apartments. Apparently it isn't a simple proposition because of all of the infrastructure that needs to be added to turn stores into livable areas. But it's still something that needs to be tried.

They've been working on ours for a few years now. I am interested to see how it turns out.

I’ve had patients who lived in one of those old folks’ warehouses (like a series of bland 10-storey concrete warehouses) who had difficulty getting around town to run errands, pick up scripts, and whatnot. Just seems logical to put those spaces to use. Throw in a pharmacy, a general clinic or Urgent Care branch, bus service to the beach, museums, etc., and they’d be set, for the most part. The opportunity to socialize on top of all that would seem ideal for a population (a LARGE one here) that can feel very cut off from everything.

That looks like it was a beautiful building to start with, so what a great way to salvage it!

And yes, seniors aren’t the only ones who could benefit from a set-up like that.

Obviously not things that can't be overcome, but the plumbing is pretty costly and not having a window would be depressing for most people. Definitely an idea worth exploring to reuse the space without having to do a full teardown.

But being able to have pretty much everything right there would be helpful and a way to encourage a more integrated society if outside people could go to the store or use other amenities.

Big screen TVs showing rural and outdoor scenes.

Plumbing is a big one. As you point out, most individual stores don't necessarily have bathrooms and kitchen facilities.

Challenges, but it should be looked into for sure.

Of course, one problem would be that you're forming a bit of an insular community with limited outside access. But is it worse than the typical "retirement" community? The lack of outdoor spaces for activities could be a negative to be sure.

As for the outdoor space, I bet they could turn some of the parking lot into a park.

....interior atreum can suffice. See micro apartments in the arcade, link above.

there are some real issues with this idea. The most problematic would be plumbing.

My local mall, for example, has 130 storefronts. Let's say 30 stay open for food, dining, shopping, medical, etc. Now you have 100 stores, many of which are very large, and would have to be split up in to multiple housing units.

The plumbing infrastructure just isn't there in malls. You can't just take a store with the plumbing for a single employee bathroom and turn it in to 4, 5, or 6 living units.

And don't forget about building codes. The amount of upgrades a 30-year-old mall would need to bring it up to code means it would be cheaper to tear the mall down and build new housing.

… but even if they did tear it down and start over, where else are you going to find a chunk of real estate that size to incorporate a little city within a city? Any surrounding businesses that would anchor themselves to a mall (banks, etc.) would likely be thrilled to be incorporated into something like this.

I saw this comic and couldn’t help thinking of our big, old mall (Sarasota Square), which has been falling into disrepair and I think is being knocked down to simply become yet more fast food places, supermarkets (I think Costco may be moving/expanding that direction) and crap that looks like every other part of town.

Seriously, do we really need another one of THESE? I know of patients who live in boxes like that and never leave home unless they’re going to a doctor’s appointment. Dismal way to spend your “golden years…”

The place in that picture would be a godsend compared to the homelessness/public housing options available to them.

We have a few luxury senior housing options, but most rentals are only a few steps up from public housing.

Most of our's look like this:

senior's housing complex outside of Austin.

I think the rent is about 1200/month.

I still live in market rate housing in Chicago, my rent went up to $1495. It's a nice apartment building built after WW1. One bedroom, with a dining room. Immaculate hardwood floors.

I'm one block from the beach and I can walk to stores. I do my best to walk 5 miles everyday, so the Lakefront trail is a nice amenity.

My life really opened up once I stopped driving.

but also not a direct or easy conversion. Not even sure given the age of many dead malls if it wouldn't be cheaper to tear down and rebuild as you wanted it instead of using the existing infrastructure.

Let's house every unhoused person in this country.

And we should also rehab hospitals that are no longer in use too. We have the means to do this. Estimated cost is that it would cost around $20B to house all unhoused people in America.

Want to hear something really wild that puts things into perspective?
That $20B to house all unhoused people? It's almost the same exact amount that we've sent to Israel since 2023.

Here, I fixed it 😀

Worth considering AND developing! And homeless folks would have a safe place to stay. That alone is a huge benefit.

which includes the taxes we pay.

How to replace the will to destroy and hurt with the will to build and help though?

half the units were for low income housing. Kinda seedy so I passed..
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my elderly back is aching from Pickleball or hiking, guess again!

So IMO there's no need---as long as we're imagining---to worry about a converted mall's "outdoor activities space"! 😁

But I wonder about the commercial viability to the owners of the malls and the land. The cost of conversion has to be borne by someone. But, not going to knock the idea until someone has tried it.

And a strong and steady pull on their patriotism. THIS is something that ALL America can get behind.

and Federal detention/concentration camp centers.

There's money for that.

that ICE bought to warehouse detainees.

After the midterms, after ICE is reined-in, communities can buy-back the buildings and re-furb them any way they want

In the movie, the zombies all returned to the mall because that was the place to be - where everyone mindlessly went in those days. I worked in a retail store in a mall in the early 80s. Around xmas time, they'd all be hanging around the entrance waiting for me to open the gate. The Atari 2600 was the big seller then and they'd rush right in and grab them. They'd have made great zombies in the movie!

Let's see... a supermarket or 2 (different companies), a pharmacy, maybe 2-3 different banks, definitely a Bookstore, maybe a few other retail stores(?): like clothing, shoe shop, an Art & Craft store, food court make it extra nice with big plants, and flowers, 2 - 3 different restaurants, a movie theater, maybe a branch library, too?

Now, you could take an outer section demolish that area and make that footprint into an outdoor sitting area with trees, bushes, flowers, lots of benches, and movable chairs with small tables. Why not?!
.
You could also have a sitting area like that inside as well that's not a food court; just a nice area for hanging out.

Back in the day of the Twin Towers where I spent 11 months there, and would visit if in the area and neded something - was a humongous underground retail area. Didn't have everything listed here, but let's see what did it have....
Supermarket (maybe 2), banks, pharmacies, clothing, and accessories stores, a book store (made me happy!), kiosks, no food court, I don't think there was a theater.
It was cool.

Also mentioned (still looking) a Sam Goody's for those of us who remember (records, CDs, andelectronics). Cafés, bakeries.

ETA. Found a map of the mall.
Reminded me that that is where I probably first had Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream - they had a kiosk.

I used to come off the subway train, go down it's corridor, get to the underground entrance, and go almost all the way across to the elevators at South Tower 2 where you could catch them down there, as well as (of course) the ground floor entrance.

Vid also said the mall was the most profitable per square foot in the USA.
Heh, who knew!
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This can't happen. Same with all the closed big box stores that could be used for other purposes. WI tried about a decade ago to pass a law where if the owners didn't do something about the closed structures the cities could commandeer the property. It just never had a chance since we were all repub then and they are bought. We're just pretending to do it because people are pissed about property taxes going up and the closed stores and malls getting write offs.

Crazy Eddy also... Radio Shack? (rat shack) Lafayette radio? (laughin idiot) and the infamous vacuum tube checker..
My Mom would give me a bag of tubes to check to see which ones worked..
My intro into electronics.. changing tubes on the old Motorola tv... great fun...
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This particular mall was within the city limits of Seattle and I shopped there all the time. It even made it into an article about how it was bucking the trend of other malls.

Nevertheless they knocked it down (or much of it), kicked out going businesses like Ulta, put in three ice rinks (it's supposed to be a community complex but it's expensive and barely accessible to the public). Now they are putting in apartment buildings with almost no egress. The sidewalk across the street from me has been blocked off for years. Construction starts at 5:00 am and goes till about 6:00 pm (it's right outside my bedroom). Dust and noise and the loss of many businesses I shopped at, it's horrible. They kind of pulled a bait and switch because they made a light rail station that was supposed to go to the mall. Then they knocked down the mall.

The piece de resistance is a supposed park that has artificial turf, polished rocks to sit on, and a bunch of umbrellas things that are the color of tangerines and ugly as sin.

Our dying malls could not sport an Ulta. We don't have young people going to malls anymore.

to remember Saturday Night Live doing the scotch tape store and the dying malls thing in the 70s.

Lived here for over 74 years. Trying to decide if I should take offense at the crap state description. Yes, we have a lot of problems, many due to a profit driven Republican as governor and his ilk……like the moron currently having a home address in West Palm. Add the carpetbaggers that have moved here at the invitation of the right wing government.

We don’t need more people or more housing…..our resources will be approaching a critical mass soon. All I hear and see is build, build, build. I’d like to see the malls with their huge paved over acreage returned to a natural state. That would give a bit more recharge to our tainted and depleted aquifers. The developers would hate this, but I’d like to see extremely strict Rate of Growth Ordinances enforced in all counties.

I grew up hunting and fishing central and southwest Florida. The past fifty years, most of my time has been spent on/in the water. In my 74 years, the environment has been tremendously degraded. Our waterways are no longer pristine. Much of the remaining coral reefs may never recover. We continue to lose vegetated uplands, wetlands, and riparian areas to extensive housing communities. It’s sickening…….and big money doesn’t care.

Peace ☮️

rape somewhere else....It's all about the money.......Follow the money...
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There is a mall in my area that has been on life support for years. It is nearly empty. The floor tiles are constantly cracking and the roof constantly springs new leaks. Sometimes they get lucky and leaks form over the broken tiles, so a single plastic bucket can catch the drips and also mark a place likely to cause a trip. Periodically, someone talks about converting it to housing. The mall opened in 1972.
Everything has a design life, and malls were generally intended to last 20 or 30 years. The structure is now 54 years old. It will be bandaided forever.
Even if it was given to someone for free, the costs to renovate and adapt it so that people could live in it would be greater than to tear it down and build a new shopping/living/entertainment area that is more in tune with present day usage patterns. The site has excellent highway connections and can accommodate buses and large trucks.

I 😍 LOVE 🥰 the creativity of this idea! The vision of a self-contained, indoor community where seniors can easily walk to food, a pharmacy, and social spaces is a wonderful concept.

However, when people dive into the actual engineering, plumbing, and commercial real estate realities, these conversions rarely make financial sense. These malls were built as massive concrete boxes with deep, windowless retail spaces and shared, centralized public restrooms.

In order to turn those spaces into safe, code-compliant senior apartments, one would have to completely tear open the concrete foundations to run hundreds of individual private bathroom/kitchen plumbing lines. You also have to slice open the thick exterior structural walls to ensure every single living space has the mandatory natural window light required by law.

On top of that, meeting strict residential fire codes for maximum emergency exit distances inside a sprawling mall maze means constructing entirely new, fire-rated concrete escape corridors throughout the interior.

The ongoing overhead is also astronomical. Heating and cooling those massive, soaring indoor glass concourses and public atriums 24/7 creates a utility and maintenance bill so high that it completely erases any possibility of "affordable" rent for seniors on fixed incomes.

In the end, I think that developers will tell you that it is almost always significantly cheaper, faster, and structurally safer to completely bulldoze a dead mall and build a proper, energy-efficient senior living complex from the ground up than it is to retro-fit a building that was never designed for residential life.

It's a beautiful dream, but the physical blueprint of a retail mall is a massive hurdle.

It will be replaced by a Costco and "other retail" and some apartments.

I'll miss it, but it's been declinging for YEARS.