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.