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The Great Inheritance of Empty Buildings

Why the death of the old economy’s buildings is the birth of a trillion-dollar reinvention industry

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Shopping malls, office towers, churches, schools, banks, and retail stores were built for patterns of human behavior that are rapidly changing. Instead of demolishing them, the next generation may inherit billions of square feet waiting to become housing, laboratories, robotic factories, entertainment centers, or entirely new categories of space.

Every generation builds monuments to its own certainty. We build banks because we’re certain people will need to walk into a building to move money. We build malls because we’re certain families will drive somewhere on a Saturday to browse. We build office towers because we’re certain work only happens when people commute to a desk.

Then the certainty evaporates, and we’re left standing in the parking lot of our own assumptions.

Right now, America is sitting on top of one of the largest unplanned inheritances in human history — not gold, not oil, but concrete, steel, and square footage. Roughly 1.2 to 1.9 billion square feet of U.S. office space alone is considered ripe for conversion, and that’s before we even count the malls, the churches, the bank branches, and the big-box stores standing empty from Buffalo to Bakersfield. This isn’t a temporary vacancy problem. It’s a permanent shift in how humans organize their time, and the buildings simply haven’t caught up yet.

I’ve spent decades studying the future, and if there’s one pattern that repeats itself endlessly, it’s this: society is far better at building things than it is at un-building them. We don’t like to tear things down. We’d rather find them a new job.

The Vacancy Wave Nobody Planned For

Hybrid work didn’t just change where people log in from — it hollowed out the buildings designed around the 9-to-5 commute. U.S. office vacancy climbed past 20% in early 2025, which translates into roughly 5.44 billion square feet sitting unused nationwide — enough space, by some estimates, to house over a million apartments if every floor were converted.

Malls are facing their own reckoning. Of the roughly 1,200 enclosed malls still standing in America, about a third are considered dead or dying, according to research from Georgia Tech’s Ellen Dunham-Jones. But here’s the twist: more than 200 of those malls are already being retrofitted into something else entirely — colleges, medical centers, churches, and mixed-use neighborhoods.

This is the first wave of a much bigger story. We are not losing buildings. We’re losing the purpose they were built for. And purpose, it turns out, is far more disposable than concrete.

From Cubicles to Condos

The most visible transformation happening today is the office-to-residential conversion, and it’s accelerating fast. Office-to-apartment conversions hit 90,300 units nationwide at the start of 2026, up 28% from the year before. New York City alone has around 90 conversion projects underway, with the Comptroller’s office estimating that post-pandemic conversions could eventually produce more than 17,000 new apartments in Manhattan.

Take 845 Third Avenue in Manhattan — a 350,000-square-foot office tower being turned into a 529-unit residential building. Or the Bank of Italy Tower in San Jose, once a temple of finance, now beginning a second life as housing. These aren’t isolated experiments anymore. They’re the opening chapters of a new industry.

My prediction: by 2035, “office-to-anything” conversion will be a bigger construction category than new office construction itself in most major U.S. cities.

Yesterday’s malls may become tomorrow’s infrastructure hubs—prime locations, massive parking, highway access, and utilities waiting for an entirely new purpose.

Malls Becoming Everything But Malls

Malls have an advantage most people overlook — they were built in prime locations with excellent highway access, massive parking capacity, and utility infrastructure already in place. That makes them perfect candidates for reuse that has nothing to do with shopping.

In Rochester, a former Sears department store has become affordable senior housing. In Nashville, the old Hickory Hollow Mall is being absorbed by Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In Denver, the long-dead Cinderella City Mall is being reimagined as a transit-oriented hub with housing, a library, city offices, and an outdoor arts museum. In Austin, Highland Mall became a community college campus with over 600 computer stations and 200,000 square feet of classrooms.

Even churches are getting into the retail-reuse game. Dozens of former Kmarts, Home Depots, and Kohl’s stores have been converted into megachurches complete with auditoriums seating a thousand people — proof that the humble big-box store, with its open floor plan and generous parking lot, is one of the most flexible building types ever accidentally invented.

The Robots Are Moving In Next

Here’s where it gets interesting for the next decade. As conversion to housing and civic space becomes more common, a second wave is forming right behind it: automated manufacturing and robotics.

Empty big-box stores and windowless mall anchor spaces are, structurally, warehouses in disguise — tall ceilings, open floor plans, loading docks, and highway access. That makes them ideal candidates not just for e-commerce fulfillment centers (which is already happening at scale) but for small-scale robotic manufacturing hubs, vertical farms, data centers, and distributed laboratories.

Imagine your old Sears anchor store humming quietly at 2 a.m., not with holiday shoppers, but with robotic arms assembling custom furniture ordered online an hour earlier. Imagine a dead bank branch downtown converted into a neighborhood biotech lab, its vault repurposed as a climate-controlled clean room. These aren’t science fiction scenarios — they’re logical next steps for buildings that already have the bones for it.

My prediction: by 2040, “micro-factories” built inside former retail shells will produce more consumer goods, by unit count, than traditional overseas factories serving the same regional markets.

The buildings of tomorrow won’t have permanent identities. They’ll evolve like software—reconfigured, repurposed, and reinvented as the world changes.

The Coming Building Identity Crisis

We are entering an era where a single building might change identities three or four times in a single generation — bank to church, office to apartment, department store to data center, mall to medical campus. Buildings are becoming more like software than monuments: reconfigurable, patchable, and endlessly re-purposeable.

This forces a bigger question for architects, city planners, and investors: should we still design buildings around a single fixed purpose at all? Or should the next generation of malls, offices, and towers be engineered from day one for modular reinvention — plumbing, wiring, and structural grids built to accommodate whatever future need arrives next?

I believe the smartest developers of the next decade won’t be asking “what should I build this to be?” They’ll be asking “how many different things can this building become?”

Final Thought

Every empty building is not a failure — it’s a blank check written by the past, waiting for the future to cash it in. The generation that inherits these billions of square feet won’t see ghost malls and dead office towers. They’ll see raw material, already standing, already wired, already zoned, just waiting for someone with imagination to walk through the door and ask: what could this become next?

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