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DrMcMeow t1_j3zieoy wrote

the whole plaza is for sale, current owner prolly doesn't want to put any money into maintenance if they can help it.

https://i.imgur.com/tAyaO8t.png

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AssumptionLivid6879 t1_j4191g0 wrote

People love to cry about the “shelf life” of both solar and wind energy, but these strip mall structures barely have 25 years of an expected life. That isn’t even including the shelf life of a parking lot that is larger than the physical building.

Most of these were built 25-35 years ago, for big box convenience, and the upkeep is too expensive for anyone to care. These structures are starting to blight and rot across the country.

Look at most of the big box / massive parking lots. Almost all the drop ceilings are brown from rain water, parking lots are a disaster with no paint, and no one is improving these structures. Almost of half of these structures in Bangor are either abandoned or are about to be and on purpose. These landowners are purposely letting the structures rot to devalue themselves and neighboring land for acquisition / tax purposes.

This isn’t a Maine issue but a country issue, we chased the cheapest price for everything so we can have more and let businesses get subsidized by our dollars. Now that the profit has been extracted they’re moving to different investments and leaving our car-centric “commercial shopping centers” to blight towns and cities.

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[deleted] t1_j42gwi3 wrote

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WalkerBRiley t1_j42y4ui wrote

Really should demo the entire plazas and let nature reclaim it. Or turn them into city parks. Or SOMETHING that isn't acres of empty asphalt.

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[deleted] t1_j4383j4 wrote

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AssumptionLivid6879 t1_j467gar wrote

That isn’t our reality. Our reality is that there hasn’t been any new tenants in many of these structures and many current tenants are renting shithole end-lifecycle properties.

Easiest example is the Airport Mall in Bangor. Every drop panel is brown from water damage at the dollar store, and 90% of it is vacant. The Bangor mall has like 4 out of possible 40 tenants. The landowner will keep running it into the ground and shorting the value of neighboring structures.

These landowners waiting for “someone to bite” are creating blight and butterfly effects the surrounding community. Blaming blightingly buildings on the lack of tenants is like a vacuum salesman blaming the customer on not wanting to buy a vacuum.

All of these pseudo-commercial shopping districts are heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, from the wasted land use within the city limits, to the extra road/sewer/power maintenance. Rather than incentivizing the repairing of these structures, it’s incentivized to just build more 30-year big boxes and let the old ones rot.

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[deleted] t1_j46m6md wrote

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AssumptionLivid6879 t1_j46oab3 wrote

Just as the energy industry is accountable for their life-cycles, footprint, infrastructure impact, future big box stores need the same accountability. It should be incentivized to refurbish and repurpose and decentivitized to blight for hedging tax recoup into portfolios.

Building without contributing to road / sidewalk infrastructure, building without contributing to the expansion of services, building and blighting without consequences needs to go. These buildings created in the 80s and 90s are destroying communities and driving further why Maine and other big box centric infrastructure across the country have brain drain issues

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