City Life

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America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing? (www.vox.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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A report last fall from Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on increasing housing supply, estimated that strip mall conversions could create more than 700,000 new homes across the United States.

The Biden administration is also excited about the possibility of converting more vacant strip malls into housing, and in October, released new federal guidance to help leaders and developers navigate the unfortunately complex financing process.

By 2021, new apartments were ready to rent on the property, and today the Woburn Village has 350 rental units, amenities like a fitness center and a swimming pool, and retailers that include Sephora and Panera.

“We just looked at the 10 percent that were most well-suited for conversion based on factors like parcel size, proximity to transit, conditions, and vacancy, but it could be much more than that if you changed some of those assumptions,” said Ahmad Abu-Khalaf, a senior research analyst who wrote the Enterprise report.

Like the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, Abu-Khalaf sees rewriting local zoning laws as the biggest barrier to conversions, which is why California authorizing retrofits statewide two years ago was such a big deal.

This summer, a California state agency that oversees building code regulations went a step further and voted to make it even easier for developers to convert commercial property into new housing.

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