Here’s another yardstick of economic distress that California tops: flattened shopping centers.

My trusty spreadsheet reviewed retail space data from CoStar tracking store demolitions between 2020 and 2025. It tells us that 23 million square feet of California retail space was demolished in these six years.

Golden State demolitions, No. 1 among the states, were followed by Florida and Texas, with 17 million square feet of retail space removed.

How big is California’s retail destruction? Well, it’s roughly on par with the combined amount of operating retailing space in Vermont and Wyoming.

Or the look at California demolitions this way: It equals eight South Coast Plazas, the wildly successful mall in Costa Mesa that’s also California’s largest retail hub with 2.8 million square feet of shopping and dining space.

Retailing’s wrecking ball has been active in recent years thanks to online shopping, which exploded during the pandemic lockdowns. That forced the closings or pullbacks by large, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers whose stores once filled shopping centers.

As a result, the finances of many out-of-date shopping centers soured.

Meanwhile, these retail sites are now prime locations for residential construction, hotels and new retail development.

California’s big demolition number is not terribly surprising, given that the state is also the nation’s largest retail hub, with 1.7 billion square feet of retail space.

That’s equal to the total shopping areas of 22 states and is 11% of the nation’s 16 billion square feet. No. 2 is Texas at 1.6 billion, followed by Florida at 1.2 billion.