Founder of ADL Ventures and Fraunhofer at MIT | Creating HardTech Ventures at the Corporate Start-up Interface | Expert in Industrialized Construction & ClimateTech | Senior R&D Leader, Board Member & Serial Entrepreneur
The US faces a dual challenge of a retail apocalypse and a housing affordability crisis. A new report by Enterprise Community Partners suggests that converting just 10% of vacant strip malls into housing could yield over 700,000 homes, providing a potential solution. The process is often simpler than transforming urban office buildings, offering an opportunity to repurpose underutilized spaces. Have you come across successful examples of mall conversions in your community, and how could this innovative approach address housing shortages in various regions? 🤔 https://lnkd.in/g9w2gK33 Gary Fleisher Ken Semler Daniel Small, Steve Burrows Tim Seims Greg Otto Matthew Haas Jennifer Castenson Anthony Gude, Dana Taylor Gon Zifroni Robert (Bob) Long Gene Meredith Audree Grubesic Tina Holtz Paul Richards
Paul Richards
8mo
In the UK the less intelligent people are trying to transform shop and storage space into housing, this isn’t the best way to solve housing shortages, shops and other spaces weren’t designed for living space, “living” space, usually they are poorly designed and retrofitting them for residential use isn’t a viable solution, it’s a knee jerk reaction by the landlords who have milked the high street for too long and now are facing hardship just like the shop and business owners whose livelihoods were reduced because of high rents and unrealistic Buisness rates, in the UK our high st are a true reflection of economic downturn, no creative accounting can hide the decline the precinct.
Before I read the article, it seemed like this was about adapting existing buildings (vacant strip malls and power centers) for residential uses. I've seen a couple of examples of that done well... & would love to see more of those kinds of redevelopments - but that is very site-specific. After reading the article and considering what I have seen of most strip malls and power centers, it typically comes down to "very scrapable buildings".
Bill Mague
8mo
How about build new housing on the acres upon acres of parking paved for these now-failed albatrosses of suburban history? No one developer/entity wants to take on the whole thing, and any neighborhood needs shops, restaurants, and indoor space in the winter (market-dependent.) This should be a $10-15/sf land acquisition for the entire site to allow re-populating of the area.
This could be an opportunity for either panelized systems, OR, (crazy thought), modified shipping containers. Keep the food courts, add in medical /mental heath facilities, maybe a grocery store. Sounds in line with what Armelle Coutant Candice Delamarre and the team at Kit Switch are doing.
Does "converting" mean renovating existing dead strip centers to add residential units either within the existing buildings or adding them (perhaps above the existing buildings)? Or, does it mean scraping the dead strip center and redeveloping them as new multifamily or mixed-use projects? There's a big difference between the two approaches.
Karl Dixon
8mo
creating jobs, while generating housing stock , while raising intellectual capital, providing diversity of needed skills to grow the economy , would be a way to go?
Problem Solver/Innovation Engineer/CEO at Honor Built Homes
8moI have long thought about this, but how would you add or provide access to daylight or windows in such large buildings? I wonder about egress code requirements and fire code requirements in conversion of these buildings. It's a great consideration and topic for discussion.