That's not a mall, that's an indoor market.

The most uninspiring......cold......boring.....sterile.....depressing place I could ever imagine going to - to shop! It's like jail - but with glass instead of steel bars!

It has all the warmth and charm of a totalitarian police state

It's all a scam, that's why it's sold to individuals rather than a large corporation. Whoever was behind this deliberately build tiny cheap cubicles, to maximise profit per space, and advertised these like apartments which the Chinese invest in, to attract this demographic. It explains why, as others pointed out, it resembles a Chinese mall. It was built next to a popular mall to make the location appear commercially viable. Once people buy, it's their problem while the developers walk away with all their money back plus profit. It was never planned to be a workable mall.

Horizon Mall would make a great homeless shelter....

It looks like a newly built duty free area of an airport

I’m a liminal space photographer and this place was heavenly! Best time I’ve had in Calgary so far. Lots of niche mom and pop shops, cool uncanny valley liminal aesthetic, and really good ice cream. You can find stuff there you probably can’t find at your generic corporate retail malls. They also have a HUGE really well done play area and arcade for kids. Called Sky Castle. I guess one persons trash is another person’s treasure. Really excited for their basement Halloween event! Great place to support local businesses.

This mall looks exactly like pacific mall here in Toronto only that pacific mall is an Asian mall always busy and opened 365 days a year its considered a tourist attraction

Excellent mall! Tons of stores and a huge food court. I bought a pair of Shoes from Ghost Shoes. The shoes are imaginary because I purchased it from a store called empty. All units were filled with emptyness. I would highly recommend this mall for Boxing day, you'll save tons of money. You can buy absolutely nothing, and walk out with nothing! Great way to save money.

*I visited **_New Horizon_* on about 4 different occasions and have spent a few hours snooping about the building, to which it occurred to me that the *_New Horizon Mall_** is no ordinary place...* The whole building seems kind of unusual in the sense that *you really don't know where the hell you are going, or what the hell you want to see.* The drowning amount of whiteness; from the floor tiles, to the walls, ceilings, and even to the lights, when combined with the grid like layout of tiny cubicle style business condominiums--most of which lie locked and empty--one could possibly draw the analogy that _New Horizon's_ vacant retail space *resembles some sort of desolate prison or asylum.* Another thing I feel is important to mention is the fact that there are only 2 pairs of washrooms in the entire building; 1 pair downstairs on the parking garage level, and another pair upstairs in the food court area. No washrooms on the main level, which seems to be a design flaw. What's more: there are literally *no drinking fountains anywhere to be found.* Quite frankly, this is the first shopping mall I have ever been to that doesn't have public drinking fountains available in abundance. It is also the mall with the scarcest amount of public washrooms that I have visited. *_What's really going on?_*

It's an expensive flea market lol

Where do shops put inventory?

This mall is doing EXACTLY what it was built to do - it's a giant Chinese tax scam.

That bugs me so much that they opened a tinier mall right beside an already existing mall. Idk what they were thinking, location would probably have played a key role into the success of that mall. Poor location and poor concept and I bet it’s going to be sold and turned into something else within the next 10 years.

Looks like a Chinese Ghost city mall Only concrete but no life They should open a loctaion on Mars too

Looks awful. Aesthetically sterile, bland and lifeless. Go back to the malls of the 70s and 80s, fountains, plants and trees, interesting layouts and great use of materials and interesting artefacts.

That's what we call a flea market. Silly Canadian

That design is something you might find in a city China, where tourists and shoppers crowd into these tourist traps to buy assorted junk, but not in a suburban North American mall. On top of that, actually selling those tiny stores to investors who probably have no idea where Calgary is, instead of leasing them to retailers/people who actually want to do business there, hammered the nail in the coffin. If you want a lesson on how to build a dead mall from scratch, this is it.

These empty shopping malls around the world need to be made into affordable tiny clean living spaces for low income, students or elderly centered around a community center & commissary such as the food court. Better than these buildings sitting empty and becoming dilapidated. Win win for all.

I was able to see the plans at an engineer friend’s office before it was built. I knew it was coming but I got to see the plans ahead of construction. It didn’t look too promising as it seemed to just be a lot of shops with nothing redeeming but a lot of shops in a very large space. Malls have trees and benches and kiosks and lighting and colour. This had just lots of long somnambulant corridors with no decoration, nothing to draw you along. The stores wouldn’t be open to the walkers. They are closed off with glass walls. No open interaction between the shops and the visitors. There are very few, if any, places to stop for a rest. As an architect, I had the chance to be involved with 4 of the tenants. At the time, walking around, there was nothing close to a critical mass to draw people to the building. There was no anchor to draw people there. The roads to the building were distant and convoluted, much worse than Cross-Iron Mall next door. In the end, marketing was thin, bordering on pathetic. No one really knew if it was even open. None of the ‘live bands’ every materialized. Their 2018 Halloween bash was poorly promoted. Still, nothing to get people to go there. Covid came along and probably didn’t help. However, they had almost 2 years before that to get it up and running. We’re there really 500+ potential tenants beside an already popular mall? Sad that so much money was put into this poorly thought out marketing disaster.

This is the mall version of Calgary's half a million dollar blue ring.

A 1rst world country trying to implement a 3rd world shopping experience. Lol

Background music makes me think about thrust to weight ratios.

This place looks like a flop. It's in the middle of nowhere. I though Canada had good scenery, that place looks like Fallout 4.

Just to clarify this isn't IN Calgary. It's in Balzac between Calgary and Airdire. Its legally outside Calgary city limits and is definitely a joke. Since the day the sign went up and before construction started I said this would be tremendous failure and a horribly stupid idea. Next to cross iron they have no hope in hell. This thing is a joke.

Read the comments. Most, if not all don't get it. It's an "Asian" mall, which is like an organized indoor flea market. These places usually feature fake stuff or culturally exclusive products that couldn't sell for enough profit to afford rent in a real mall. Look up Pacific Mall in Markham, Ontario. The USA complained about that specific mall being a significant source of counterfeit goods. The culture that shops at "P Mall" is looking to haggle and some knowingly purchase and wear the counterfeit junk sold there. Police raid the place once in a while to look like they care. Houses nearby warehouse and sometimes even manufacture the fake goods. Some stores are legit or mix fake/stolen goods with legit merchandise. Good luck with that..

My parents used to live in Airdrie (just 10 minutes away from New Horizons) and I didn’t know how bad of shape the mall was in. My guess is that the developers thought they could compete with Cross Iron by providing a differentiated shopping experience with more unique stores. What actually happened was that Cross Iron was an already established and well traversed mall that people preferred to use over New Horizons.

Why would you build a mall next to a mall? Lol

This idea was doomed from the start. A mall full of 150 square foot stores. That is not retailer friendly, I've been to West Edmonton mall a few times and every time I went it was enjoyable it has a great atmosphere. I actually can't believe these investors didn't do a double take and actually think to themselves that maybe this time of mall layout or format was not a consumer friendly idea. These investors literally have millions of dollars to throw into projects and they couldn't see this was a ill advised investment its actually unfathomable.

heard the same person who sold calgary this mall also sold springfield a monorail in the 90s

And they keep saying "this is what people want". Ok...

I have a good idea for that facility. I looked at the openness of it. It would be a great convention center. If you had conventions it would bring more business for the mall and more tourism for the town. But I thought it was pretty sick too with all those IKEA type stores. But they needed to have a Costco size warehouse to pickup their inventory they didn't have that. Inventory logistics were probably full of chaos to work out. Canada use that facility as a convention center to boost tourism. It sounds good to me

With all the tiny stalls, it looks more appropriate for a flea market than a mall. Also who wants to be on display in a fish bowl? The entire premise is bizarre. Another thing to consider, is Alberta's economy under an NDP government with oil below 30$, and neither the Alberta or federal government doing anything about it, since they are both anti-oil. This is not the booming Alberta of a few years ago with high oil prices, essentially a negative unemployment rate, and almost every store, restaurant or other business with help wanted signs for part time, full time and management positions. It was insane. Places like Tim Hortons had to offer special benefits and incentives to keep people from quitting within three months because an employee found somewhere else to work which paid more. I would imagine under similar economic conditions, this maze of glass would have taken off "just because".

The problem was that most of the purchasers were investors, looking for a retailer to lease to, instead of retailers

Nope, this is not what people want. People dont want to shop there and businesses dont want to sell there. Period.

The same person who designed this mall, ran the Hillary 2016 campaign.

Every time I drive past the New Horizon Mall, I always think it looks like an airport that went under years ago.

It will never stand a chance next to the traditionally styled Cross Iron Mills. People aren't prepared to change their shopping style. This is Alberta the Texas of Canada and we like things big and lots of us have big money to spend at big box stores.

@ 4:46 Hmmmmm......... what should I have for lunch today? I guess it's Matty's Grill again......

One of the major reasons for NHM's failure (and it is still a failure in 2022, even though there's a bit more interesting retailers in the mall now), can be seen at 3:06. The mall was meant to be a collection of owned units with interesting retailers in them. The problem is that the owners encouraged "investors" to buy units with the hope of leasing or reselling those units to actual retailers. This led to a rush of speculators buying up the units without any intention of opening a store. Great for the builder who got paid, but terrible for literally everyone else involved (existing owners, the community at large, and even the speculators who bought those units are all basically screwed).

The announcer sounds like he's reading a thesaurus.

No, not desperate investors, greedy investors, ones that are looking to lease these spaces at higher rates than Chinook Centre. Understand why it's empty now?

The premise of a mall isn't bad, but who in their right mind would open it up for investors to buy slots outright? 1. Investors are liable to sit on their slot, and most that don't will set rent higher than the mall would have. Both decrease the number of participating businesses the mall needs to survive. 2. The building can't be sold in it's entirety when it fails (see point 1) because different people own different bits. 3. They can literally never change the floor plan because people own pieces of the floor. I guess they need the instant capital to recoup their initial investment, but the whole thing is a logistical nightmare unless they're just trying to sell and move on, in which case it will probably fail anyway.

Even with small stores, I bet the people at Louis Vuitton will still find a way to go ‘look’ for your size for half an hour

The formula for a successful mall is simple, Arby's = customers. Its not rocket science. Nobody can resist delicious curly fries.

This place will make a great paintball/airsoft arena. It's just a matter of time 😏

It looks like a prison more than a mall 😅😂

"if you build it they will come" myth busted!

Dear God that's depressing. At least pump in some music, it sounds like a museum on a Monday morning.

It looks more like a flea market than a mall

That mall is visited by the peoplekind of Canada.

It seems like this is more of a Real Estate scam than a mall; selling the stores as condos instead of leading them like most malls do means that the property owners can't scale the mall to fit available stores by clumping the stores that are actually operating together, and it also means that the mall management looses most of their control over the shopping experience. I hope that the mall picks up, it has a lot of potential... But without an anchor store open, and it sounds like unrealistic expectations of rent for the stores, and just too small of store spaces, it seems like it is going to fail hard before succeeding. (I have done sales out of a 10x10 at festivals and faires, it's hard to imagine doing that every day...)

Those crazy Chinese investors and their hot money! What wacky high-jinks will they get up to next?

Proud Albertan and this channel is epic!!

New Horizon Mall parking lot is now a RV parking lot as it is 75% RV's. So happily now the parking lot being used for something.

Turn it into a Mega Brothel Mall

I knew when they planned this mall years ago that it would fail. The transportation network in and out of this area is horrendous, I personally avoid the area because of the inability to get parked in a reasonable timeframe. Speculative buyers were had on this venture. This is like the movie “The Big Short” part 2. The city and province are in panic mode trying to think of ways to stimulate tax revenue. With the downtown vacancy rate at or over 26% and the unemployment rate at over 8% here in Calgary things look bleak. A looming over priced 2026 Winter Olympics price tag of over 5 Billion not including the sure to fallow cost over runs, we are being set up for disaster here soon! Watch for home values to eventually tank but more importantly watch the Property Tax Increases that are coming soon to a city near you. All levels of Government are running wild with no end in sight. Sorry this is not something you would hear on the local news stations.

I'm English and that English accent from the official mall site really really annoys me.

This is what happens when you build a new mall across from a huge regular style mall.

Update: I went there last weekend and it did manage to survive Covid so far, but it’s still as bare and desolate as ever. I don’t know how they manage.

I think Chinese investment had something to do with this, this microstore format is not new, it was not new 10 years ago when I first started seeing stuff like this in Chinese neighbourhoods. Most of the stores I saw were low income, low volume type places too... a lot of pirate shops, second hand cell phone and computer repair stores. Maybe most of the investors were from China and they knew they could just sell it on spec to Chinese eager to invest in Canada because most of them would never even see it in person to realize how bad an idea it was.

Maybe sell to more store owners and less landlords...

I'd love to lease a store an live in it

BTW, The New Horizon Mall is located in a town named Balzac and not Calgary but is still very close as you can see Calgary from there.

One of the main reason malls and department stores are failing is that they are inconvenient for shoppers, in this aspect--NO SHOPPING CARTS. If you have to carry all your purchases by hand, then you will either do less shopping (who wants, or can, carry several bags from store to store, or department to department?) or you will have to keep going out to your car to drop off bags, which takes lots of time. Many people find it much easier to just go to Walmart or Target.

This looks like 90's chinesse malls in central and eastern europe...i saw something similar 20 years ago in Romania. Cheap glass , cheap bindings and way too far from where people actualy live !!! The only way they could bring people is to have chinesse prices for good enough quality products !

They started building it in the middle of an oil boom and it opened during the worst oil bust recession our province and city have ever experienced. The unemployment rate in Calgary was one of the highest in the country when the mall opened, people, investors and businesses have been cutting back.

Architectural masterpiece ... it's a freaking warehouse.

Good morning horizon mall workers, let’s get this bread!

Wait you flew from Edmonton to Calgary? Lol I think that's the real story here

Reminds me of the malls I've seen in China, except over there the stores are usually organized in "districts" where you have clusters of similar merchants next to one another, e.g. garments/apparel, electronics, watches, jewelry, etc. just not sure I see that model working here though.

looks exactly like pacific mall in markham , just a newer material version

I love your videos keep up the good work ( one day I bet this channel will be big )

It's not a mall it's a bazaar.

4:10 Silk Road is going retail LOL

If that mall was filled to tenant capacity they would have almost (probably more) as many employees as customers. Sounds like a nightmare to me. Not to mention you would be going there to browse a catalog and place an order due to lack of space for inventory. Anyone with a survivable business model would be better off renting elsewhere.

While you’re at it Calgary, get the Olympic and put yourself in debt.

I think it looks like Asia Pacific mall in Markham. But that mall is in a heavily populated area with a very large Asian population. This seems to be far from any real population centre.

So you tried to repackage a fleamarket in an area that already had a thriving mall? 🧐 and to be honest, aside from a few open areas the corridors look fairly tight for shoppers with bags.

I was there last week, it still looks brand new with about 4 stores, 1 restaurant, and one bubble tea place.

I'm surprised the film industry hasn't taken note. They'd have a field day filming anything & everything in there. Hell they'll typically squat on any vacant property. 😃🤣😂🤩

Damm, I love this passive aggression. This video i bssically one mall dissing another mall lmao.

The reason is actually very simple: Chinese & Indian investors bought those units with very high expectations on rental returns and capital gains. They didn't buy them to open a shop. Since this kind of investors are well off they rather play the waiting game than lower the price. It happened in several malls in China too

One year later: It is still dead as ever with only roughly 80 stores, but with one anchor store which brings in most of the attention...

Gut the whole interior and turn it into sound stages for film/tv

This mall will never work properly. 1 - Selling each stall or store to a different owner is a TERRIBLE idea. For a Mall to work properly, there needs to be one single entity owning and managing the space. That is a completely outdated model. 2 - It's HIDEOUS. It literally looks like it was built in the 80's/early 90's. I don't know who the architect was, but he/she is terrible at his/her job. There is no nobility in materials, the space is very minimalist (and not in a good, futuristic way, but in an empty, outdated way) and completely bland. 3 - There's an already established mall right "next door".

It's outside of Calgary's City limits, in a community called Balzac. If it's main focus is on the Asian market, they should have built it in the city, not out in the prairies. Might make a decent Sportsplex though. Indoor Tennis?

Remember it's like the 70's when Ralph Nader made a comment about cars, he said people don't want small cars that get good gas mileage, people want big cars that get good gas mileage! People don't want small tiny stores, people want BIG retail shopping malls!!!

Are you going to make an update video on this?

someone call dan bell this needs to go on dead mall series

The huge problem with sold malls spaces, is their inability to be coordinated. If it's owned by a company, it will lower its prices to attract shops to rent at their place for free.

The elevator voice said it best! "Going...Down."

Is was there last Saturday and all I saw was a food court with nothing in it and why would they put it right next to cross iron mall

Mall of America is still nicer then both those malls

I BELIEVE a traditional mall format is owned by one person and they find anchor tenants prior to the project beginning. In this instance the developer, like in a residential condo, only needed to pre-sell a certain number of spaces. However, a space sold is not a tenant. It could be a gambler buying it, money laundering, investor, anyone but someone that actually wants to set up shop. This is the problem here. Many, I believe, were planning to flip the units and make a profit. How, anyone could think this possible in a city with so much empty retail space is beyond me. The province is in a downward spiral so it makes it even more surprising so many were able to find the money to gamble on this idea. I just posted a video from my visit on Saturday as one of the owners offered me a space on a profit sharing idea with no actual rent due. However, I am not even sure I want to spend time opening a shop with this small risk on the table as my time is worth something. Even at FREE I am not so sure I would want to open shop and many are asking $1000 to $2000 for a space per month. I hope it gets better for them but I highly doubt it will. SEE MY VIDEO FROM YESTERDAY.

I like the idea of the microstores. If they want to really get businesses in spaces there, what about lowering the rent for properties on one half of the mall and have that be more like a farmer’s market/flea market by encouraging the normal joe to set up a booth there? Then the other half could be big brand stores that pay normal or slightly higher rent to balance the cost of lowering the rent for one half of the mall.

The problem with Calgary is that their is way to many investers and shareholders doing nothing but expecting something in return. Things take longer to happen and old marketing strategies are on there way out as the know nothing middle men are all standing there with their hands out. Just like when real estate sellers buy up empty lots in new neighbourhoods and sit on them. Good luck filling that mall.

Did they steal the Obama campaign logo for the mall? lmaooo

Jeez you got so many views!! I've watched a lot of your videos and glad to see your channel is picking up

There are quite a few of this kind of malls in Toronto, Ontario and surrounding area for years. I think it start with the one call Pacific mall. The 200M New Horizon Mall look so much like Pacific Mall, I am just wondering why it cost so much to build when all the individual "shops" don't even have top cover.