You want to open a entire supermarket for a single building ?
That would only work if you convert an entire commercial district, but then you still have all the other infrastructure problems. If you’re going to do that why not level the entire lot and build proper housing?
It’s very common to have grocery stores in the bottom floors of buildings that are open to everyone, not just the residents of that building. And in parts of Europe it is the norm for large commercial/residential buildings to reserve the bottom floor for small retail businesses. It would greatly improve cities to have this.
I’m in Europe and large office buildings that are empty are usually not the ones with stores on the bottom floors, those offices (and residential buildings) are older, smaller buildings in city centers and are very much in demand. The large empty office buildings are usually in commercial districts on the edge of cities with very little foot traffic. There is no market for convenience stores there if you just convert a single office building.
Say you get 100 apartments out of it, you can’t run a supermarket on 100 customers.
Say you get 100 apartments out of it, you can’t run a supermarket on 100 customers.
Why does it have to be a supermarket, though? From what I’ve heard, New York City has bodegas everywhere and those are small convenience stores that have similarly sized customer bases. If the bottom floor is a small market, they have a nearly guaranteed 100 customers. And in your hypothetical commercial district, there would be more than one unused office building so more opportunity for mixed-use space.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a market for all the buildings around it too?