The shopping mall is the epitome of America's Suburban Experiment. From a local government standpoint, it was the golden chalice of development, a winner-take-all prize in our race to the bottom. Whoever got the mall was able to steal from their neighbors that fraction of a sliver of retail taxes that local governments receive. When consolidated in one place, that could add up to a significant amount of money, at least for a while.

The losers with their crumbling downtowns.....well, they could eat cake.

Until now. As kind of an indicator species in this great auto-oriented paradigm we've created, the shopping mall is in what one industry insider calls, "a death spiral." This dinosaur of another age is finding it hard to exist amid an ecosystem that has more nimble, adaptable competition:

“We are extremely over-retailed,” said Christopher Zahas, a real estate economist and urban planner in Portland, Ore. “Filling a million square feet is a tall order.”

That's what happens when we have a one-size-fits-all tax system mashed together with a winner-takes-all development pattern; we end up with too much of the easiest thing to generate quick cash with.

In the Curbside Chat presentation, I show two similarly-sized pieces of property. One is the highly-coveted big box store with an auto-dealership and gas station on the edge of town. The other is the run down, neglected downtown with all of its vacancies and burned-down buildings that are now parking lots. The headline from the comparison is that the downtown -- despite being old and not having a real competitive set of offerings -- is worth 78% more than the big box complex. It dominates in the enduring wealth category.