Tom Simmons, who oversees the mid-Atlantic shopping center division of Kimco, another real estate giant, is more blunt. “There are B and C malls in tertiary markets that are dinosaurs and will likely die,” he said, but “A malls are doing well.”

But there is a fuzzy line among the categories. White Flint Mall, a once-upscale destination in the affluent Washington suburb of North Bethesda, Md., is now sealed and awaiting demolition. A half-hour’s drive to the east, in the economically and ethnically diverse Prince George’s County, the Landover Mall was torn down in 2006, leaving empty parking lots and one stand-alone Sears, which closed in early 2014.

Both properties belong to the Lerner family of Washington, who are also the majority owners of the Washington Nationals baseball team. Lerner Enterprises has said it wants to redevelop both sites, but there are few signs of it in evidence.

Outside Akron, Ohio, the Rolling Acres mall has defied every attempt to redevelop it and now sits forlorn, with boarded-up windows and trees growing through cracks in the concrete. Before it was sealed, squatters occupied it and vandals pilfered copper wire for scrap.

When it was thriving, “people would come from all over in busloads,” said Timothy A. Dimoff, a retired Akron detective who once advised on security at Rolling Acres. “Everybody in Akron still talks about the caramel popcorn in the food court.”

Owings Mills may be on the verge of becoming a dead mall, but it is not in a dead-end market.

The original owner of Owings Mills, General Growth Properties, sold a 50 percent stake to Mr. Simmons’s company in 2011, and now Kimco is working to redevelop it into a hybrid of an open-air shopping center and enclosed mall.

Resurrecting a dead mall isn’t an easy process, however. Demolition of the old Owings Mills and construction of what is known in the industry as a “power center,” with big-box stores like Costco, Best Buy and Target, would cost $75 million to $100 million and take two to five years, Mr. Simmons said. He expects Owings Mills to persist in its current, zombielike state at least through the end of 2015.