view the rest of the comments
Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
I’m in Europe and large office buildings that are empty are usually not the ones with stores on the bottom floors, those offices (and residential buildings) are older, smaller buildings in city centers and are very much in demand. The large empty office buildings are usually in commercial districts on the edge of cities with very little foot traffic. There is no market for convenience stores there if you just convert a single office building.
Say you get 100 apartments out of it, you can’t run a supermarket on 100 customers.
Why does it have to be a supermarket, though? From what I've heard, New York City has bodegas everywhere and those are small convenience stores that have similarly sized customer bases. If the bottom floor is a small market, they have a nearly guaranteed 100 customers. And in your hypothetical commercial district, there would be more than one unused office building so more opportunity for mixed-use space.
Because what use would a bodega be on it's own? They aren't large enough to have the inventory to replace a supermarket. so that still means you have no conveniently close place to get your daily groceries.
These kinds of commercial districts with nothing but office buildings are terrible sad places to be. I'm not sure why anyone would want to live in such a depressing place.
I didn't mean the store would have to be a bodega; that was just an example of a small store sustaining itself with that size customer base. I meant that it could be a small grocery store, one that doesn't qualify as a supermarket. And like I said, if we're talking about a whole district, there are multiple buildings available so you don't have to get everything from one store. You could have a butcher in one building, a produce shop across the street, the grocery store with just nonperishables beside that, etc.
Because they don't have many other options. We're talking about affordable housing, which is needed by people who are increasingly getting priced out of non-depressing areas. And areas like what I'm describing, with small, locally owned stores colocated with housing with shared ammenities can be incredibly vibrant communities. You could even close off the interior roads and make something like the superblock concept that's been growing (I've heard about it the most in relation to neighborhoods in Spain).
I don't see why it wouldn't be a market for all the buildings around it too?
The buildings around it would be office buildings.