Landlords or Carnies?

You may recall reading my post the other day about landlord's coming up with creative uses for vacant space, including indoor surfing. Well, the Llenrock Blog has taken this one step further with an informative and humorous post on creative use, to wit:

This concept seems all to familiar to retail landlords of regional malls, power and lifestyle centers. The only thing worse than a rainy day to a carnie is a dark store to a landlord. And landlords aren't being all that shy about it either. A recent article in the New York Times showed that a burgeoning trend to fill up the mounting oceans of vacant space is, well, water.

I'm not really into indoor surfing, but if a landlord let a tenant put in a temporary indoor pool (how you do that is beyond me, though, because of the dehumidification costs), I'd be all over it. But I am dreaming because of the damage to the space, the objections of tenants, the cost, the insurance and a million other legal issues. I can tell you this, however: I have been to the local mall exactly once this year, and I was there a grand total of twice last year.