I guess I wasn’t clear, that is pretty much what I would anticipate. A library and a store are very similar occupancies, so I would expect the applicable fire codes to be very similar.
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So much room for Soylent Green factories!
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Part of the problem is that the owners of the property often find they get more money out of letting the properties stay vacant and collecting tax writeoffs on them, rather than trying to rehabilitate them into something useful. We have a couple of strip malls that are 80% empty, but the owners are letting them stay empty, rather than reduce rents to encourage new tenants.
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This is generally true. It is not always true, and may not be in the event of the owner of a space zoned for a particular purpose that is not being used for that purpose (and whose owner has no plans to use for that purpose).
In any case, if a building is long-vacant, the likely reason is that it has basically no value to potential buyers, which means its market value is low, which means it should be cheap to acquire by eminent domain (it won’t in practice, I assume). No one holds allodial title for any property in the U.S. You * do not* have the right to do whatever you wish with your property, even if you think you should.
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AAAAAMEN! Testify!
Yes BB algorithm, that is all I wanted to say.
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That’s what happened with earlier industrial spaces (warehouses, factories) in walkable, high-density cities. But those buildings were over-engineered for extra-heavy-duty use, for the same reason all old buildings were over-engineered: that’s the material and technology available. And those buildings will last for a century, easy. When they got turned into cheap housing/art space, they had many years left.
Big boxes? Under-engineered. They’re big balloons of concrete block and cheap roofing, with minimal plumbing run through the concrete pad, intended to last 20 years at most.
We’ve got one that’s now a megachurch. It’s vile for many reasons, but the army ant nature of both big boxes and megachurches gets obvious when you see them in the same place, in sequence.
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I posted this in the ToysRus thread just recently, seems obvious to turn these big boxes into giant Cannabis grow houses. I read that big warehouse spaces in the Northeast were being snapped up in anticipation of legalization.
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Yeah, the fantasy article also involved the boho-ized big box properties eventually getting gentrified, which was really a step too far into unbelievability given that the buildings weren’t expected to last anywhere near that long. But so much of the US infrastructure and buildings are being used far beyond their expected lifespan, so maybe that’s the future of arts spaces - buildings decade past their replacement dates.
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depending on the scale, and the specific architecture, they can make very nice houses
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KKR, Bain and Vornado purchased Toys “R” Us in 2005 in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout, but more than $5.3 billion of the purchase price was paid using debt. Toys “R” Us has adapted to many changes in the toy industry since Charles Lazarus started the company as a baby furniture store in 1948, but spending $400 million annually to service its debt made it impossible in 2017 for Toys “R” Us to deal with the competition coming from online and big box retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart.
“The company’s overleveraged capital structure has constrained it from making necessary operational and capital expenditures, including investing in the revitalization of stores,” said Brandon in his bankruptcy-court declaration.
Bankers are indeed the cause of Toys R Us going bankrupt. Well, private equity firms playing leveraged buyout games with the help of banks.
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Isn’t that to block the doors and keep the zombies out?
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“When a company is in decline, and as probability of bankruptcy increases”
No these private equity firms require a healthy company, not one near bankruptcy, to extract value and load up with debt. By the time bankruptcy court is in the picture, they’re on to the next one.
Ah Bird, I’m willing to bet you get away with this bollocks much of the time bc you almost sound like you know what you’re talking about.
However, a few other commenters accurately described the shortcomings in your logic. So I’ll leave it at that. There was a write up back in 2012 when Bain Capital was running against Obama. It’s well written and in the link below.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/04/18/mitt-romney-american-parasite/
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Sometimes that doesn’t end up well.
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The other problem with using these for the homeless is that many of the homeless are also carless, and the majority of these built on cheaper land further out from the city center where transit options are limited.
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Most of these buildings aren’t designed with large clear spans. You’d have to do a lot of expensive structural retrofitting to get enough space to put in an NHL size ice sheet or indoor soccer field.
When Ben Franklin went tets up, the one nearest the home of my youth eventually was converted into an indoor mini golf course. They simply worked around the existing structural columns, even incorporated a few into play hazards.
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and this apparently, is how they build libraries in new york city
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It was reported by an employee almost 20 years ago which is making it difficult to find or properly attribute, but the ceremony was described at length and I think -is- emblematic of retail management with backgrounds in competitive sales.
Okay, agreed it will be ideal if they can be converted to housing. One iconic L.A. mall is being converted to office space.
Since it’s already next to a rail station and they will pour half a billion into renovations, I wish they’d do it as a mixed use campus with a housing element.
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An indoor “park,” like a coffee shop or those Borders of yore.
Living in the north east, I wonder why there aren’t more indoor public spaces for use in the cold winters and humid, hot summers.
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Every time I read the amount of money pouring into fitness, I can figure out why these malls aren’t running after gyms. Practically everyone is opening a gym or fitness boutique.
