Mall Profile #14: Haney Place Mall, by Cindy Masuch & Justin McElroy
There's no mystery on whether Haney Place Mall is any good. So we explore a more interesting question about Maple Ridge's biggest mall: what made it turn bad?
Haney Place Mall
Location: Maple Ridge
Opened: 1981
Approximate number of stores: 24 (we counted every one)
Anchor tenants: Walmart, Dollar Tree
Let’s be direct: there’s not a lot in Haney Place Mall.
It’s a mid-sized mall, with two large anchor spots at each end of a long, wide, slightly skewed hallway. But because many of the store units along that hallway are vacant and for lease, there’s a grand total of 20 non-food court things in the mall. Of those, Vanilla Bean Bakeshop and Town Square Cobbler are fairly universally loved!
The rest is mostly a shrug: the usual cell phone stores, hair and nail care businesses, a Dollar Tree and a Suzanne’s. Large government spaces: a Service Canada centre and a Fraser Health care facility, places making the best of the large vacancies here. There’s a liquidation centre, a large thrift store, and a boringly standard Walmart.
Our guest for this episode, Maple Ridge resident Matt Aquin, says that the mall has been a bit of a punchline in the city for many many years, and that plenty of folks wish it would be replaced by a more exciting retail option (a Costco perhaps?), but in the absence of that, it creates a bit of a void in the heart of the city.
Once, it was a perfectly usual mall for a city on the outskirts of a larger metropolitan area. It opened in 1981 as a piece of the greater Maple Ridge downtown plan, a shopping hotspot right next to the town hall, arts centre, and bus loop. Haney Place itself had Woodward’s and a Safeway as anchors, clothing stores, everything the standard mall would have.
That civic half is still working fine, but the mall followed a usual trajectory. The Woodward’s closed, turned into a Zellers, which also closed and was converted into a Target. And the Target found no purchase in our soil, perhaps too acidic or too basic for it, and it withered. And a Walmart came in and filled its space, where it is to this day.
The Safeway left too. The space then housed a thrift store, then a Thrifty Foods, and now a different thrift store. The rest of the inside slowly became more hollowed out, stores closing down, leaving the mall feeling barren. The wide hallways and the lack of exterior decorations around store entrances — sans some slightly uncanny valley Winnie the Pooh paintings — makes the mall interior feel echoing and cavernous. The lack of decoration or grid on the floor tile left me feeling unanchored. If a flash flood came through, I would be swept away, past the smooth canyon walls.
This is depressing to talk about.
It’s also one of those stories that is interesting in the aggregate — a particular brand of Canadian mid-sized mall 50 kilometres from the big city centre that has declined even as the suburb around it has grown — but feels like punching down on an individual level.
One of the principles of this series, and part of our reason for limiting reviews to malls with at least 15 outlets, is that there are 20,000 videos and dunks on dying or dead suburban malls, a place where millennials gawk at cultural drift and the voids of capitalism, and frankly there’s no need to be the 20,001st just for its own sake.
A more interesting question might be: what is specific about Haney Place that contributed to its decline?
Competition from the nearby (as in, a five-minute-walk-away nearby) Valley Fair Mall couldn’t have helped. Right now, Valley Fair is going strong, with the mall-supporting Three Sisters: a grocery store, a drug store, and a liquor store. It has more traffic than Haney Place, and more stores. In fact, Black Bond Books was a tenant at Haney Place, but moved years ago to Valley Fair.
Ongoing problems with Canadian retail brands knocked out a few more stores from Haney Place. The mainstay clothing stores Bootlegger, Warehouse One, and Ricki’s recently closed up, leaving just the Suzanne’s and Walmart as middle-class brand name retailers in the mall. A mall centred around the type of retail most impacted by 21st century digital transformations is always going to struggle more than a mall centred around food, services and community.
Some Maple Ridge residents say the rents in Haney Place went up to amounts businesses couldn’t bear. In 2015 the mall was bought by SmartREIT, a property manager that tends to favour Walmart, and the mall’s greatest decline was during their six years as stewards of Haney Place. Of course, there was something else during that time: the pandemic. It put all malls on shaky ground, but when you’re on shaky ground to begin with, it could have been a death knell for Haney Place.
That didn’t quite happen. SmartREIT sold Haney Place to Lorval Developments at the end of 2021, and since then, the mall has been ever so somewhat regaining momentum. A child care centre opened up. The new stalls in the food court are getting kudos from the community, with Hani Kebab’s ample portions being a big hit. The aforementioned bakery opened over a year ago, and a new florist came in this summer.
Due to Haney’s advantageous position within Maple Ridge, there are general plans by Lorval to redevelop the mall into a mixed-use condo heavy Thing To Make Money, but there is no timeline for that, and so Haney will sit in purgatory for sometime to come.
Haney Place isn’t good, but that doesn’t stop the cobbler and the baker and the Persian chef from doing their best. Life may still bloom from the heart of this mall before its passing.
TOTAL SCORE
Small Stores: 3.6/10 (As noted, there are a few stores with some spark to them, but not nearly enough to give the interior of the mall any real energy — particularly since the cobbler and baker are right beside two of the entrances.)
Anchor Tenants: 2.7/10 (Disclosure: this might be slightly lower than our score for malls with a similar mix of a Walmart, dollar store and thrift store because our guest for this mall really dislikes Walmart. But also, nobody is particularly enthused about a Walmart in 2026, and this trio offers a much more limited appeal than a grocery/drug/liquor Three Sisters combination.)
Food Court: 5/10 (There are but four options in the food court, and one of them is a Subway. But the other three are independent small businesses: a pizza and wings stall (Pixwi), an Indian and Chinese outlet (Butter Chicken), and the aforementioned Hani Kebab. That doesn’t make it a great food court, but there’s just enough variety and quality to give it a passing grade.)
Design/Accessibility: 5.5/10 (The wide corridor and fairly good lighting would seem much less liminal if there were more vibrant stores in the heart of the mall, and the integration on its north end to Maple Ridge’s civic precinct is actually a bit of tidy work. At the same time, it’s still a small basic mall from the early 1980s with a giant parking lot in front.)
X-Factor: 2.5/10 (Our worst X-Factor so far! Truly a grim reminder of what happens when malls become half vacant and underloved for a sustained period of time. Fun as a theoretical exercise but not fun to, you know, actually sit or wander around in.)
OVERALL: 19.3/50 (And yet, not our worst mall of the series! That honour(?) still belongs to Denman Place Mall, owing largely to the fact that Haney has a passable food court and places to sit and fraternize, while Denman has a Burger King and two tables where staff will yell at you if you aren’t using them to play Keno. Still, the clearest example we’ve had yet of the dying mall archetype.)
