Simulpocalypse #9- Conclusion: How thousands of empty commercial buildings will affect us all in coming years...
Closed businesses, lost jobs, dilapidated eyesores, falling building values, crashing CMBS bonds, failing banks, graffiti, bums, addicts, scrappers, and... amazing adaptive reuse opportunities
Forget about the skyscraper office towers in big city downtowns, the urban decay of the long shuttered factories like Detroit’s Packard plant, the former Sears Headquarters building, and abandoned sports venues like the Houston Astrodome and RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. It’s the smaller, local buildings, standing empty in cities across the country that will have a great affect on most our lives. The former homes to small, local businesses, like this abandoned building above, these are the real tragedy of the Simulpocalypse. Public domain photo.
Simulpocalypse- (SIGH-mole-pock-uh-lips): A word I coined to describe how we have a growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking locations in the U.S., while “normal,” everyday life goes on simultaneously.
We all know the scenario. We’ve seen it over and over throughout our lives, with several variations. You get really hammered one Friday night, the Uber drops you off, and you stumble into the house, crawl into bed and pass out. Somewhere in the early morning hours, you sort of wake up, and hear some weird noises outside, then you pass back out. You wake up in the late morning, hung over, and walk slowly into the bathroom, puke, rinse off your face, and down some pain killers for your headache. You go back into your bedroom and find that your phone has no service. You go into the living room and turn on the TV, for some reason, it’s not working either.
You open the front door and look outside. The neighborhood look normal, but something seems kind of weird, but you’re not sure why. Then it dawns you, it’s quiet outside. Really quiet. You don’t see or hear any neighbors. There are no cars driving on the streets. You get in the car and head to the store. You keep driving, and don’t see any other people… not alive anyhow. Some kind of plague has killed off every other single person on Earth. Or maybe there was a nuclear war, leading to a full blown global apocalypse, nuclear winter, and a dying off of all food sources. Maybe it was a series of comets, hundreds of miles away, that destroyed a huge area, and sent up a cloud of dust that blocks out the sun for years. In the post-apocalyptic scenario, somehow you survived the horrific worldwide event that killed off everyone else. It dawns on you that you’re the last living person left on Earth. That was basically the idea behind The Last Man on Earth TV show, back in 2015.
This is the basis of the post-apocalyptic scenario. The basic idea goes back thousands of years. Some of the earliest known human stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Sumer (Iraq region), written over 4,000 years ago, and the later story of Noah in the Bible, are global flood tales, apocalypse stories.
As a “modern” fictional novel, the post-apocalyptic idea goes back to Mary Shelley, best known for writing Frankenstein in 1818. In 1826, Mary wrote another novel, The Last Man. It’s about a man who survives a global pandemic that kills every other single person on Earth over several years. I read that book recently, it’s a deep and heavy read.
The post-apocalyptic scenario has been incredibly popular in the nuclear age, after World War II. It’s been used in many novels, TV shows, movies, and video games. The late Baby Boomers, and Generation X people like myself, grew up being told that an all out nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Russia & its former states) could lead to a global nuclear holocaust. This concept was reinforced in books, TV, and movies for decades. In the Millennial and Gen Z era, the threat of a worldwide climate change apocalypse has taken over.
The Time Machine novel (1895) and movie (1960) The Last Man on Earth (1964) Logan’s Run novel (1967) movie (1976), and TV show (1977) Planet of the Apes (1968) Omega Man (1971) Genesis II (1973). Damnation Alley (1975). Ark II TV show (1976). The entire Mad Max movie series (1979, 1981, 1985, 2015, 2024 ). The Day After TV movie (1983) Waterworld (1995) Tank Girl (1995) The Matrix Trilogy (1999) (2003) (2003) I Am Legend (2007) Wall-E (2008) The Book of Eli (2010) Greenland (2020). You can add in pretty much every zombie movie or TV show ever made. These are just a few of the post-apocalyptic books, TV shows, and movies, in the last 130 years. Nuclear war, comets, plagues, radiation, pollution, environmental collapse, even aliens, there are lots of ways writers have imagined human kind coming to and end. Except for a few people who survive, and then wander around having adventures.
But the apocalypse didn’t happen. Not yet, anyhow. Yet we have a whole series of places in the United States that now appear truly post apocalyptic. There are a large number of small places in the United States that actually look like some kind of apocalypse has already happened. Some of these places aren’t that small. In most cases, it was some kind of localized economic “apocalypse” that happened. In a few cases, it was a localized environmental “apocalypse” that happened. You know some of these places. But there are far more that you probably haven’t heard of. The Packard plant in Detroit, Michigan. Hard Rock Amusement Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. The Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. Whole sections of Gary, Indiana. Bombay Beach at the Salton Sea, in California’s Imperial Valley. Six Flags New Orleans in Louisiana. The Sears headquarters in Illinois. The Houston Astrodome in Houston, Texas. RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. These are just a handful of the larger, post-apocalyptic places in the United States. The list of these places keeps growing.
This Simulpocalypse series of posts is about empty buildings. Lots of them. I didn’t start writing this series with a thesis I intended to prove. I started this series of posts to dig into the question of why we have so many empty buildings, and fully abandoned places, in the U.S. today. This series, like many of my posts, was a journey of discovery for me. One thing led to another, for eight months now.
There are somewhere around 5.9 million commercial buildings in the United States. A GAO study says there are 1.5 million abandoned properties in the U.S., as of 2022. That number seems to include both commercial and residential properties. No one seems to know exactly how many commercial buildings are vacant, abandoned, or in full urban decay, at any given point. The estimates of abandoned houses in the U.S. ranges from 5 million to 12 million. That’s a huge range. This number, whatever it actually is, includes short term rental properties currently empty, second homes, condos, vacation cabins, high rise condos left empty by investors, unsold homes and condos, as well as fully abandoned homes. The point is, there are tens of thousands of vacant and abandoned commercial buildings in the U.S. now.
Why are there so many vacant, abandoned, and post-apocalyptic looking buildings in the United States today? People over the age of about 45 remember a time when abandoned buildings were a rare thing. What happened? Why have so many modern buildings become underused, vacant, and fully abandoned in the last 50 years?
While lots of people have a variety of ideas on particular local and regional commercial properties becoming abandoned, there’s a Big Picture idea that I think really helps explain the simulpocalypse on a nationwide and worldwide scale. In 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler published a book called The Third Wave. At a time when America’s factories were still thriving, he put forth a radical idea. Toffler believed we were already beginning to move out of the industrial-based society, and into an information-based society. He was right, the major waves of American factories closing down began around the time his book was published. Researching and brainstorming with his wife Heidi, Alvin Toffler wrote several other books, culminating with Revolutionary Wealth in 2006.
For anyone who wants to understand the Big Picture of what’s happening in today’s world, including underlying factors in commercial real estate, I think Revolutionary Wealth is one of the best books to read. But very few people are actually interested in understanding the Big Picture of things, and willing to read 400 page non-fiction books. Unfortunately, Toffler’s work is nearly completely forgotten these days, except by me, apparently.
The key idea Toffler pioneered in 1980 I now call The Big Transition. I started calling it this in my own writings years ago, trying to figure out where society was headed as dead malls and the Retail Apocalypse were becoming well known, around 2016-2017. In addition, entrepreneur Steve Case published another book called The Third Wave, in 2016, about the internet, the same year Alvin Toffler died. That further confused things concerning The Third Wave.
In any case, The Big Transition is the concept that American society is in a decades long transition period in between the fading Industrial Age and the still emerging Information Age. We are not in either of these ages right now, were are in a decades long transition period between the two. Alvin and Heidi Toffler did an incredible amount of research, brainstorming, and writing, to pioneer the idea of U.S. society transitioning into an Information Age. But a lot has changed in the last 19 years, since Revolutionary Wealth was published. Alvin Toffler put out that book when YouTube was about a year old, social media was a new, little “college thing,” the iPhone and Android smartphones hadn’t been invented yet, dead malls weren’t a thing, and Sears was still a much bigger company than Amazon. A lot has changed since Revolutionary Wealth was published, and since Alvin and Heidi Toffler passed away in the 2010’s. But the global changes he wrote about continue to go on and keep evolving, and I keep this idea alive.
Toffler’s Third Wave, The Big Transition as I now call the core idea, applies to commercial buildings in this way. By the 1960’s and 1970’s we had a mature Industrial Age culture in the United States. We had factories, ports, transportation, warehouses, shopping malls, shopping centers, housing, and all the other infrastructure where we needed them, for a highly functional industrial society. Even then, though, the changes were happening.
A true, fully functional Information Age needs much different infrastructure than the mature Industrial Age did. It needs many different kinds of buildings, and it needs many of them in different places in many different places. The emerging Information Age in the U.S. needs far fewer factories, along with fewer shopping malls and shopping centers.
The major tech companies tend to cluster in about ten metro areas. The Information Age needs far fewer people in rural areas, small towns, and medium-sized cities, and more people in the certain major metro areas. Types of infrastructure that didn’t even exist in the 1970’s are now crucial. Server farms. Thousands of miles of fiber optic cables and cable TV cables. Cell phone towers. Wifi hotspots and infrastructure. These are just a few of the new types of infrastructure needed to build a functional Information Age.
In addition, there are now thousands of satellites that are key parts of today’s infrastructure, in orbit, cruising around in space. The Information Age needs many different types of workers in a much wider range of jobs. There are far more jobs that require higher levels of intelligence, technical skills, creativity, and decision making, than the Industrial Age requires. There are far fewer low and mid-skilled jobs, per capita, that pay well in the Information Age.
Simply put, thousands and thousands of commercial buildings built for the Industrial Age are no longer needed for their original purposes. These under-used, vacant, and abandoned commercial buildings are spread across the country. Over about 45 years, buildings of all kinds became vacant, as this transition played out in industries, businesses, and commercial and residential real estate. Sometimes businesses went out of business, and left a vacant building behind. Sometimes businesses shut down a facility, and no one else needed a facility of that size or type. Sometimes recessions led to financial troubles, a business went bankrupt, and closed a whole series of stores or other buildings. Sometimes natural disasters ravaged an area, and the resources weren’t there to rebuild it, or to demolish the unneeded buildings.
In addition, where and how we work kept changing. Consumer trends continued to change. People began to buy items online or on-phone that they used to buy in brick and mortar stores. Now they have those products shipped to their house or business. Social norms morphed and evolved as other aspects of modern life changed, and those led to even more lifestyle, business, and industry changes. These Big Picture trends played out in very different ways in different cities and regions. These changes played out at different rates of speed for different industries, and in different towns and cities. Large tech hub cities surged with growth as older, industrial cities shrank and struggled.
Week after week, month after month, year after year, more and more commercial buildings became underused or vacant as these shifts in business and life continued. Some vacated buildings were bought or leased for new kinds of businesses. Some stayed vacant. Some became completely abandoned, eventually broken into, and fell into full scale urban decay. The number of vacant buildings continued to grow, overall, across the United States, and many other Industrialized countries as well.
While a relatively small number of people own and run businesses, these thousands and thousands of empty commercial buildings affect nearly everyone in a series of ways. On the local level, vacant commercial buildings bring down values of other, nearby buildings. Once they get broken into, then taggers, graffiti writers, drug addicts, homeless people, and eventually scrappers, vandalize and tear them apart from the inside. Once the scrappers pull out the copper pipes, wiring, and other valuable fixtures, the values of these buildings plummet to a tiny fraction of the former value. Then the values of other buildings nearby also drop further. If there are enough of these buildings in one area, often no one can afford to either rebuild or demolish these buildings, so they continue to fall apart and decay. This creates a local or regional doom loop for commercial real estate and business in general.
Another way these buildings affect everyone is that empty buildings have no businesses in them. That means the city or county is losing the property tax revenue that they used to get from these buildings. As cities struggle in a variety of other ways, the loss of property tax money means they will need to make cutbacks in employees or urban services in the future. That effects everyone in the community, whether they realize it or not. (This post is continued in Part 2)
Simulpocalypse #9- Conclusion: Part 2: The conclusion to the conclusion, coming soon…
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