KarunaNews Story

In the early 1990s, a new mall opened in real estate developer Amy Casciani’s suburban town in upstate New York. But as retail patterns changed and mall foot traffic slowed, the last major anchor, Sears, closed in 2016. To meet the town's housing needs, her nonprofit development group, PathStone, turned the Sears store into 73 rental apartments and built a new 84-unit multifamily building on the parking lot. Near Boston, an old and mostly vacant mall was turned into Woburn Village, with 350 rental units, a fitness center and swimming pool, and retail stores. Across the US, policymakers, researchers, and real estate developers are paying more attention to such mall conversions. Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on increasing housing supply, estimates that strip mall conversions could create more than 700,000 new homes.