Homeless Community Turns An Abandoned Mall Into A Hidden Village With Heat, Water And Electricity

Homeless Community Turns An Abandoned Mall Into A Hidden Village With Heat, Water And Electricity The mall on the east side of Dayton, Ohio opened in nineteen seventy-four with a hundred and twelve stores, two anchor departments, a food court with fourteen restaurants, and a parking lot that held four thousand cars. On its busiest Saturday in nineteen eighty-eight, over twenty-three thousand people walked through the main entrance in a single day. Mothers held their children's hands. Teenagers lived in the arcade. The mall was where Dayton went to feel like Dayton. In two thousand nineteen, the last store closed. The anchors had left years earlier. The food court had been dark since two thousand sixteen. The parking lot, which had once held four thousand cars, held six. Two belonged to a security company that checked the property once a week. Four belonged to people who had nowhere else to park. By two thousand twenty-two, the mall was a seven hundred thousand square foot concrete shell sitting on forty-two acres of land that generated zero revenue and cost the holding company eleven thousand dollars a month in property taxes, insurance, and minimum security. Nobody wanted it. Nobody could afford to demolish it. Nobody had a plan for it. It sat there the way dead malls sit in every mid-sized American city, enormous, empty, and embarrassing, a monument to an economy that had moved on and a community that had been left behind. And then, on a night in October of twenty twenty-two, a man named Terrence Okafor climbed through a gap in the loading dock fence on the north side of the building and walked into the mall for the first time in over three years. The last time he had been inside, he was buying shoes for his daughter. This time he was looking for somewhere to sleep.