the main advantage to setting up in a stripmall to start with: they're cheap. Of course, now you're starting to wander into the realm of the original, mixed use, vision of the shopping mall...
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