Surprisingly, the most recent numbers suggest that the outer suburbs and exurbs, once consigned to Hades by the new urbanist crowd, have begun to roar back. Millennials, as they get older, notes Jed Kolko, now seem to be moving to what he calls “the suburbiest” areas farther out on the periphery. 

It is in these areas that malls may have their greatest future. In communities like Irvine, where the Spectrum development has become the de facto downtown, or Sugar Land, a highly diverse outer suburb of Houston, the “town center” is essentially a mall in brick, made to look like an old Main Street but filled with chain stores and specialty restaurants. Many residents of fast-growing communities like Sugar Land, which has 83,000 residents, are relative newcomers, and for them such town centers are the focus of their communities.

It is time to dispense with the twin memes of mall- and suburb-bashing, and begin appreciating and improving how most Americans live and shop. The malls of the future indeed may be very different in many ways—more segmented by income and ethnicity, more entertainment- and experience-oriented. But they will continue to serve an important focus for most American communities. And at a time when many of our most celebrated cities have themselves become giant malls (is there any place on Earth more boring than the area around Times Square?), the future of malls may prove brighter, and even more transformative, than commonly imagined.