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Hello
I went to the Houston Mall again. I was rehab shopping for my mother. No, not THAT kind of rehab; she is becoming less and less mobile with her disease.
Even at 3:30 PM the mall is dead. Evelyn's, the dress shop that was too stubborn to leave, is no more. A third of the mall is rented by the Houston Medical Center. This is not a bad idea if the $/sqft sales are high even for spending money on medical procedures. But HMC isn't the Mayo Clinic or Cook County Hospital in Chicago.
The northeast entrance is no more. Home Decor resides in it, the small stores along the way, and in two or more old stores possibly carved out of WT Grant's. I remember when my sis and I went to Grant's and bought a small globe. This was on a Sunday. Eckerd's is a billing center for HMC and the southeast corridor has Warner Robins Municipal Court and a probation office. A nail place and beauty supply replaced stores near where the old record store and Burton's shoes once thrived. I forgot there was a southeast wing to the mall. It has a few of HMC's storefront facilities.
Were I HMC and if no expansion were already planned for the hospital I'd buy the mall and revamp it. Then I would rent it out. Hospitals likely find themselves hurting to make a profit and though Houston Medical Center doesn't have indigents bleeding them dry it remains a neat idea.
Management needs to market the mall as an office center and fill the hallway with another row of offices. Perhaps they can bulldoze all but the east and west anchors and make a strip mall. Westgate did this but their mistake was remaining commercial in a deteriorating neighborhood.
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