When it comes to alternative living spaces, there's one that goes way back. Ever wonder just exactly what it was like down in Oscar's trash can on Sesame Street? Of course you did. It turns out Elmo got a quick peak at it once.
As a grubby little kid who didn't care much about cleanliness, I definitely could relate to Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street a bit. When the drama was high in my house, there seemed times when living in a trash can like Oscar might be a good idea. I'm only half joking. Alternative housing, when you live in a tense household, was appealing as a kid. I couldn't wait to grow up, make money, and have my own place to live. OK, things didn't play out quite like I expected. As a result, I have lived in a wide range of "non-normal" living situations, as well as several cool apartments and houses, in my adult life.
It was the late 1970's TV detective, Dan Tanna, who really turned me on to the idea of living in a commercial building. In the TV private detective show, Vegas (See 20:06, 30:38, 38:14). Tanna lived in a warehouse/industrial building in Las Vegas, and drove a classic, red, 1957 Ford Thunderbird into his living room. When I was 12 or 13 years old, that seemed like the coolest bachelor pad ever. Tanna, being a TV detective, was always surrounded by beautiful women, which added to the idea. My dad, a serious car guy in his younger years, owned a red, 1955 Ford T-bird, and two 1957 T-Birds, which was another reason Dan Tanna seemed super cool to me, as a kid.
A few years later, and about 1,500 miles west, in Boise, I got into BMX bike racing and freestyle while I was in high school. A year after I graduated high school, in 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California. With no money for college, and with BMX freestyle being the driving force in my life then, I started publishing a BMX freestyle zine, financed by my low wage job at Pizza Hut. Old School BMXers remember that the BMX movie Rad came out in 1986. The whole plot of Rad seemed pretty hokey to me, but it was cool that BMX made it onto movie screens.
Another bicycle movie came out about the same time, the Kevin Bacon movie Quicksilver. It was about a stock broker who loses big, goes broke, and becomes a bicycle messenger in San Francisco. Personally, I liked Quicksilver better than Rad. In that movie, Jack and his girlfriend lived in a big, industrial loft turned into an apartment. Again, that just seemed like a really cool place to live. I thought, "if I lived there, I could freestyle in my living room." It wasn't like I suddenly started dreaming of living in an industrial building, it was just something that seemed cool, and the idea stuck in the back of my head.
Years later, as I lived in a bunch of different places with BMXers, and backyard ramps became a thing, the idea grew. In addition, I was living cheap all through the 1990's. During that era, I was working odd jobs, reading dozens of books, and just trying to work through my shyness and personal issues. Then, after an injury in 1999, I wound up living in a taxi, and in a whole lot of unusual places, in the early 2000's, and beyond. In high school, I had expected to live a pretty typical life. But BMX took me off in another direction, and I'm glad it did. Over my adult years, I've lived in two houses with 10 or more roommates at a time, in an office, in RV's, in an indie art gallery, in an industrial building, in my personal car and several taxis, and a whole bunch of different homeless scenarios, ranging from shelters, to a tent in the woods for several months. It definitely wasn't the plan, but I became very experienced at cheap and "alternative" living situations.
Now it's 2025, and nearly everybody, at every income level, is complaining about how high rent and mortgage payments are. And they are right. Mortgage and rent affordability is worse than it has been for most of your lives. For a while now, I've been writing a series on my Substack site about the tens of thousands of vacant and abandoned buildings in the United States. I call this issue the "Simulpocalypse." You can check my Substack posts, to learn more about that idea. At this point, after many years in and out of homelessness, I just want to find a decent place to live and work. But that old idea has grown. Getting an industrial or warehouse building large enough to create a live/work/art studio place, one big enough to put a mini ramp inside, sounds really, really cool. It will probably never happen, but the dream is still there.
In any case, housing affordability is a huge issue for millions of people now, not just me. At the same time, there are more and more warehouses, industrial buildings, stores of different sizes, and now entire office buildings, becoming vacant. One possible option to save money on housing, or to build a dream house scenario, is to look to these vacant and abandoned commercial buildings, sitting empty around the country.
It turns out YouTubers seem to be leading the charge with this idea. I think we're heading into a long, pretty gnarly, recession. I think people finding cool ways to live in vacant urban and commercial buildings will grow into a decent sized trend. It's not the only option to save money on housing, but it's one interesting option that's out there today. As traditional homes and apartments have become more and more expensive, a huge number of commercial buildings have become vacant, even totally abandoned. Many are much cheaper to lease than apartments in the same area. Sure, you're not supposed to live in commercial buildings. But building owners need tenants, and some may let a decent tenant live in the building, and not sweat it, so they have some rent coming in.
So here are a bunch of different people who are, or have lived in, commercial buildings, in one way or another. Check out the ones that sound interesting.
OK, enough of the crazy places, here are some much more down to Earth homes in commercial buildings and other alternative living spaces.
This couple, who run an online business and a YouTube channel, were building a home in part of their warehouse out in the country in Florida
This real estate investor "became homeless," and lived in his office to save money, after the real estate market crashed, during the Great Recession. He credits the time spent living in the office with helping him to get his business going strong again.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
Post #1 of my Simulpocalypse Series on Substack (it links to the later posts)
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