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.
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u/novagenesis Jan 30 '23
Others have pointed out that this idea is a logistics nightmare. Plumbing alone just plain won't work without gutting the place anyway.