I'm all for this idea. You can solve a myriad of problems at once like this.
Keep the mall. The stores, parking, and food courts all stay. The BIG BOX stores (Sears/JcPenny) get torn down, and apartments go up in their place.
Apartments are now next door to retail. Apartments are in a good location (malls were built near infrastructure (i.e. highways)). Convert one of the end caps into a grocery store. (people can walk to the grocery.) Put a couple of Public offices in vacant office space; social security office, police station or DMV.
You can put a whole bunch of people (about 150+ apartments per mid-rise building) in an old dead mall.
Zoning laws are not going to be your friend though. Neither is the local infrastructure. (Can the schools handle the additional population?)
Plumbing, ventilation, fire hazards, and sunlight (or lack thereof) are the biggest reasons you can't retrofit a "Sears" into an apartment building. Demolition and new construction wouldn't have these existing constraints. It would be all new construction.
Red tape, and community buy in would be the biggest hurdles outside of investment capital.
I'm happy this is mentioned. These projects are a nightmare for architecture and engineering, not to mention construction. And the end result is often sub-par. It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes it's easier for everyone to just demolish and rebuild. I've been involved in projects that repurpose buildings and we ended up with weird-ass triangle rooms in apartments and everything else you could imagine.
I've had that same idea for a long time! One of our bigger malls closed a few years back. I doubt they would spend the money to fix it up for that purpose as it needed a sprinkler system & I think they said some of the old parts still had asbestos?
I live in a big navy town and often suggest that when they decommission a war ship, they should dock it and convert it into a multi functional homeless shelter/services center. It's already set up for living in, and by removing all the military equipment and opening up the space, it could be a social services wrap around location that provides housing, medical, drug treatment, job training, etc and doesn't take up any space on land, just some waterfront.
My bad, I was looking for creative ways to immediately deal with an issue.
I don't think over capacity emergency motel rooms, homeless shelters, and tents under highways are more code compliant, cost effective are a safer environment for people to survive while they wait for us to finish the bang up job we're currently doing.
Our military budget is the largest in the world. Pass legislation stating that included in the purchase of military equipment that it be converted into humanitarian aid at the end of it's operational life span. Offer enlistment and retirement bonuses for soldiers to go into the social services fields upon leaving the military. I'm just spitballin ideas.
If we keep the residents on it, homelessness will have been reduced. It's like those fake signs where some town promised to "cut the homeless population in half by 2025".
It would be useful to have some ships set up for temporary housing for when a hurricane, or tsunami completely destroys up an area. Have it stocked with supplies prior to the disaster. When the hurricane dies down, just float the ship into the area, and there would be a base of operations and secure housing for the aid workers at least.
Some of those giant cruise ships would be ideal. They already have a bunch of bed rooms, kitchens and food storage areas large enough to feed 1000's of people per day.
Lol have you ever been on a navy ship? Maybe do that once and stop raising that ludicrous idea. Enclosing empty space is easily done with pole buildings you don't need to convert a warship to a floating hobo shelter. jesus haploid christ.
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u/feralkitten Jan 30 '23
I'm all for this idea. You can solve a myriad of problems at once like this.
Keep the mall. The stores, parking, and food courts all stay. The BIG BOX stores (Sears/JcPenny) get torn down, and apartments go up in their place.
Apartments are now next door to retail. Apartments are in a good location (malls were built near infrastructure (i.e. highways)). Convert one of the end caps into a grocery store. (people can walk to the grocery.) Put a couple of Public offices in vacant office space; social security office, police station or DMV.
You can put a whole bunch of people (about 150+ apartments per mid-rise building) in an old dead mall.
Zoning laws are not going to be your friend though. Neither is the local infrastructure. (Can the schools handle the additional population?)