America’s housing shortage has gotten so bad, politicians are looking left, right, underfoot, and downtown to see what we could possibly turn into residential buildings. Nearly a decade of underbuilding has led to a shortfall of 3 million to 6 million housing units, leading younger Americans to double up with roommates or family or hold off on buying a home altogether.
There is, however, a widespread and underused class of real estate that holds the potential to make a dent in this figure. Long-suffering retail—strip malls, shopping centers, dead malls and their cousins—could be converted into hundreds of thousands of new apartments nationwide, with just a bit of work.
Turning just 10% of underperforming retail sites into housing could create 700,000 new units nationwide, according to a November report from Enterprise Community Partners. While that’s just a drop in the bucket of America’s multimillion-unit housing shortage, it could make a real difference for some communities. In the Boston area, converting just 10% of strip malls would be enough to absorb all the population growth in the region for the next decade, according to a 2021 study from Massachusetts’ Metropolitan Area Planning Council. (A property did not need to be entirely vacant to be a good candidate for adding housing, and many housing conversions in this study propose keeping ground-floor retail in the apartment buildings.)
“I think this has huge potential across the U.S.,” June Williamson, a professor of architecture at City College of New York and co-author of several books on building reuse, told Fortune.
“All the land that’s already developed for retail use and scattered at very low density all around the United States has the capacity to accommodate all different kinds of housing types,” she added.
To be sure, the capacity for a sweeping change doesn’t mean it will happen—and converting retail into housing comes with its own set of physical and…