Black Friday Challenge

Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns have for several years asked people to visit local shopping malls, power centers, and strip centers, photographically documenting the amount of parking sitting vacant on Black Friday, historically the biggest shopping day of the year. I've participated for the past several years, but this time we decided to start the Black Friday Challenge. Here's how it works:

On the day after Thanksgiving this year and every year from now on, have a look at all the empty spaces in the back quarters of every parking lot where you shop that day, and photograph them. Parking spaces left empty today will never be parked in forevermore by customers of that shopping establishment. Meanwhile, we have a housing crisis while at the same time there are roughly 2 billion parking spaces for the 250 million or so cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks in the US. Redevelopment of just a quarter of those never-to-be-used-again spaces into walkable, mixed-use pocket neighborhoods could solve our housing crisis for decades into the future. There's more info on last November's Black Friday Challenge post, but these are the basic steps:

1. Analyze the places you shot. Look not for dead malls or strip centers because that'll paradoxically be a tougher task. You want to work with places with most of their stores still doing reasonably well, but with a lot of empty parking spaces today.

2. Get an app to help you easily identify the landowners of your target properties. Your pitch to them will be: "let's look at a proposal for turning your forevermore-unused parking into a redevelopment asset that can be transformed into a mixed-use pocket neighborhood, otherwise known as 'built-in customers for your existing stores.' And the mix of uses will be of a scale far too small to compete with your stores; it'll be closer to WFH (Work From Home) scale. So you're taking real estate with no economic activity except the cost of seal-coating and re-striping the asphalt periodically and transforming it into an income-producing asset that benefits your other businesses."

3. But before meeting the property owner, you need a plan. If you're a designer or builder, you may be able to do this yourself, or if not, you probably have consultants who can. But if this seems like a great idea but you don't know anyone who can do a plan, groups like Strong Towns and the Incremental Development Alliance have robust local and regional networks. You might also consider members of the Urban Guild which I co-founded with Nathan Norris in 2001 and which includes some of the best designers of architecture and urbanism in the country, including Andres Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanism. If you need help on the development side, the National Town Builders Association people have been developing excellent urbanism for years.

4. The plan itself shouldn't be brain surgery; you'll likely have a mostly-rectangular site with easy access from an existing thoroughfare already serving the shopping center. The biggest key will be the building units you use. In order to fit most seamlessly into the existing parking lot, consider that parking spaces are roughly 18 feet deep: that's your key metric. We learned back in the Katrina Cottage years that we can design many good units that are 14 to 18 feet in their thinnest dimension. Use buildings in this size range and the plan will be more likely to fall easily in place.

5. Build a toolkit of your best plan types because you don't want to repeat the same building endlessly. As a matter of fact, it would be really cool if people who accept this Black Friday Challenge were interested in sharing their best plan types. If so, I'd be happy to host them as resources on this site.

I'm working on a design of my own and will post it here soon.