Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/the-retail-graveyard-what-is-actually-moving-into-americas-abandoned-shopping-malls-now/
There’s something quietly surreal about walking through a shopping mall that has given up the ghost. The food court chairs are still bolted to the floor. The fountain still sits in the center atrium, dry and collecting dust. Once the nerve center of suburban American life, thousands of these structures now stand as enormous, climate-controlled shells, too expensive to tear down and too large to ignore. The question of what comes next turns out to be far more interesting than the decline itself.
As of 2024, there were an estimated nearly 34 million square feet of empty retail space across the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. had an estimated housing supply deficit of 3.8 million homes. Those two numbers, sitting side by side, explain a great deal about why dead malls have become something of a national fixation, not just for urban planners, but for housing advocates, tech companies, healthcare systems, and communities desperate for something to replace a lost anchor.
Apartments Where the Anchor Stores Once Stood
As of January 2024, at least 192 shopping malls across the country were planning on converting space into apartments, according to real estate consulting firm Realogic. The scale of this shift is hard to overstate. Retail-to-residential conversions range from apartment buildings springing up in what were once mall parking lots or the former sites of closed big-box stores, to partial or…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-06-29 12:01:00
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