Imagine apartments built into what used to be department stores, (Oh, you’re JC Penny 203? I’m at Sears 106). Get those old arcades up and running. Set up meal stations at the food court. Once people actually live there, stores will start to move back in.
If I’m unable to finish my life in my own home, that doesn’t sound like a terrible option.
Oh damn…
they’ve already started turning them into rental units because that’s apparently the entire American economy now
mall walks!
With those moving walkways you see in airports.
Those are also the “mall rat” generations, so it’d be pretty fitting lol.
We can watch the original Fast and Furious, recreate a mockup of HTML eBay and put 5hp stickers on our mobility scooters with RGB under glow lighting, and sub’s around our nitrous bottles.
I live my life one quarter footprint store front at a time…
mobility scooters with RGB under glow lighting
This but unironically. I think I need to find someone willing to let me do this to their scooter or wheelchair; I’ve got parts to spare and if it gets even a few chuckles it will be worth doing.
And, naturally, we’d be hauling boomboxes blasting gangsta rap in the baskets of our mobility scooters. lol.
Our generation’s old-folks home gonna be lit
I’m thinking this leads to MegaCity 1 type situations like in Dredd.
Have never seen it, but will take your word on it. lol
It’s worth watching
bc it will become our new reality. A bit of a… different take on the future than Star Trek shows, think more what led up to the Bell Riots rather than what happened afterwards.
I think that’s the point.
I’m down and claiming the candy store in 113!
Instead of puzzles and bingo night, we’re having GoldenEye tournaments and D&D night!
No Oddjob!
That’s just assumed. Sign me up for the Pistols: License to Kill league.
I’ll take a Payless Shoes. Usually at one of the ends, sort of tucked away. Good bit of space, and quick access to the parking lot.
Oh yeah, like 90% of that parking lot can get repurposed into a park. Throw a bus stop in there.
This isn’t a too shabby of an idea. It probably won’t be used but a mix of stores and homes in one building sounds great.
That would be a cool place to live to me.
ITT: people want cyberpunk megabuildings
The idea of apartments centered around a grocery plaza has been a thing for a while. It’s almost an answer, except it still requires transportation to everything else. Plus the stores tend to be higher prices to support the cost of property and because they can.
Add a metro station, a large parking garage, should work
apartments centered around a grocery plaza has been a thing for a while
Do you mean like… a town?
A town is a bit more than that, but it is how towns typically began, from a central trading place and nearby settlements. Only this is a planned concrete parking lot and established chain along with fully built domiciles, already in a city/town’s jurisdiction.
Only this is a planned concrete parking lot
That’s where it all falls down. Mandatory parking space kills cities. The point of a centralized commercial area with residential around is that people will walk to it.
I would love to see this kind of repurposing of properties to be far more common! Malls tend to be fairly central, so they make ideal locations for being nearby everything a person could need in a residential setting.
Cool idea but lack of natural light could be an issue.
Hey, that’s a benefit to some of us…
And walking down to the food court to use a bathroom may be, ahem, problematic for a retirement community.
There was a dead mall in a nearby city that was finally bulldozed to make way for apartments. It’s taken decades and nowhere near habitat yet. Sort of a start though.
Stahp, I’m not even 40 yet.
And you won’t be able to retire in 20 years, or 30, maybe 40, if you’re lucky
Nah. Vaporwave themed laser tag arenas. Let’s go.
That would be really good, but this idea has been explored and unfortunately it is only viable on a very narrow amount of buildings. Most malls aren’t properly built to be housing and the costs of adapting them for housing exceed the cost of just building new housing elsewhere. And the costs of tearing it down and rebuilding are even greater. Overall, Malls are economic net negatives for communities, all single use infrastructure constructions are.
This is the answer.
A cheap / half assed conversion would be a ghetto. It would be awful.
Sanitation would be a huge problem also. In an apartment you have access to air from the outside. Imagine everyone living in a box in the same enclosed space. Yes I understand malls have gargantuan (and expensive) air conditioning systems. It would still stink.
Not to mention the money. Even a derelict mall is still worth many millions of dollars. You have to buy or lease the building from them.
You’d be much better off creating a walkable community of low-cost housing in a low-density semi-rural area.
This is now my favorite housing idea ever.
They tore down the big, stagnating mall a few minutes from my place years ago. It’s still a big, empty lot.
This would have been a much better and surely most cost-effective solution. Instead, we’re probably eventually gonna get another soulless office park in spite of dwindling demand.
I didn’t know this, on account of like not knowing a lot of land owners. But I did know one (for sure), and they had some property that unfortunately burnt down. It was more economically sound for them to keep the place an empty lot with a guard and a gate than to build something back up. I think that’s naners. But also the whole situation was some kind of nanas.
I heard the same thing for landlords in the past. That having the property in any state is better than having to reinvest that cash into upkeep. So you don’t particularly care about the renter’s life quality, as much as you care that they keep floating money up to you and not complaining as things fall apart around them. And keeping people in crisis mode is a great way to counter any sort of counter-measures they can bring down on you. But also keeping public support organizations under-budget and overwhelmed is a solid way of sending the message “you’re on your own.”
I know it’s kinda like a learned helplessness thing - but when everything around you is shit, and you’re trying your best and just keep sinking - it’s tough to fight assholes. But this is all er…my thoughts on the matter. I don’t know anything definitively. Just figured they’re banking that property until it’s time to sell. And anything that goes into it - is money that cuts overall profits.
you have to go all the way down below the dirt to prep a site for residential units. With a toilet, shower, and sink per unit, the density of sewer and water plumbing is much higher than commercial. Fire codes also demand egress points (a.k.a. windows) for every bedroom - hard to do Inside a big box retail space.
How do earth-sheltered homes comply? I’ve seen a few, and they have no windows in most of the rooms, including bedrooms. And there’s a few who’ve taken to living in caves, old mines, and decommissioned missile silos. There must be an exception to this code.
Forget that, how to tower blocks comply? There isn’t a single exterior fire escape on any of the multi-story apartment buildings anywhere in my entire county, and some of those fuckers are 7 or 8 stories tall. Your choices in the event of fire are an interior stairwell, or splat.
In modern (post 70’s) buildings, the interior stairwell is the emergency fire exit. New York (and some other old cities in the US) buildings are stereotypically plastered with external emergency fire stairs because they are so old and their internal stairs aren’t fit (are actually a fire hazard) for emergency exit. The exterior fire escape is the exception to the building code, not the rule. They’re there to compensate for the fact the buildings predate most of our modern understanding of fire and other accidents management. Modern multi-story apartments are way more resilient to fire hazards than a 1920’s building, even when they are taller.
On the event of a fire you are supposed to leave your apartment and run down stairs, for which it should be: equipped with emergency lights, properly signalized to indicate exits, and use only doors with push bars towards the exterior. A well built building will have all rooms with a direct line of sight towards the apartment exit, fire alarms on every floor, extinguishers in all common areas (ideally every apartment should have one inside for the tenants), a fire hydrant or fire fighting water point in front of the building and a clearly signalized safe spot outside (distance away from the building so the risk of getting hit by something falling from the building during an earthquake is lower). The building should have fire retardant protection between each floor and between the common areas and the apartments.
This is not from any particular code, I’m no expert on any of that, just what I was taught from a firefighting volunteer friend, it is really good information to assess the safety of a building as a potential renter.
It’d be kind of neat to build adjoining residential structures onto an existing mall such that the mall would be a common indoor area. Suppose the HOA dues would be murder, though. 😆
Also the weight for housing is much higher than the structure is designed for with large open space retail. If the thing didn’t collapse, it would probably sink into the ground enough to cause problems.
Now, if one could find a way to replace the department store footprints with housing, and have the mall corridor administered by a municipal authority without some criminal venture capital thief, something like this could be a great way to create practical compact and walkable living spaces. We need stuff like this, but no one in real estate can act in good faith with long term sustainability. Quarterly return vampires are too deep into their suicide run to handle sustainable life goals, even if the doors fall off mid flight.
Malls are usually multiple stories. Couldn’t you do all the plumbing on the first floor to avoid going underground. And then add structural reinforcement at the first floor to prevent higher floors from collapsing / sinking? Yeah for egress you’d have to put the bedrooms along the exterior walls. But I’m sure you could still get plenty of use over the space which does not border an exterior wall both as part of the unit and as part of some shared community area.
Is a mall on Black Friday ( in the mall heyday) really lighter than a residence of the same footprint? Or is the average weight over time more important than a dozen hours every once in a while?
The more open a floor plan appears, where there are not large support columns, the lower the weight bearing capacity will be in general.
With something like modern skyscrapers that appear to have open floor plans, there is a massive structure somewhere within the design. The structure is usually in the center built around the elevators and stairs, although there are other methods too. This structure is engineered for the specific loads of each floor and the total structure, along with various environmental factors such as weather. Like all structures, this starts with a foundation that is large enough for the designed load with a small margin of safety added. The cost of the foundation is directly related to the weight bearing capacity. No one is building structures with substantial extra unused capacity. Likewise, people like the aesthetics of open indoor spaces. This involves designing a structure with the minimal amount of load bearing capacity so that it does not need support columns throughout for the roof and upper floors. This particular aesthetic constraint means that the total load bearing capacity of department stores is very close to what you see in a typical store. If you start adding a bunch of walls and furniture to subdivide this space, there us absolutely no chance that the structure could handle the load. Even if you would like to add support columns, the foundation is engineered for the load. You can’t reinforce something like this in a cost effective way. The size and depth of the pad, rebar density and structure all must be substantially different. You’re likely to need piles or other features that tie in the structure to deeper bedrock elements of the underlying earth.
I guess I’m picturing a mall with lots of support beams in the stores themselves, but not many in the hallways. I wonder if my local mall growing up was originally built for a different purpose. I can’t really picture any other malls, but I’ll keep an eye out when I visit a different one.
Bet you’re real fun on renovation shows…
…I want someone like them working on every single renovation
when internet still basically consisted of angelfire and geocities (yes, even before myspace), we used to go to the mall and pester the goth kids smoking cigarettes by the mall entrances who were there because they also had nothing else to do
Whatever.
Go to Abercrombie and buy another polo shirt, conformist. /S
