A "POP CULTURE" ARTICLE AND A "POP CULTURE" ANALYSIS

Implications: This article is not at all important!  It is a feeble excuse for a half baked promotion and/or book review about the life of an eccentric architect who was one of the first designers of enclosed regional malls.  The article is an inaccurate and highly slanted commentary about the "evils" of regional malls and predicts their immanent demise, while at the same time it contradicts itself by showing how the mall is constantly reinventing itself.

Analysis: The architect, Victor Gruen, was an eccentric, and a pompous, self promoting character whose work has long ago been surpassed by many other smarter, better and more original thinkers. If he had not done a tremendous amount of self promotion and had not had the good fortune to get a few Mall developers as loyal clients in the early days of shopping center development, no one would even remember him much less be writing books about him.

He considered himself an "Artiste" and like many eccentric artists, he fell in love with his own works. The most interesting thing about the man was that, after losing most of his clients and being bypassed by younger and more talented architects, he started going around the country lecturing about the "evils of the mall".

Why Mr. Burns chose this article to justify writing an analysis of the expected decline in top quality Mall REITs such as Simon, Taubman and General Growth, is a real mystery.  Not only is Mr. Burn's analysis at odds with the economic reality of the mall industry, his analysis is simply wrong in his description of the historical perspective (especially about the origins of GGP) of mall REITs.

The article was written by a pop culture British writer. The writer visited a few very sick malls and a few new "lifestyle" centers in the U.S., and then wrote a magazine article that is half "hatchet job" by a mall-hater and half fictional account of how and why the entire industry is in trouble because of the death of a small percentage of regional malls that should never have been built in the first place. 

GLG readers are deserving of analysis that at the very least get the facts straight. There are plenty of thoughtful, well researched articles about the relative strengths and weaknesses of regional malls and the quality of the portfolios owned by various mall REITs. Unfortunately, this article and the attendant analysis are not among them.