During the 25 years that consumed the back half of the 1950s and every bit of the 60s and 70s, Orange County shed the last remnants of its agrarian roots to become ground zero for that uniquely American citadel of consumption: The shopping mall. From 1958 to 1979 malls rose like mushrooms from the county’s flatlands, drawing millions of shoppers and their cash-stuffed wallets to cities from Costa Mesa, Laguna Hills and Newport Beach to Anaheim and Buena Park, Westminster and Huntington Beach, Orange and Santa Ana, Brea and Mission Viejo. For three generations these cities rode the sales-tax gravy train their malls produced. Their flush General Funds fueled the growth of their police and fire departments, maintained their parks and financed new ones, kept their streets paved, their storm drains and gutters clear and their sidewalks in good repair. But that era has passed. Roughed up and bruised by the Amazon blitzkrieg and COVID-19 pandemic, most of the malls that once powered Orange County’s conspicuous consumption economy are either limping relics of a bygone era, no longer standing (the Village at Orange mall) or in some stage of redevelopment (the Brea, Westminster and Laguna Hills malls). This wholesale transformation of the county’s retail landscape isn’t only the casualty of tech savvy consumer preferences for the path of least resistance when it comes to shopping. It’s also a catalyst that’s driving the most significant shift in land-use policy and zoning regulations in a generation. Indeed, Orange County’s “mall” cities are navigating through a perfect storm. Pressed by gargantuan state housing mandates, saddled with upside-down budgets, and dogged by an oversupply of obsolete commercially zoned land, “mall” cities are wisely ditching their fallow “fiscal zoning” strategies emphasizing commercial retail zoning in favor of mixed-use zoning that integrates new housing to feed