Hard to know if it's serious

What's clear is that we need far more than more malls. From a 2005 article in the NYT:

The Mall That Would Save America

Robert Congel, a commercial real-estate developer who lives in upstate New York, has a plan to ''change the world.'' Convinced that it will ''produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done,'' he is raising $20 billion to make it happen...

What Congel has in mind is an outsize and extremely unusual mega-mall. Destiny U.S.A., the retail-and-entertainment complex he is building in upstate New York, aspires to be not only the biggest man-made structure on the planet but also the most environmentally friendly. Equal parts Disney World, Las Vegas, Bell Laboratories and Mall of America -- with a splash of Walden Pond -- the ''retail city'' will include the usual shops and restaurants as well as an extensive research facility for testing advanced technologies and a 200-acre recreational biosphere complete with springlike temperatures and an artificial river for kayaking.

Someone ought to mention to the architect that isolated goof-itecture amidst a huge parking lot doesn't spell sustainable:

But some reporters take it seriously:

Mega-mall in upstate New York could give birth to a clean-energy awakening

But it sure looks like it will fall-apart:

Destiny USA Breaks Ground in Syracuse.

Two Steps Forward: Destiny USA's High-Wire Act.

Comments

[Craig Howard]

The Destiny project has been floating around for over a decade. It maintains momentum because desperate-for-development upstate New Yorkers have decided that tourism is the last hope (in an area where it snows heavily for 6 months a year).

New York's politicians, eager to continue their over-taxing and over-spending, are willing to throw in piles of future tax revenue to keep the illusion of hope for the future alive just a while longer.