Reusing Abandoned Big-Box Superstores Across America
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
Back in suburban Northern Virginia, when a Wal-mart down the street from me closed up, the local (mostly immigrant) community converted it into a mall. They setup dozens of shops separated with curtains, a huge thrift-shop, and an amazing indoor playground. It's become a wonderful community resource and it thrives despite all the big-box stores just up the street. I don't see how you could do this with every empty store, but where communities have the resources and will, this is a great idea.
Leverage has allowed retailers to grow faster than normal, but it can also swing back and shrink them at an even quicker pace.
Way back when Walmart was mainly in Arkansas, I lived in Northern Virginia. The Springfield Mall opened bringing department stores outside the Beltway. Department stores have been in decline ever since. Malls have stopped being a thing just as downtown shopping had stopped being one before them. Through the 80's and 90's I watched department stores go belly up in the Orlando malls. Nothing to do with Walmart.
The Publix was the nearest grocery store to the house I grew up in in Orlando. George Jenkins still set its tone from Lakeland even though it had begun growing across state lines. The tone old George set was 9-5 Monday to Thursday, 9-5:30 on Friday, 9-12 Saturday, Closed on Sunday. Stock boys got a nickel raise every six months. Tipping of the bag boys was encouraged. Tipping the cashiers [all women] was not. The other place women would work was the bakery.
Around 1980, the Albertson's bought the corner lot next door. Hours: 9-11 every day. Heathens could shop on Sunday. Working people could buy groceries after work. It was practical for the California company to open in a cross country market for the same reason it was practical for the Jenkins's company to expand out of state: the deregulation of interstate trucking. It took a few years, but not all that many, for Publix to better serve the public.
My beloved's family is from Kussuth County, Iowa. The small towns in their townships have been dying since German POW's encamped there abouts were repatriated in 1946. Tractors and modern mortgages and Monsanto and college educations are better candidates than Walmart. And local retail? Well piss off the owner of the only quicky mart in Lone Rock and the option is to buy your $3.00 can of beenie weenies and $2.00 roll of toilet paper in the next town over.
People vote with their feet. Whatever it's negative impact, Walmart tends to take people as they are. It doesn't subject them to the whims or moral judgements of its owners. That's a broader change in retail that Walmart embodies. A man can by Legos for his daughter at midnight even if he's sweaty and stinky from an evening shift on the loading dock. His partner doesn't need to put on a pillbox and white gloves and take an afternoon off to shop downtown.
I preferred the old one, to be honest.
There was an amazing used game shop in there up until two months ago that had many old arcade games for sale and for playing on. There was also an incredible electronics shop run by a wonderful old Asian lady that had anything you could imagine hidden away on her shelves, but it also vanished without a trace. I'm hoping something comes in to replace them.
This is all right down the road from the Potomac Mill big-box shopping area. It's marked as the "Depressing Retail" area of this "Judgemental Map of Northern Virginia":
It should be noted that the town is building it back... but with tax-dollars. They've opened a small science center, a huge museum, and a stage theater in an attempt to bring the businesses back to the downtown.
Even after they move out of one, they effecively prevent the local community and private developers from putting it to good use.
As far as I'm concerned, the FTC should be investigating and looking to break them up. In cities, they form an incomplete oligarchy. In smaller communities, they've become a very effective monopoly, and they demonstrate overt, brazen business practices squashing competition to further consolidate and perpetuate this.
In other words, they are not simply competing on "price", anymore. (Where that pricing was already disadvantageous due to political influence with respect to taxes, international trade, et al.)
They are purchasing and exerting outright political and legislative favor to disable competitors including by separating them from otherwise available resources.
20+ years later, there is a WalMart roughly in the town.
An empty Walmart could house lots of server racks. The lack of power and bandwidth make the site unsuitable for that use. The lack of cooling equipment and electrical distribution equipment make the building unsuitable for that use. The sea of asphalt and road frontage that comes with it not only isn't worth paying for, it adds to the operating cost of the facility.
These are custom tailored buildings that have reached the end of their viable economic life located on sites where the land was cheap. Their economics was based on operating at a scale that worked with a geographically large but low density catchment.
The abandoned sites express the lack of market demand. In suburbia, there is a cap on demand for 100 acre retail sites. There is a political cost to down zoning high revenue parcels to lower revenue uses and there isn't much demand for those sites anyway: i.e. an industrial or residential use tends not to benefit from high visibility frontage...for an apartment complex it'd often be a detriment.
Finally, the cost of converting a Walmart to a library or workforce housing or a warehouse or whatever is unlikely to vary much from building new. Construction required for conversion from one occupancy to another tends to be expensive. The building shell and asphalt tend to be significantly less costly than furnishings, equipment, and finishes.
Sure there are unicorns where an abandoned retail mecca becomes a vibrant megachurch. But big boxes sit empty because there isn't market demand for another 200,000 square feet of space in that location. Repurposing Walmarts is like housing people in shipping containers. A desire to be clever trumps rational analysis.
Sometimes, a desire to be analytical trumps the desire to simply observe the unintuitive nature of economics[1,2].
> ...abandoned sites express the lack of market demand...
Market demand is subject to the effects of price stickiness[3]. What was once an expensive building on an expensive piece of commercial real estate, might now be very cheap (thus earning demand), but the nominal price remains for some time (this is usually because the company (e.g., Walmart) has enough money that they can sit on an unused asset, rather than listing it at market price). IOW, there isn't market demand, because the nomial price hasn't reached the market price.
1. http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/4500256609/Green...
2. http://www.containerhomeplans.org/2015/04/what-i-wish-id-kno...
The primary market for abandoned Walmart sites is Walmart', a company like Walmart seeking to compete with it directly. Walmart improves its short and long term prospect by preventing Walmart' from acquiring its former sites cheaply. That's the way real-estate works. Control of a site is a localized but complete monopoly.
If no one is taking over, I'd say it's definitely worth the public resources at least to tear it down.
For most communities, an empty suburban building is not a priority issue.
I've always felt that big boxes should have to put their demolition cost up as a surety bond before construction. Should the store close or go out of business the land could be returned to a field.
Vibrant areas might be able to get the store to do what they want, but they aren't the areas that are going to have a problem when it leaves.
When I envision the big boxes around here, it's mildly unfortunate that they might end up unused, but there is so much open space that they aren't a particularly big concern. By area, most of the US is like that. In areas where there isn't a whole lot of open space, the redevelopment will be more likely anyway.
Of course, whether SmallTown should want Wal-Mart is a valid question. Unfortunately, they probably do, because Wal-Mart moving into LittleTown will probably decimate the local retail economy anyway.
Take, for instance, a Best Buy. A Best Buy could potentially house hundreds, especially considering the vertical space (think bunk-style shelves for sleeping). I'm not suggesting this is good or that it would be comfortable, but we've got more than 4 million people working retail in the US, and retail is going nowhere fast.
IOW, in the markedly more dystopian future that I imagine, a lot of the same people that work in these big boxes will live in these big boxes.
Typically residential and commercial areas are zoned differently. You can't just build a house, nor should you, on a strip mall or in an area that's unsafe for children due to four lane streets with high speed limits, lots of car traffic, no green spaces, no infrastructure to handle thousands of people, no parks, not enough sewage capacity, no public trans, etc.
This would just create another Cabrini-Green style ghetto. Lets not repeat the mistakes of the past.
I really hope we don't choose to do either one to ourselves.
The stall itself is robotic and self-cleaning, so one human attendant can service dozens of locations. The human labor factor is what usually torpedoes the economics of privately-owned public-access toilets, so if you can engineer the robotic functions well enough, your per-customer operating costs can drop low enough that you only need 1 in N to pay you anything to stay in business.
In actual practice the problem tends to be prostitutes using it as their workplace, IV drug users needing a private cop free place to shoot up, and homeless people.
Embracing those problems instead of ignoring them is likely to successfully generate more money.
Back when bathroom attendants were economical, they were the ones that could chase out or discourage the undesirables.
I didn't mention this, but one of the robotic bathrooms I have seen encourages people to leave in a timely fashion by filling itself with water as part of the self-cleaning cycle. That program mentioned the difficulty in getting the squatters out while still serving regular customers.
[Edit for cousin post:] After the door lock times out, the GTFO timer starts. Don't be surprised if your stall fills with unpleasant odors (mercaptans) and sprays of cold water if you decide to try to squat in there without paying.
Or a screwdriver in the latch. Don't underestimate smart apes.
However, these are old buildings with some interesting architectural details, some character to them. They've also survived being around for nearly a century because they were built with stone and brick, rather than the cheap structures that are often thrown up for modern retail stores. I can't imagine a Best Buy shop would still be standing in 60 years without serious dedication to its maintenance. Compare to the factory I live in that sat vacant for 40 years.
Or, as people have been doing for decades, they'll move to suburbs. And suburbs of suburbs. Housing is unaffordable in cities. Suburbs, not so much.
The buildings are not the highest quality, you are going to have issues with the metal and the roof. Supplying energy to heat of cool these are going to be an issue.
The parking lots will have to be patched and repaved as the weather takes its toll.
I think just removing the entire structure would overall be a less costly alternative in the long run.
Walmart likes money. If they could remodel an old store into ... anything ... at a profit, they would. They don't. That says something about the anticipated lifetime of most of the schemes. Also explains why the contemporary examples are new or recent but walmart is an old company. All the alternative ideas tried a decade ago have long since failed so there's nothing to talk about except the more recent experiments that haven't run out of money yet.
Remember a failed walmart is where the worlds most successful retailer could not or could no longer make a buck, for whatever reason. "I'm gonna outdo walmart at running a retail operation" is very unlikely for any value of retail operation.
A side issue is the architecture and design of the building fixes in concrete and steel a certain minimum annual revenue per sq ft below which the structure and system has to fail sooner or later due to lack of income. Its easier to make a small store that generates a higher rate per sq but is limited in size, or a large market that generates a low per sq rate. That would imply whatever the newly built building looks like, its not going to look like a walmart because its already determined that doesn't work at that location.
We tend to think of WalMart as this cash flush behemoth, but the reality is that grocery is a very low margin business (on the order of 3%). They might squeeze a little more out of less efficient competitors, but it's possible that the location could work for a higher margin business or something that's not retail.
The city planners are in 2 parties: those that want to keep the bedroom community the way it is, and those that want to turn it into a walkable city. The first is caught in the past and sees the schools as the major draw. And kind of ignores DINKs as a whole. The latter sees a future where young adults prefer to move to cities, and don't come back.
One problem is that the space is so large. I really like the idea of these become community centers, though I'd prefer the small downtowns get their identity back.
Valley View Mall effectively died a few years ago. It got bought by a new owner who's been trying to get permission to demolish it and build something new in its place. While waiting, he decided to get creative with the mall's contents instead of leaving it dead.
So he converted a good chunk of the mall (I think they used one of the anchors) into a big open Latin American-style market called "El Mercado". It's really cool looking, and the owner is definitely taking advantage of the fact that the surrounding neighborhoods are predominantly Latino.
Another use was converting a good chunk of the empty stores into art galleries, which he leased to local artists for cheap in exchange for their participation in a monthly event called the Midtown Art Walk. And then he converted more stores into a boxing gym and an indoor soccer field.
All of this is specifically to build a sense of community in the area that will carry over to the new development when he finally gets to bulldoze the mall and build his "Dallas Midtown" project (and the city finally authorized the demolition this month, so it should be soon), so it should launch with a well-established community.
Here's an article about the creation of El Mercado: http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/2012/07/as-valley-views-n...
And another article about the current state of the mall: http://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/is-valley-view-mall-dead-...
Can't think of any other big box store that does this, though.
And while on this topic, one of the above mentioned new buildings was required by our 2011 tornado, which much more thoroughly wrecked our high school. The upper half of 11-12th graders were quickly (less than 3 months) ensconced in a failed big box next to our shopping mall, which all in all they were reported to like. (Better than the middle schoolers who were next to a dog food factory in an industrial park. :-)
Space is finite.
Regulations shouldn't be about affordability, they should be about density.
> Regulations shouldn't be about affordability, they should be about density.
That's essentially a different label for the same thing. Affordable housing is dense housing.
In cities, affordable housing is almost always dense. It doesn't apply in the other direction, though. Dense housing isn't necessarily affordable.
But, building more dense housing increases the supply of affordable housing almost 1:1, even if the new dense housing isn't affordable.
In constrained cities. In the linked article there's a pix of the dead walmart in Beaver Dam Wisconsin. I've visited family there, in fact I stayed at the hotel across the street from the dead walmart. It was part of a dead mall, I think. The relevance of this is the new, larger supercenter is literally across the street from a corn farm. Not an isolated farm either.
If your job, perhaps being a retired grandmother, does not require living in the center of silicon valley, then its a VERY nice place to live with tons of outdoor recreation.
Affordable usually implies much lower income, and lower income implies less geographic constraint. The "centeredness" of the job you mention depends incredibly strongly on job title and pay rate. The legendary extreme centeredness of startup jobs is very important to startups, but the other 300+ million citizens live a much less centered life.
Devising a way to cost-effectively stack housing volume in a way that is more acceptable to middle-class buyers than the existing condominiums or multiplexes would do much to alleviate the negative effects of suburban sprawl.
I think that elevating the street/garden level one story off ground level might work. That way you can make all the houses touch each other, and their utility easement tunnels, and still get vehicles in and out. Essentially, you pack the buildings in as tightly as possible, and make people drive or walk over the roofs to get out of the neighborhood. Heavy trucks would probably not be able to enter unless structural support for elevated roads somehow becomes much cheaper.
So you think that having your house literally touch neighbors on both sides and having cars drive over your roof constantly would be more appealing than current condos?
So you get no natural light from at least 2 sides, and little from the front/back (because presumably there are more homes built similarly)? You park on top and walk down a 15' set of stairs to get to your front door?
You'd be living in a home that cost twice as much to build because of the structural requirements for supporting cars. It'd be costly to maintain. And for all this, you basically get the experience of living in a tent city under a bridge.
The whole idea is to remove the "dead" area that is currently solely occupied by residential feeder streets and suburban setbacks.
A 1/8 acre lot (0.05 ha) is 5445 sq.ft. (506 m^2). The average total square footage of new homes in the US is now over 2500 sq. ft., usually divided over at least two levels, making the lawn and garden for many lots at least 3 times the surface area of the house itself. You only need to reinforce the parts that people will actually drive over, and that space will likely be used for laundry, storage rooms, and utility closets. The utility corridors will likely be under the roads, so that's where your power, water, network, and sewer connections will come in to the house. People are a lot more accepting of windowless reinforced concrete bearing walls in their laundry room than in their bedrooms.
If the average lot size is 1/15 acre (0.027 ha), that's 2904 sq.ft. per lot, which is a lot depth of 88' (1/60 mi) with street frontage of 33' (1/160 mi). Give the public way an easement of 66', half out of the lots on either side, with 15.5' sidewalk and greenspace on either side, and 35' street. So on the ground level, you have 33'x35' of clear space, with 33'x20' of topsoil fill for the back garden, plus 33'x33' of space that may be obstructed by soil-filled tree pits, structural support for the street, and utility pipes and conduits. On the first floor, you have 2.5' setbacks between "houses", and 20' for the back garden, giving you 28'x35' of clear building area. Then you stack a third level atop that for another 28'x35'. That's about 3000 sq.ft. of interior space, with a 660 sq.ft. private garden, plus whatever is usable under the street and sidewalk. If basements are economical for that region, that's another 1155 sq.ft., minus the area for supports and bearing walls.
In one square mile, you can then have 30 parallel 2-lane streets with on-street parking, with 8 perpendicular 4-lane streets, for 8640 total buildable lots, each having more living area than the average McMansion. Assuming that you build 40% as parks, government services, and retail rather than residences, and an average occupancy of about 4 people per home, that's 20736 people per sq.mi., which could make your square mile the 14th most densely populated muni-corp in the US, without even having any multilevel apartment buildings.
From what I understand here, your proposal boils down to "make the lots half as big, build the houses directly adjacent to the street, and dig a basement that extends under the street to get some interior square footage". Yes, you could do this, or you could lift the whole thing up one level so the basement isn't really a basement (though I doubt it saves you anything since it's got to be a beefy structure to hold up to road traffic, and it's still going to feel like a basement). I just don't understand why you would do this and who would want to live in this Morlock ghetto. This sounds ugly and expensive and pointless when you could build dense housing without doing any of this.
When I did, my wish-list was as follows.
I wish I had...
- a window that faced a different direction.
- more storage space.
- a parking space closer to my pantry, and at the same level.
- better sound insulation between neighbors.
- an unobstructed view of the southern sky.
- more than one possible cable provider.
- the option for DSL.
- a uniquely numbered address.
- a private outdoor space, suitable for gardening.
- another way to get in and out of the complex.
I wish I had...
- no accessible/visible lawn for the homeowners association to hassle me about.
- a shorter/easier commute.
- locks on my outdoor faucets, because of *that neighbor*.
- any business at all within walking distance.
- some sort of park within walking distance.
- no visible ugly utility boxes.
- lower total housing and utility costs.
- a room that I could use as a home office.
Well, for starters, "affordable housing" is usually used in the context of adding housing. So it's generally already part of the discussion. And secondly, it's not just more, but what kind of more housing. More, yet expensive housing won't help, so "more" is necessary, but not sufficient.
Yes it will. It might not help as much as cheaper housing, but it will help. Any increase to housing stock should lower prices overall. For example, building a luxury apartment building that adds a few hundred expensive units to an area will apply a bit of downward pressure on other parts of the housing market.
There might be a problem if new luxury spaces were too big, but in my experience they are still very small units. In my neighborhood the new luxury buildings have smaller units than mine. Mine isn't luxury just bcause its older and doesn't have a new kitchen.
In big expensive cities I'm not even sure how you'd build non luxury. I think you'd have to make it shitty on purpose.
If you think it's a good idea then start a development company, petition the city for permission, and raise money.
Further, housing is not a purely elastic good. Many luxury/high end places would rather a unit stay vacant for longer than to rent it out at lower prices to someone who might be an "undesirable".
http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/07112015/lets-talk-about...
Proposed changes with some renders.
Would be a great alternative to the other 2 malls within 15 miles of it that thrive compared to Eastern Hills. Even the Dave and Busters cited in the article left and moved to the Walden Galleria.
But - progress is very, very slow in Buffalo and it's suburbs.
While it is good to reuse an existing structure with a little help from zoning the land and supporting utilities can be re purposed to other uses that require good traffic qualities and location; schools, churches, car dealerships and even apartments.
I would think the unmentioned issue is, did the area collapse around the store that supported it or was this simply caused by bigger and better nearby? If its the former then getting people back into the area could be challenging and makes it much more suited to government offices or such
ETA: I don't work for Rackspace, and never have. I also don't own any stock. Just glad they bought the mall.
Sources:
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/realestate/commercial/rack...
2. My sensory experience :-)
Yes, they have an interesting strategy of buying abandoned malls and re purposing them into huge office complexes. The great thing is I guess they get a LOT of real estate for very cheap. If you ever get the chance, I would definitely recommend going inside the Castle, as the San Antonio headquarters is known. We had a lot of warnings to keep our cars locked and laptops secured in the trunks to prevent break-ins, but it seems like things have greatly improved now.
AFAIK, it works for Rackspace because its culture is very very egalitarian: even the CEO has a cubicle (there are many private conference rooms and such for meetings). So basically, they take over a mall and divide the floor space into cubicles and voila, you now have an insane amount of real estate.
They did the same thing with a dying mall in Austin as well. Many people I've met have been amused by this strategy but hey, all that space means that they have an office gym, yoga rooms and whatnot. All for very cheap.
Personally I think its a brilliant idea.
It would be good for municipalities to require shutdown bonds from these big-box outfits. But any town that has the clout to extract that sort of concession from the retailer also has the clout to keep them out entirely, so that's not workable.
Affordable housing? Manufactured housing sites? (meaning indoor trailer parks?) That sort of use might overcome the gross energy inefficiency of these things.