Growing up in Orange County in the late 1970s, KL DeHart often wandered the Westminster Mall with her mother, checking out the latest fashions and seeing what movies were playing.
As a teenager, she spent many weekends there with friends playing pinball and skeeball at the arcade and shopping for trendy Chemin De Fer jeans.
Now, the mall is packed with empty storefronts. At the remaining businesses, employees eagerly jump to help the few customers passing through.
What may rise in its place, if developers and city officials have their way, is a new kind of mall, one that will include lawns, walking trails, and thousands of apartments according to a new report from the LA Times.
“It was the hip place to be, and it’s really faded out, but it’s just sad to see it go,” said DeHart, a 55-year-old massage therapist who still lives near the mall, in the house she grew up in. She is among the residents worried that the new apartments will increase traffic while doing little to solve the region’s affordable housing crisis.
In Orange County, the San Fernando Valley and suburbs throughout America, the mall was a gathering spot where there were few other places to hang out. It was where kids stocked up on the latest fashions and roamed in packs after school, spawning the term “mall rat.”
The 1980s cult classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” began and ended at the mall where the teens worked. In the 1995 film “Clueless,” a Beverly Hills teen retreated to the mall, which she described as a “sanctuary,” after failing to persuade a teacher to boost her grade.
Now, teenagers text with their friends and make TikTok videos. Their parents are more likely to shop online than at a brick-and-mortar store.
At the same time, Orange County is desperate for housing, with rents and home prices escalating and state laws requiring cities to zone for new construction. In a region where there is little undeveloped land and neighbors are likely to push back at new housing, some see declining malls as ideal places to build.
The Westminster Mall is “probably one of the largest areas of developable space that still exists in our time in this area,” City Manager Christine Cordon told the City Council during a meeting last November. Cordon remembers taking the bus to the mall decades ago to pick out CDs at Best Buy.
“You’re too young as a teenager to hang out in an actual nightclub, so back in the day, where would you go? The mall,” said Karen North, a USC professor who specializes in social media and psychology.
“It became this default place to go because it had something for everybody. You never knew who you were going to bump into, but you were always guaranteed there was something going on and there would be people around.”
