[flubert]

>You haven't been hearing it twenty years either.

Back in the year 2000, someone created the Deadmalls.com website:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadmalls.com

...just a few random items from DDG:

From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"

"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150527125625/https://www.nytim...

From 2001: "Dying shopping malls reborn as old-fashioned downtowns"

https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-12/article...

From 2003: "Malls: Death of an American icon"

https://web.archive.org/web/20030707142032/https://money.cnn...

Cory Doctorow was talking about dead malls in 2003:

https://boingboing.net/2003/04/19/dead-mall-contest-re.html

From 1998: "Enclosed malls losing luster as well as tenants"

"Mintz thinks the vacancies signal a deeper problem -- that malls are outdated and out of touch with the needs of today's shoppers."

https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/1998/02/09/st...

And it turns out there was a book published in 2002:

"Greyfields into Goldfields: Dead Malls become Living Neighborhoods"

https://www.amazon.com/Greyfields-into-Goldfields-become-Nei...