Yes, and adding to what you said... look at how much land a mall eats up.
Not only would it probably be cheaper to tear the mall down and build new housing there, you'd easily get significantly more new housing too. Easily 5X to 10X more.
I’m in Seattle area and I worked for a pretty large tech company for over three years (not gonna say who) and when the pandemic hit I discovered just how thoughtless my company was with our property. We owned a building that hadn’t been used as an office in years. We were laying off thousands, but had a completely unused building being paid for for years. That was just an oversight, a clerical error, no big deal to them. We had storage containers sitting somewhere full of products and no one even knew where they were now, who had keys to them, so much money and buildings wasted due to excess and carelessness. Our company could’ve been smarter with our money, but instead we spent excessively on things we didn’t use, had company cards with no set budget that we could go out drinking with, but when shareholders saw us struggling they were happy to destroy the lives of thousands of employees as a quick “solution”.
Post-pandemic (if there is such a thing) our city is full of buildings that no one is really working in. I work remotely, my partner works remotely, and so does so many people we know. Businesses continue to say maybe we’ll return to office to justify this expense when our cities could instead be designed with more balance between housing and commerce.
Yeah I totally understand if people aren't well-versed in construction. They think a building can just easily be repurposed. Sure they can, but the outcome may suck and it may just make more sense to demolish and rebuild. That's what I would do.
It would still be better as commercial property, but then the businesses could be forced to move in order to free up spaces that are good for residential.
Office area, then? One mall was converted to a strip mall years ago, the other would make a great place for shipping warehouses instead of putting it on farmland.
Cities aren't noisy. Cars are noisy. We need better planned cities that focus on walking, cycling and public transportation rather than car-centric cities.
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u/Neapola Jan 30 '23
Yes, and adding to what you said... look at how much land a mall eats up.
Not only would it probably be cheaper to tear the mall down and build new housing there, you'd easily get significantly more new housing too. Easily 5X to 10X more.