After: Apartments, art galleries, indoor farms, classrooms, and public libraries

Many dead retail spaces will likely morph into businesses that have community-based functions, like apartments, public libraries, indoor farms, and refrigerated spaces for processing food (for local restaurants or grocery stores), Williamson says.

"You'll find DMVs, town halls, and libraries in malls increasingly, the type of place where the public government can interact with the public," Williamson says.

Some public spaces, like libraries, don't bring in much rent, so they mainly serve as a way to attract people to the mall, she says.

"If the mall owners can't keep the place fully leased, this at least keeps people coming who could keep the other leasees from fleeing," she says. "The 'Main Street' was killed by the mall, so developers are trying to build new downtowns inside the malls."

In St. Louis, Missouri, one large store in the Chesterfield Mall became an illustrated children's book museum and a puppet theater, while another in the CoolSprings Galleria in Franklin, Tennessee turned into a gallery that showcases local artists. Since it opened in 2005, the gallery says it has sold over $20 million in artwork.

The three-story Providence Arcade in Rhode Island — America's oldest mall — transformed the majority of its shops into 48 micro-apartments in 2016 (with a hair salon and cafés still on the ground floor). Similarly, New York's White Plains Mall will be torn down and redeveloped into a 20-story residential tower within the next five years.

Smiley says that if a mall is being redeveloped into housing, most of the building will usually get demolished. Most malls have little plumbing and electrical capacity, which residential buildings demand.