Hope rising from the ashes of big-box stores
As department stores and malls empty out, shelters eye new spaces A vacant Macy’s became a refuge for people struggling to find a place to live.
Everyone at first thought it was a joke.
It was the summer of 2015, and Carpenter’s Shelter was facing a big dilemma. A developer had offered to remake the Alexandria, Va., shelter, housed in an old Department of Motor Vehicles building, into a modern space that would not only have the capacity to shelter more homeless people, but also offer affordable housing. The shelter’s board of directors wanted to move forward, but it could not get past the most important issue of all: What would happen to the homeless people already there? Carpenter’s needed 18 months for the renovation. In the meantime, where would the homeless go? Where would they live?
“How about Landmark Mall,” somebody suddenly suggested at a task-force meeting to discuss the issue, and everyone laughed at the thought of a shelter at a shopping mall.
What began as a joke, however, soon became a plan, and then a construction site and, finally, inside a vacant Macy’s, a homeless shelter, where Carpenter’s executive director Shannon Steene has his office in a corner that had until recently been home to women’s active apparel.
Inside the space, the department store feels far away, but hints are still there: the scuffed tiles and grey carpeting, the mirrored columns, the vast parking lot, the giant sign where someone did a poor job of painting over the Macy’s name and the customers who come by every now and then looking to do some shopping but instead finding homeless people.
The idea that spurred this transformation represents a new way of thinking bringing together three economic phenomena: the collapse of the brick-and-mortar retail industry, the disappearance of affordable housing in America’s boom towns and the struggle to reduce homelessness.
“The fact is that there will be millions upon millions of square feet of retail space that are not going to be used over the next five years … and they can be used for all kinds of things,” such as sheltering the homeless or raising affordable housing stock, said Amanda Nicholson, a professor of retail practice at Syracuse University.
“I think it would be an inspired idea.”
The first time Steene went into the Macy’s as a shelter director, he walked amid all of the checkout counters and service signs and mirrored columns and wondered whether they could pull it off.
They had funding for 12 weeks of construction. Twelve weeks to gut the building of all that was Macy’s and then in its place build bedrooms, install bathrooms and furnish a recreation room and cafeteria.
Then it was the second week of June, and those 12 weeks were past, and the homeless were moving into the new shelter, and in another part of town, 27-year-old Kanisha Williams was growing tired of crashing on her friend’s couch. Her new- born son, Zion, was crying through every night. Zion’s father, Montee Higdon, 29, jailed on a trespassing charge, was about to be released, and the three of them needed more space.
So they went to the family services centre.
Higdon, who has bipolar disorder, and Williams had been homeless for about a decade. Throughout that time, Williams had worked low-paying jobs at places from McDonald’s to Macy’s, where she had been paid $8 an hour to move items into clearance.
Now they were standing at family services, and staffers were telling Williams there was an opening for her family at the very same Macy’s where she had worked in 2014. “It was a laugh,” Higdon said. “Walking through those doors,” Williams said, “those were the doors I used to leave out of when I clocked out. So walking in, at first it was like a Macy’s vibe. But as soon as I’d seen it, it went away. It went from a clothing store to a store that’s actually helping people get on their feet.”
That night, for one of the first times in his life, Zion slept until morning without crying.