Canada sees the rise of mall cities

That's the headline for a story in the real estate section of today's Globe & Mail. Apparently mall owners are developing the space over their malls for condos. What a concept! In the mid-80's I used to have occassional meetings with Joey Wolfond at his office in the basement of the Willow West Mall. That was Guelph's first enclosed shopping mall, and it had been developed by Joey's grampa, Joe Wolfond. Joey and I were close to the same age, and he was an amicable converstionalist. We ostensibly met to discuss the sale of a nearby strip mall his family owned, but our conversations veered all over the map, from caribbean cruises to fast cars to his grampa, who I had the pleasure of knowing ever since my gas jockey days at John's Supertest in my teens. Occasionally the discussion turned to real estate, and I remember debating the pros and cons of adding apartments in the space above the mall. The Willow West Mall had a huge parking lot, that never came near full capacity except for the week before Christmas. Why couldn't you put twelve stories of rentals overtop the mall? You already own the mall, so it's basically a free building site. Joey told me why they couldn't. Zoning. Bylaws. Rules. Regulations. That was forty years ago. Today it's newsworthy that mall owners are building out residential over their properties.