For years folk have been joking about turning malls into Gen-X retirement communities so they can feel right at home. Welp…
EDIT: Cool idea, but they need to ban short-term rentals. I guarantee that more than half the units there are already exclusively on Airbnb.
This sounds nice if the apartments were a bit bigger and airbnb was banned, but I can’t say I would enjoy living there as is.
It looks like they’re reusing old shop spaces mostly as-is. Not much renovation beyond the bare minimum, and it’s a historic mall. Makes sense that they’d be undersized and not too comfortable. Probably the most practical solution.
Which can be fine in this particular instance, but this isn’t the general model we had in mind.
Sounds like this particular project is just a shitty one. You can have apartments larger than 250 square feet. And you can have full amenities with more work put into it.
Seems like CNBC chose the cheapest possible mall apartments to explore.
the Arcade Mall in Providence, Rhode Island
lmao. I can’t be the only person who finds it amusing that this is like half a mile from the mall that Michael Townsend’s group built that secret apartment in.
Conversion of properties from one use to another fucking sucks.
I have worked in many industrial buildings that were converted to offices, and none of them had much in the way of human considerations.
I’ve lived in office to residential conversions, and while habitable they had many caveats. From utilities literally carving out spaces in rooms, odd shaped rooms, pillars in the middle of spaces, hallways barely big enough for an adult, poor lighting and little to no accessibility. The contrast between living in a purpose built residential building is black and white.
Buildings are built for a purpose. Once they are no longer needed for that purpose, tear them down and replace them with what is needed.
Retrofits allow the landed gentry to continue making money on their assets with minimal additional investment, at the expense of those using those spaces (which is never the owners)
