Rescuing the Castaways

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Planning - February 2011

Rescuing the CastawaysEmpty boxes of all sorts are being converted to new uses.

By James Krone, Jr.

Many cities have saved unique historic buildings by adapting them for new and profitable uses. Butproperties left stranded since 2008 by the receding flood of cheap loans are different. These are notone-in-a-million properties but one of a million - the glut of office towers, McMansions, and condosleft behind by a decade of speculation, and the enclosed malls, big box outlets, and car dealershipsorphaned by sagging retail sales of all kinds. Finding new purposes for these castaways may not beso easy.

Housing affects the largest number of properties. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, nearly19 million houses, condos! and apartments stood vacant in the third quarter of 2010. That is partlybecause the nation's housing stock increased by 8.65 million units from 2002 to 2007 while thenumber of households increased by only 6.7 million. While investors (including speculators) will snapup cheap properties, houses that were built far from transportation, jobs, and shops, or that areoverscaled for the needs of future buyers, may take years to move.

The obvious way to bring these zombie houses back from the dead is to convert unsalable new unitsinto more marketable kinds of housing. Many cities have too many empty condos and not enoughaffordable rental housing. In New York City in late 2009, a coalition of housing activists held ademonstration dubbed Operation: Empty Condo-Conversion near the old Albee Square Mall indowntown Brooklyn. Members of the Right to the City Movement, a national and localantigentrification organization, had cataloged more than 600 local buildings with vacantcondominiums, which they demanded be converted into affordable housing units.

McMansions also present a dilemma. "I do wonder," says urban blogger and consultant Aaron Renn,"if McMansions can or will be subdivided into apartments the way many older in-city mansions wereduring the decline of the urban core."

The answer suggested by past economic downturns is yes, at least for the in-town versions wherelocal authorities are lax in monitoring house conversions into multiunit buildings. Because of theirlarge size, some McMansions have been put to uses never envisioned by their builders, from grouphomes to studios. However, as Christopher leinberger, the University of Michigan real estateprofessor and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, has warned, unsellable properties on thegeographic fringe of many metropolitan areas could become "the next slums."

Any number of visionary and "green" plans have been proposed as alternatives, such as miningunsold houses for building materials (see "Save It All!" December 2010). As part of a 2009 exhibit ofnew ideas about the built environment, one Irish design firm proposed, only half kiddinglYr to convertunfinished houses into crematoria, chapels, and tombs - a permanent residential subdivision for thedead.

Redundancy, reimagining, and reuse

School districts in areas of declining population face the same problem as housing developers: Bothhave too much space for demand. This is especially true in parts of the industrial Midwest andNortheast, where long-term economic decline has been aggravated by the recession and the flight ofYOUngjOb-~se~e_ke_r_s_.__ ~ •• __ ~

Consultant Charles Eckenstahi and Carl Baxmeyer of Detroit-based McKenna Associates estimatethat Michigan's-student populatron could drop by nearly eight percent between 2000 and 2030,leaving the state with 6,000 more classrooms than it will need. In Kansas City, Missouri, the problem

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Rescuing the Castaways

Some redundant school buildings are likely to be mothballed for future use. The question is, what todo with the rest? A team from Cleveland State University'S Levin College of Urban Affairs recentlycompiled case studies of new uses for vacant buildings, including schools. One of the authors, urbanstudies professor Robert Simons, notes that most of the roughly 100 projects the team studied wererecycled as rental housing, including condos.

The converted-to-condos school dates to the 19805, and is probably the most common kind ofrepurposed building. Such projects have been completed in Medford, Massachusetts, the WestRoxbury neighborhood of Boston, Seattle, New York City, suburban Pittsburgh, and many other cities,although the pace of such conversions has slowed as the housing market has become overbuilt.

At the same time, pupil counts are zooming in some suburban districts. And even districts withdeclining enrollments may need more space, if, for example, they consolidate closed schools at onelocation. Brand-new schools such as charter schools also need space. One way to meet their needs isto make use of defunct retail space. Over the past decade, charter schools in Laramie, Wyoming, andCharlotte, North Carolina, have opened in old Kmarts renovated for the purpose.

The public school district serving the Phoenix neighborhood of Maryvale found the new space itneeded in the vacant 300,000-square-foot Maryvale Mall. The district set up its central warehouse inthe mall's former bowling alley and remodeled former storefronts for use by two new schools, amiddle school and an elementary school, opened in 2000 and 2001, respectively. Although they sharea media center, kitchen, auditorium (the mall movie theater), and gymnasium (a former skatingrink), the schools operate as separate facilities.

Converting existing buildings offers a faster (if not necessarily cheaper) way to add classroom spacethan building from scratch. Safety upgrades are one significant cost, and at Maryvale, the large mallparking lot had to be unpaved to accommodate grass playing fields. Even 50, the conversion cost only$15.9 million for the two schools.

Risen from the dead

Estimates are necessarily inexact, but the numberof "dead malls" in the U.S. is certainly in thedozens. A mall might be dead only in financialterms, since most remain open but are under-tenanted. (They might be more accuratelydescribed as malls on life support.)

It has been at least a decade since the nation'sdesigners and developers began searching foralternative uses for moribund malls, especiallyenclosed ones. Entries in the Dead MallsCompetition, held in 2004 by the nonprofit LosAngeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design,included conversions of malls into windmill farms orwetlands dotted with "island" stores.

Most mall owners want merely to make theirproperties profitable again, and most spaces arere-leased rather than being repurposed. But manyailing properties are more valuable for their landthan for their buildings, which means that thenation's economic recovery may see many of theold malls razed and their sites redeveloped formixed use projects or town centers - new versionsof the ersatz Main Streets that were thecenterpiece of the enclosed mall.

However, the old shopping centers often havegenerous spaces indoors and out, and they occupy

convenient sites, making them potentially attractive to office and institutional users. Randall Park Mallin the Cleveland suburb of North Randall was described as the world's largest shopping center when itopened in 1976. After it closed in 2008, a new owner gave it a new name - Devland City - and anew plan to make the complex a hub of foreign trade and manufacturing.

The one-million-square-feet-plus Omni International Mall opened in 1976 in downtown Miami butdeclined over the years. After closing the mall in 2000, Omni's owners announced various plans forthe property (induding turning the giant structure into a telecom hub), but none got off the ground.Today, parts of the mall are offices occupied by Miami International University of Art & Design, theGreater Miami Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Passport Agency, and others.

In Niagara Falls, New York, plans are well along to turn about one-third of the roughly 70,000 squarefeet of the vacant Rainbow Centre shopping mall into a culinary institute run by Niagara CountyCommunity College. In 2009, the Vanderbilt University Medical Center established a new facility atthe aging One Hundred Oaks Mall in Nashville. Vanderbilt Health One Hundred Oaks now houses 22specialized clinics in 300,000 square feet.

Artists have always been drawn to the low rents in clapped-out sections of cities. Some malls areserving the same purpose in the suburbs. To attract people to the struggling Westfield Crestwoodmall (formerly Crestwood Mall) just off 1-44, in the southwest St. Louis suburb of Crestwood, newowners since 2008 have offered empty storefronts to area arts groups to use as low-cost gallery andperformance space, classrooms and offices, meeting space and shops, and storage until commercialredevelopment plans could be realized.

Many enclosed malls added grocers to their tenant mixes, but urban agriculture is now part of themix as well. The Galleria Mall in downtown Cleveland is home to what backers call an "urban ecovillage." Part of the glass-roofed mall functions as a greenhouse, in which vegetables and herbs aregrown hydroponically. "Gardens Under Glass" sells the organically grown goodies to mall patrons andlocal restaurants - a real food court.

From ersatz to actual

Perhapsthe most familiar idea holds the most possibilities: Turn these ersatz town centers into realtown centers.

Several years ago a small local architecture firm came up with a plan to open the ends of thebankrupt mall on the edge of the Adirondacks in Gloversville, New York, and reconnect it to thetown's existing street grid. The first-floor shops would have been fitted with windows and doors thatfaced onto a new street that offered sidewalks, bicycle racks, and bus service. By moving the localAmtrak station to the adjoining parking garage, argued the architects, the mall could even be turned

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Such schemes look less radical now. "No matter how faded it may be now, the shopping center hasbeen a 'centerplace' in the community, and therefore makes a good candidate to become a'centerpiece' of a better community, " says Rodney Nanney, principal planner for the Ypsilanti,Michigan-based Building Place Consultants. He adds that the typical large mall layout offersopportunities to connect it to the existing street grid while maintaining some of the anchor tenants,who would become the nudeus of a new mixed use business and residential center.

Pasadena, California, is an example. In 1980, the city partnered with a suburban shopping malldeveloper to build Plaza Pasadena, which occupied three blocks of Colorado Boulevard, the maindrag. Within a decade, many new shops had opened along the streets around the development. In199B the city approved spending $100 million to revitalize Plaza Pasadena by reopening the enclosedcorridor connecting city hall and the civic auditorium and reorienting the interior stores to faceColorado Boulevard. The reborn outdoor mall, known as Paseo Colorado, thrived for a time, but likeso many malls has struggled to maintain its once-upscale tenants.

A similar proposal along those lines won MuivannyG2 Architecture a prize in the 2010 Future ImageArchitecture Competition sponsored by the International Council of Shopping Centers. The challenge,says Darren Schroeder, a principal of the Bellevue, Washington-based firm, is to get more value outof malls in urbanizing suburban areas. "The land on which [these malls] sit is rising in value. Wethought, 'Why not build the city back?' Take the urban grid and apply it to these 30 or 40 acres. Whynot master-plan that?"

Schroeder's team proposed reducing the mass of the typical enclosed regional mall by cuttingcourtyards and skylights into the building and creating a succession of indoor and outdoor spaceswith multiple tenants and points of entry. The downtown-in-a-box would be home to housing,libraries, markets, restaurants, an amphitheater, open space, and even (like Cleveland's Galleria)farming.

The tough ones

Adaptive reuse has been a fact of life in cities ever since there have been cities, but some types ofmodern buildings cannot easily be converted to new purposes.

Consider the modern office building. Silicon Valley was littered with enough empty high-rise andoffice park space in the fall of 2009 to fill 15 Empire State Buildings. But while factories, warehouses,and now shopping malls and big box stores have been successfully converted into offices, office-to-commercial and office-to-residential adaptations are more rare, at least in suburban locations. Condoconversions have little appeal in an already overbuilt market, and an office block built on land pricedfor that use may not return a profit to the builders when sold as housing.

Further, says Aaron Renn, single-use zoning begets single-use buildings. The lack of windows in thetypical big box and enclosed mall make them problematic places to put schools. The fact that theparking at car dealerships sits behind the buildings makes this particular class of propertiesunattractive to retailers.

A more general problem is that many newer structures are not built well. Malls and big boxes are justboxes, and many McMansions are not built to last much longer than the mortgage taken out to payfor them. David Shepherd, the director of sustainable development for the Portland CementASSOCiation,says, "I regularly confer with European counterparts who express amazement oramusement toward our current building methods for what they consider 'disposable construction.'"

Stephen Szoke, the association's director of codes and standards, points out that while many pre-1950s office buildings were so well built that they can meet today's code requirements for virtuallyany use, newer malls and other retail structures may be fit for new lives only as factories orwarehouses. "The short answer is, use for other occupancies is limited for many such bulldinqs," hesays.

Land-use regulations can be an impediment to reuse. Large-lot housing cannot be legally convertedinto other kinds of housing if zoning codes do not allow increased densities. And single-use zoninghas left many suburban office buildings in isolated business parks too remote from schools and shopsto attract families seeking housing.

Zoning constraints are less of a problem for school-to-residential conversions, since most olderschools are located in residential areas. But as Rodney Nanney notes, conventional zoning ordinancestailored to older mall projects (such as zoning the land as a shopping center district with speciflcpermitted uses, setbacks, and parking requirements) are regulatory roadblocks to creativeredevelopment. "The keys to getting around these roadblocks are creative use of the local masterplan and the planned unit development process," Nanney says.

Hamilton, Ontario, is debating changing the zoning by-laws to make it easier for developers to reusevacant industrial and warehouse buildings without the hassle and expense of restrictive zoning andfees. The immediate cause was the dty's attempt to force an arts center operating as a legalnonconforming use in a former factory to conform to the Single-family residential zoning called for inthe city plan.

Most cities in the U.S. and Canada use exemptions and amendments to permit specific reuseprojects, such as have long been used in brownfield redevelopment and adaptive reuse of historicstructures. Hamilton itself did that in 2010 to allow a sports hub to open in a former Studebaker plantin the Ancaster Business Park.

Overlays and special districts are more formal tools to achieve the same ends. One of many examplesis Salt Lake City, which set up a special warehouse-residential district to allow empty warehouses tobe reused as multifamily housing while permitting the continued use of going warehouse businesses.

Money, not surprisingly, is a problem for conversions. Cleveland State's Robert Simons explains thatmost of the school-to-residential conversions he researched were partially supported by low-incomehousing tax credits, historic preservation tax credits, or both. "A few schools had other uses, likecommunity center or retail, but often these were not economically viable as stand-alone entities, II henotes. Simons adds that the optimum conversion target is a historic elementary or junior high schoolof between 35,000 and 100,000 square feet, with relatively tight floor area ratios. "Larger projectshave sometimes not fared well, even with adjacent ball fields dedicated to new stick-built units tooffset development costs," he says.

AS promiSing as mall-to-urban-street conversions may be, only limited versions of the concept, as InPasadena, have been executed. "We've had nice conversations with a couple of developer-clientsabout our ideas," reports MuivannyG2's Darren Schroeder, but "nothing concrete" has come out ofthem.

The next time

Many people are thinking ahead. The Portland Cement Association recently published changes to the

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Rescuing the Castaways Page 4 of5

The respected British civil engineer David Gann antidpated the ICe's standards by several years. Heand colleague James Barlow studied attempts to reuse buildings left empty by a previous buildingbust in the United Kingdom. They conduded that a more flexible approach to both planning andbuilding design and construction is needed to ensure that buildings can be converted easily whendemand arises tor new uses.

James Krone Jr. is a california-based writer and frequent contributor to Planning.

Armories Without Arms

Sometimes big boxes are left in local hands courtesy of the federal government. Many of the nation'sapproximately 3,000 U.S. National Guard armories have been removed from service and transferredto municipal, nonprofit, or commercial ownership.

Take the old armory in Jacksboro, Texas (pop. 4,500). The Guard erected a 10,776-square-footarmory on city land in the mid-1950s but in 1970 returned the property to the city, which alsobought the building. The city rented the armory for proms, basketball tournaments, and reunions,says city secretary Shirley Grantham.

In 1996, with the armory showing its age, Jacksboro obtained a $476,000 matching grant from theTexas Parks and Wildlife Department to develop Twin Lakes Community Activity Center. Modestupgrades to the armory included a workout room, new gym floor, and ADA compliance. JacksboroParksand Recreation Director Jim Feltz says the annual budget for staff and "bare bones"programming like youth sports is about $100,000.

Other armories have been converted as well - into a Maine hotel, Brooklyn apartments, anOklahoma museum, and private residences. However, the Houston Light Guard Armory haslanguished in local hands since 1938 - although a nonprofit is eyeing it.

- Beth Henary Watson

Watson is a writer and editor living in Mineral Wells, Texas.

Image: The workout room in the converted National Guard armory in Jacksboro, Texas. Photo BethHenary Watson.

ResourcesImages: Top - Two schools - a middle school and an elementary school - were carved out of avacant 300,000-square-foot mall in Phoenix's Maryvale neighborhood. Photo courtesy MarcT.Atkinson Middle School. Bottom - Part of the glass-roofed Galleria Mall in Downtown Cleveland nowhouses Gardens Under Glass, which sells organically grown vegetables and herbs to mall shoppersand local restaurants. Photo courtesy The Galleria and Tower at Erieview.

From APA: "God and the Mall," Planning, July 2010, and "Mall Makeovers," Planning, July 2009.

Meeting the Big-Box Challenge (PAS 537), Jennifer Evans-Cowley, 2006.

Retrofits: Deadmalls.com is the most comprehensive catalog of ailing shopping malls, with news,photos, and commentary.

The book, Big Box Reuse, by Julia Christensen (MlT Press, 2008), documents what 10 communitiesdid with their abandoned retail outlets.

See also RetrofiWng Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson (WHey, 2008).

American Planning Assooenon ! 1011 National Planning Conference Saturday, ApnI9-Tuesday. "..,r,112.

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