From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"
"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."
Back in the year 2000, someone created the Deadmalls.com website that was notable enough to get a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadmalls.com
And it turns out there was a book published in 2002:
"Greyfields into Goldfields: Dead Malls become Living Neighborhoods"
https://www.amazon.com/Greyfields-into-Goldfields-become-Nei...
...just a few random older articles from DDG:
From 2000: "Retail Darwinism Puts Old Malls in Jeopardy"
"The fully enclosed shopping mall, that island of boxy chain stores and lost apostrophes in a sea of asphalt, was not born in California. But this seems to be the place where people are digging its grave, at least in its present form."
https://web.archive.org/web/20150527125625/https://www.nytim...
From 2001: "Dying shopping malls reborn as old-fashioned downtowns"
https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-12/article...
From 2003: "Malls: Death of an American icon"
https://web.archive.org/web/20030707142032/https://money.cnn...
Cory Doctorow was talking about dead malls in 2003:
https://boingboing.net/2003/04/19/dead-mall-contest-re.html
From 1998: "Enclosed malls losing luster as well as tenants"
"Mintz thinks the vacancies signal a deeper problem -- that malls are outdated and out of touch with the needs of today's shoppers."
https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/1998/02/09/st...
From 2018: "America’s malls are dying. Owners are hoping virtual reality and fitness centers will save them"
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-malls-revival-2018091...
Of course there are a plethora of recent articles as well:
https://duckduckgo.com/?va=v&t=ha&q=%22Malls+are+dying%22&ia...