People living in commercial buildings and alternative scenarios to save money or create dream homes

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.  

YouTuber Marianne and her boyfriend live in an old bank in Montreal that they remodeled 

Stacie and her family live in a remodeled, 100-year-old school building in Indiana

An old train car turned into an Airbnb in rural Idaho

Sheila bought an abandoned lighthouse in Ohio and turned it into her home

Abandoned missile silo turned into a home in New York

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

Performer/YouTuber and his girlfriend live in an industrial building in Orange County, California

An architect bought an abandoned auto repair shop, and rebuilt into his work/live space in Atlanta

Another guy who lives with roommates in a warehouse in California

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.  

This former patent attorney bought an abandoned building and spent four years building it into his dream live/work space

Another guy who lived in an office in the Los Angeles area, to help his friend who was getting a small online business going.  He paid low rent, which would help his friend pay the lease on the office, and he helped work on the business, as well.  

A 1940's era gas station turned into a home in Lousiana

A retired couple built a luxury home inside of an old factory building

This former Catholic church was turned into a home in Boston

This YouTuber and her 4 kids live in a former thrift store turned into apartment

This guy lives in a converted commercial property

I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack  

Post #1 of my Simulpocalypse Series on Substack (it links to the later posts)

A YouTuber in Canada lives in an abandoned bank. Is this one answer to the housing affordability crisis?

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."

-Jane Jacobs, urbanist thinker and writer

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..  

Steve Emig's Substack- Simulpocalypse Post #1