text: At a time when store closures are accelerating and struggling malls pockmark the country, county commissioners in Florida have approved a plan to build what would be the largest mall in the U.S. 
   
   American Dream Miami would also be the most expensive mall ever built, according to Canadian developer Triple Five Worldwide Group of Cos. The 6.2-million-square-foot retail and entertainment complex would cost an estimated $4 billion, Triple Five says. 
   
   ... ||||| A rendering of the American Dream Mall in Miami, Florida. Triple Five Group 
   
   The largest mall in the US — called the American Dream — is officially coming to Miami, Florida. 
   
   Spanning 6 million square feet, the $4 billion retail and entertainment complex will be about twice the size of the nation's current largest mall, the King of Prussia Mall in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. 
   
   The American Dream Miami's developers, Triple Five Group, are also behind the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, according to The Miami Herald. 
   
   Set to be located on undeveloped land off the Florida Turnpike, the American Dream Miami will look more like an amusement park than a traditional, dumbbell-shaped mall. The complex will feature a water park with a giant indoor pool, an indoor ice rink, an artificial ski slope, "submarine" rides, dozens of restaurants, and up to 1,200 stores. 
   
   The project doesn't have a set timeline yet. A rendering of the water park at the American Dream Mall in Miami, Florida. Triple Five Group Triple Five anticipates that 30 million people will visit the property each year. That's about 10 million fewer visitors than the Mall of America, which generates nearly $2 billion annually for Minnesota, according to the developers. 
   
   The new project has received some pushback. A number of existing malls in Miami argue that the city, which already has a saturated retail market, doesn't need another mall (especially of this scale). 
   
   Some Miami locals also have concerns regarding the development's potential water and energy use and impact on the city's stormwater system. During a meeting of the Miami-Dade County Commission on May 17, Miami resident Megan Sorbo called the project "an environmental abomination," according to the Herald. Environmentalists from the Sierra Club noted that the mega-mall will be in a low-lying area of Miami, putting the development at greater risk of flooding as well. 
   
   While Triple Five has received approval from the city, it still needs a series of permits, additional financing, and a proposal for stormwater runoff infrastructure. Triple Five Group As the American Dream Miami moves forward, hundreds of malls and thousands of mall-based stores — from Claire's to Sears— have closed in the past two decades across the US. According to retail analysts, many more may close within the next 10 years, due largely to the rise of online shopping and changing consumer habits. 
   
   Miami's new complex could provide a more viable model for struggling malls and malls of the future. Unlike traditional suburban centers, the American Dream Miami focuses on experiential attractions, with the water park and ice rink to reside in the atrium. The project fits into the genre of "destination malls," which are often located near urban centers and attract visitors from the entire region rather than only people who live nearby. 
   
   A rendering of the indoor ice rink at the American Dream Mall in Miami, Florida. Triple Five Group Destination malls, also called "super-regional malls" or "lifestyle centers," use experiential attractions to subsidize regular retail shops. They usually include attractions like movie theaters, bars, casinos, restaurants, rock climbing walls, laser tag, and even roller coasters. 
   
   In a previous interview with Business Insider, David Smiley, the assistant director of Columbia University's Urban Design graduate program, said that destination malls can be more profitable to developers than normal malls. 
   
   "The emergence of entertainment as part of the shopping mall is becoming very important," he said. "It keeps people in the center longer. And even if they weren't going to shop for something, they get lured in." 
   
   A rendering of the indoor ski area at the American Dream Mall in Miami, Florida. Triple Five Group For example, in 2012 and 2013, the Carousel Center in Syracuse, New York re-branded as Destiny USA, and added higher-end restaurants, IMAX screens, an arcade, and indoor go-carting and obstacle courses. According to the mall, the 2.4-million-square-foot complex draws around 29 million people (both from the US and Canada) every year. 
   
   Triple Five is working on another destination mall in New Jersey, too. The complex, called American Dream Meadowlands, will include a Nickelodeon theme park (similar to the one at the Mall of America). It's set to open in 2019. ||||| Hey, kids, you know what America really needs? Another shopping mall. 
   
   But not just any shopping mall. What it really needs is a big – no, make that obscenely gargantuan – place with millions of square feet of retail and entertainment space. How about a hotel? A water park? Indoor skiing? And maybe a couple of thousand hotel rooms just to fill out the empty spaces? 
   
   If you think you’re suddenly stuck in a time warp and this is a story from 2002 that has somehow made it into your news feed, check the time stamp: This baby is so right now, it’s downright frightening. 
   
   This week, the Miami-Dade County Commission approved zoning changes that will allow American Dream Miami to be built on a 174-acre site within the county. 
   
   And who better to build it than those zany Ghermezian boys and their Triple Five Worldwide Group out of Canada? 
   
   For those of you not familiar with the history of shopping complexes the size of Asian city-states, the Ghermezian family first rose to fame building the West Edmonton Mall in Canada more than 35 years ago. At the time, it was truly something that had never existed before in the history of retailing: an immense complex of stores, restaurants, an amusement park, water features and enough food courts to feed an entire nation. It remains the biggest shopping anything in the world. 
   
   The family next took its formula south of the border and built a slightly smaller version in Minneapolis and dubbed it the Mall of America. Four people who attended the grand opening in 1992 are still wandering the halls looking for the exit to the parking lot. 
   
   The success of the Mall of America set off a retail feeding frenzy, the after-effects of which the industry is still reeling from today. The Mills Corporation, which had made its name with outlet-based centers, decided it could go store-to-store with those Canadians and broke ground on a massive mall just west of New York City in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Dubbed the Great American Mall, it, too, would have the requisite store-restaurant-ski-extravaganza mix housed in a building that appeared to be paneled with leftover color tiles. 
   
   In a relatively short period of time, it all went downhill, as if on a literal ski slope. Mills ran out of money, and eventually out of corporate existence. Another developer came in, renamed the festering structure Xanadu and proclaimed it the next great thing in retailing. Apparently the urban legend that the New Jersey Meadowlands is where people go to bury things they don’t want found (remember Jimmy Hoffa?) didn’t resonate with this builder, either, and he likewise hung up his earth-movers after a few years. 
   
   Enter – you guessed it – the Ghermezians, who convinced Chris Christie, then New Jersey's governor, that they were just the guys to finally get the job done. They took over in 2011 and said the mall – now called American Dream Meadowlands – would be open in time for the Super Bowl being played next door at the new Meadowlands Stadium … in 2014. 
   
   If you attended that game – or any of the hundreds of other football games, soccer matches, rock concerts or rodeos held at Meadowlands Stadium since then – you’ve no doubt seen the mall next store in various stages of inactivity, construction cranes hovering over the site like vultures waiting to pick at the rotting debris. 
   
   But on any given day, some work is actually occurring at the mall, and those ever-hopeful Ghermezians now say it will open next year. That could still be as long as 19 months from now – and 16 years from when construction began. Even Tesla builds faster than that. 
   
   Which brings us back to Miami and this latest venture. The publicity mentions all the usual buzzwords about jobs and the local tourist-based economy being able to absorb a facility like this. No local businesses will suffer, of course, and – let’s be clear – not a penny of public funding will be used to build American Dream Miami. 
   
   The last major shopping mall to be built in the U.S. was the Mall at University Town Center – also in Florida, by the way – and that opened last June. Before that, it had been three years since what the trade calls a regional shopping mall had been built. 
   
   According to estimates, there are still about 1,200 shopping malls in the country, but if current trends continue, that number could be cut in half by the time things level off. 
   
   When Mall of America was built, there was no such thing as e-commerce. When plans were drawn up for the mall in New Jersey, Amazon had been in business for only a few years – and was still basically just selling books and a few CDs. So you can cut developers some slack for the situations they find themselves in today. 
   
   But c’mon, Ghermezians. America is over-stored, over-shopped and over-bought. We don’t go to movies like we used to, and there’s an Olive Garden or Cheesecake Factory at every retail crossroads in the country. And does anybody really need to go snow skiing in Florida? 
   
   The business of building retailing in North America was a wonderful one, and it had an insanely good run – until it stopped. One man’s dream is another’s nightmare. ||||| By Allison Pries | NJ Advance Media 
   
   If you've lived in, been to, driven by, or flown over New Jersey anytime this century, you've heard of it. The American Dream mall -- the artist formerly known as Xanadu. Over the last 16 years, it has often become the punchline, as money problems and lawsuits plagued the mega development. 
   
   But, for those still wishing that the mega-mall may one day actually open its doors, the last few years have brought renewed hope. The mall's current developer, Triple Five (the third to take on the project since its inception) seems to be maintaining momentum on its American Dream. 
   
   Construction is actually happening, and Triple Five promises most of the complex will open in the spring of 2019. The target date has intrigued many, who have watched the dramatic (and expensive) saga of the development unfold.
target: – In an era of shuttered shopping malls, the biggest one in America is set to be built. Officials in Florida's Miami-Dade County last month approved zoning changes for a 6.2-million-square-foot shopping and entertainment center on a 174-acre site off the Florida Turnpike, complete with an indoor water park, lake, ski slope, ice-climbing wall, 2,000 hotel rooms, and up to 1,200 stores, reports the Wall Street Journal. American Dream Miami—to be "twice the size of the nation's current largest mall" at an estimated cost of $4 billion, per Business Insider—is the somewhat outdated brainchild of Canada's Triple Five Worldwide Group, run by the Ghermezian family. They know a thing or two about shopping malls, having built Canada's West Edmonton Mall, the largest mall in the world when it opened 35 years ago, as well as Minnesota's Mall of America. "But c'mon, Ghermezians. America is over-stored, over-shopped and over-bought … And does anybody really need to go snow skiing in Florida?" Warren Shoulberg writes at Forbes. "I don't see it competing with Disney World," adds a VP of Miami-based Continental Real Estate Companies. Their complaints join those of residents worried about traffic and the environment, and of critics who watched Triple Five struggle to fund New Jersey's as-yet-unopened American Dream Meadowlands mall after taking over the site in 2011, per NJ.com. Critics are also wary of the public subsidies that might be used to open the mall, slated to be the most expensive ever built, but American Dream Miami plans to "be built by private dollars," a lawyer for Triple Five says. Countering what he calls "a campaign of disinformation" by local mall owners, he adds the mall will create 25,000 jobs and attract 30 million tourists annually.