Shopping Mall as Assisted Living Community: A Match Made in Heaven?

"Westmount" by Loozrboy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 . Source: Flickr

As life expectancy in the US continues to increase, developing a sustainable approach to caring for our seniors is becoming more urgent. At the same time, changing retail trends have meant that brick-and-mortar shopping malls and big box stores are losing out to online retailers and pop-up or other alternative models. Indoor shopping malls have been experiencing high vacancy rates for some time, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated that trend.
 
Long term care administrators and developers are starting to see these defunct malls (and big box stores, hotels, schools) as an untapped resource in their search for affordable property. A new trend is emerging: the adaptive reuse of “dead” shopping malls as long term care facilities. A Massachusetts developer recently asked David Sisson Architecture to evaluate one such property for this use. Here are some takeaways:

Obstacles:

• Lack of natural light is the main issue. Shopping malls are notorious for their poorly-lit interiors, which create a time capsule effect that encourages shoppers to linger, lose track of time, and spend more than they planned. Big box stores have even less light and may be less easy to adapt into long term care. This shortage of light is a major problem especially since the latest research on quality of life in nursing homes and assisted living communities offers strong evidence of the benefits of natural light for maintaining natural sleep rhythms, boosting vitamin D production, and providing visual comfort.
• Many malls are in suburban locations and separated from residential neighborhoods and desirable amenities. Here too, today’s best practices in long term care emphasize the importance of proximity to residents’ home communities, and access to local amenities.

 
Advantages:

• Comparatively speaking, the costs of purchasing and redeveloping a dead mall may be less than building on undeveloped and very expensive land.
• Some malls—especially those located in downtown or other dense areas—have well-developed transportation connections and are close to amenities. Even suburban malls are often connected to residential areas and CBDs via bus routes. Urban malls in particular are often pedestrian friendly, which is advantageous for ambulatory residents in assisted living communities who can walk to local services or shops for small purchases.
• All shopping malls have extensive parking facilities. All this parking may not be necessary for a long-term care community, but land can be reclaimed for outdoor recreational spaces and other uses.
• Dead malls are often prominent eyesores that pose a danger when they are broken into and vandalized. Adaptively reusing them follows best practices in urban and community development.
• Adaptive reuse avoids the high energy footprint of new development, and therefore meets sustainability benchmarks.
• From the perspective of fire safety, some malls already have firewalls separating different sections. For example, because they were conceptualized as largely independent entities, anchor stores were sometimes separated using firewalls. These large retailers frequently had independent infrastructure for utilities.

 
Design Solutions:

• Malls have a lot of exterior wall surface and residents’ rooms can be arranged to maximize access newly-installed windows in these walls.
• Courtyards and skylights can be carved into the unlit center of the mall in order to provide natural light to interior rooms.
• There are opportunities to provide extensive private and public outdoor spaces like by reclaiming sections of the asphalt sea outside the mall.
• In 2017, a new senior housing development was on average 124,000 SF. Malls range from around 400,000 to 1 million SF. This leaves a lot of space that can be leveraged for new uses.
• A long term care community can be combined with complementary uses such as an independent living community, adult day care, community center, medical center, and assisted living workforce housing, giftshops, services like barber shops, hair stylists, and nail salons to create a dynamic mixed use development that benefits both its target users and the larger community.
• The scale of space available in a defunct shopping mall also opens the possibility of experimenting with the zoned or green house model of long term care where seniors reside in small, residential-style houses grouped into neighborhoods and cared for by all-purpose caregivers. Similarly, an adapted shopping mall can be remodeled following the successful Dutch dementia care village model, where residents roam freely in a reconstructed village-type environment.

Read more:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7603995/
https://www.cbre.com/report-download?PUBID=41306da9-0a27-43d3-81c2-0c6d88905466
https://seniorhousingnews.com/2019/12/17/mall-conversions-could-build-on-pioneering-dementia-village-model/