This is definitely not my taste in interior design, but I love her creativity and way of making this place uniquely her own. DIY content creator Mariane Plaisance and her boyfriend live in an old bank building in Montreal, Canada, which she has completely redecorated inside. We have a growing number of commercial buildings now losing money, and many standing vacant or fully abandoned. In addition, there's a major affordability crisis in housing across the U.S., Canada, and some other countries. Is living in a remodeled commercial building an answer to these problems? Maybe.
What would your dream house look like? Think about it for a moment. Where would it be? What color would it be? How many bedrooms and bathrooms would it have? If money was no object, would you have a gigantic mansion on a hilltop? Would it be way out in the country? In the mountains? In the middle of a city where the urban action is? Would you have a home theater? A huge swimming pool? Would you have droids to wait on you? The ultimate open kitchen? A slide? A fire pole between floors? Would your master bedroom be underwater? When it comes to customizing a living space, there have been all kinds of amazing and ridiculous homes built throughout history, particularly for people with more money than they knew what to do with.
Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are decades into a long transition period in society. The late futurist Alvin Toffler called it The Third Wave, in his 1980 book with that title. He and his wife believed we were leaving the industrial-based society of the last 350 or so years, and moving into an information-based society. He wrote several books explaining how this massive transition in society might play out, as he explains in this interview from 2007.
Forty-five years after Toffler published The Third Wave, I believe we are now reaching the point of peak change in the transition the Tofflers wrote about. In 2025 we have a major housing affordability crisis in the U.S., Canada, and several other countries. Here in the U.S., we also have a major homeless problem that has grown exponentially in the last 20 or 25 years. At the same time, because of the Industrial Age to Information Age transition Toffler wrote about, we have tens of thousands of commercial buildings that are no longer viable for their original purposes. Thousands of these structures, ranging from small houses to entire sports stadiums, have been abandoned. First there were abandoned factories and some warehouses, then came houses in those cities, then retail storefronts in small towns, larger abandoned stores, dead malls, and now a growing number of abandoned older office buildings, in nearly every city in the U.S..
I've been writing about this issue of empty buildings on my Substack site, in a series of pieces called Simulpocalypse. One of my main reasons for writing this series is to dive into this topic is to try and figure out how we could actually put many of these buildings to new, cool, viable uses for today's world.
That's where Mariane, in the video up top, and her renovated bank turned into a work and living space, comes in. This is a great example of how someone turned a vacant commercial building into a cool, funky, whimsical, and YouTube studio and unique home. I think this type of thing can be done in many, many more instances, if we can get through the issues of evaluating a building's current true value, local red tape, outdated zoning laws, and the other things keeping thousands of other under used and vacant buildings from finding new uses for today's world.
Mariane and her boyfriend bought the old bank for about $500,000 U.S. dollars, in Montreal, where the median home price is about $600,000. So they held out, as the price dropped, and made an offer, so they got the property for less than the median price of a home there. The bank has about 3,500 square feet, which I bet is much larger than the average house size. At half a million U.S. dollars, this isn't a super cheap place to live. But it is less than an average house there. Now imagine if you had a somewhat larger building, and had several people sharing it, two or three couples or several single people, each creating their own living space (and work space) in the building. You could bring everyone's living expenses down quite a bit.
I've been writing about "the coming recession" for several years now, since some long term trends suggested this next recession would bring a huge level of change throughout society. Here in the U.S., we have a major housing affordability problem, particularly for Millennials and young Generation Z, just entering their working life. At the same time, we have what I'm now calling the "Simulpocalypse," a growing number of vacant commercial buildings across the U.S..
There are a handful of people living in commercial buildings who have videos here on YouTube. Not many. As this recession deepens, and as commercial real estate continues to tank in retail and office particularly, some people will figure out how to live in some of these spaces. I'm not talking about the large adaptive reuse projects that cost tens of millions of dollars, but average people realizing that if they have a small business of some kind, they can rent an old store front or industrial unit for half as much money as a decent apartment.
Yes, zoning is an issue, but vacant properties getting tagged, vandalized, invaded by drug addicts or other homeless people, and possibly catching fire are other, often bigger issues. There will inevitably be property owners willing to lease to people who run a small business and live in their vacant stores, warehouses, or office buildings, just to get some income. Other people will be desperately trying to get out of buildings, and will take some weird offers to sell these properties. While I don't see this as the biggest answer to housing affordability, I think this is likely to be a quiet trend over the next several years. Time will tell if I'm right about that or not.
"New ideas need old buildings."
Did you check out the video embedded at the top? Mariane is French Canadian, if you haven't figured that out yet by her accent, and her DIY YouTube channel is in French, and it's called 2e peau. Her work as a DIY content creator led both to how the couple could afford to buy this building, and to the nature of her amazing renovations and redecorating of this building. As millions of people struggle to afford decent places to live, will more people start renting or buying commercial building to live in, or create live/work places tapped into today's internet-based business world? I think it's definitely a possibility.
If you read my blog or Substack, you know that I've been living homeless for many years now. So why am I so interested in abandoned commercial buildings? Well, for one, let's just say I've become much more sensitized to today's housing issues, because of my own struggles to make a decent living and find housing, starting with my taxi driving days, about 25 years ago. But there's more to it than that. I've had this weird dream of living in a converted industrial building since I was a kid. It started with a womanizing TV detective when I was about 12-years-old.
At 20:46 in this episode of the 1978 TV show Vegas, we see private eye Dan Tanna drive his classic Ford Thunderbird into his apartment, with a flat tire. This clip leads into a long scene in his "apartment." In the show, Tanna lived in an industrial building out near the Las Vegas airport, and he would drive his car right into the living room. Like pretty much every 1970's private detective on TV, Dan Tanna was a hero every week, and a consummate ladies man, in the James Bond tradition. But it was that cool apartment in the old industrial building that I always thought was the coolest part of the show.
In the 1986 bicycle messenger movie Quicksliver, starring Kevin Bacon, Jack and his ballet dancer girlfriend live in a spacious loft, the quintessential artist's loft. In this corny road bike freestyle/dance scene, he's riding around their apartment, trying to distract his girlfriend from her ballet practice. Yes, it's a stereotypical, 1980's, corny, romantic, movie montage. But this is one really cool loft apartment. By the time Quicksilver came out, I was a hardcore BMX freestyler, and this cool loft built on the dream I had, started by Dan Tanna's industrial building apartment Vegas. The dream of living in a funky, cool, industrial building someday, where I could ride my bike or park my car in my "living room," kept growing in my head. I'll be honest, that dream still exists. I'm probably not the only one who has imagined living in some old industrial building transformed into my own cool, personal live/work space.
My dream actually happened, sort of, back in 2005. I was working as a taxi driver, scraping by week to week, paying about $600 every week to lease my cab, and putting another $300 or more in the gas tank, every week. After paying my expenses, I didn't have enough money to rent a decent room or apartment. So I lived in my taxi, 6 1/2 years total, and took showers at the gym. I got a cheap motel room once a week, usually on Sunday nights, because business was slow. I'd watch a little TV, eat a cheap pizza, and get 10 or 11 hours of good sleep. After working 70-80 hours a week, all seven days, one night of good sleep did wonders.
Another taxi driver, a guy named Richard, had an indie art gallery in an industrial unit in Anaheim, the AAA Electra 99 Art Gallery and Co-op. He made me an offer one day. The deal was that he would let me live in the art gallery during the week, and I would drive his taxi all weekend, from Friday afternoon until early Monday morning. I took the deal. I moved into the gallery, and suddenly had 4 days off. I worked long hours on the weekend, and lived with a mama cat and her six kittens in the gallery Monday through Friday afternoon. It was in that place that I invented my Sharpie Scribble Style of drawing and shading with markers. That drawing technique now provides most of what little income I earn now. I lived in the gallery for 8 or 9 months, then went back to full time driving in the cab, hoping to rent an apartment at some point.
Living in an indie art gallery was pretty damn cool, and jump started my creativity, which was non-existent, for about three years, when I moved in. I became a visual artist in that crazy little gallery. I've now sold over 100 large drawings, in the last ten years. I didn't see that coming when I moved into the gallery, in the late summer of 2005. I didn't have a BMX bike, and I was really out of shape then. So I didn't do any freestyling in my "living room." I didn't have a car then, either. Electra did have a big roll-up door in the back, but the stage was right there, where garage bands played on the weekends. So I couldn't pull my car into the living room.
So in my weird head, the dream of a really cool live/work art studio/gallery/apartment housed in a commercial building still lives on. Personally, I need to sell my drawings for a lot more money to make that happen. But who knows? Maybe someday the dream will come true... again. As for the millions of people looking for a reasonable place to live, I think we will see more people figuring out ways to live in vacant commercial buildings since there are thousands of them sitting vacant or underused across North America. If this idea appeals to you, check out some of the links in this post for further ideas.
I'm doing most of my writing on Substack these days, though I still do a post here on the blog once in a while. Check out the whole Simulpocalypse series on Substack, all about the growing number of struggling and abandoned homes and buildings in the U.S..
