Last month, writing for Business Insider, Leanna Garfield noted that, “Hundreds of malls and thousands of mall-based stores have shuttered in the past two decades, and many more may close within the next 10 years.” Meanwhile, homelessness, which had been declining as the Great Recession faded, has started to rise again. The federal government in 2017 reported that there were 554,000 homeless nationwide, including nearly 58,000 families with children.

In Arlington, Virginia, a nonprofit asked if a recently shuttered mall might provide shelter for those who needed it. As Terrence McCoy writes in the Washington Post, the transformation of Alexandria’s Landmark Mall into a homeless shelter is representative of “a new way of thinking that is bringing together three economic phenomena: the collapse of the brick-and-mortar retail industry, the disappearance of affordable housing in America’s boom towns, and the struggle to reduce homelessness.”

The Alexandria nonprofit Carpenter’s Shelter was inspired in its founding by Father Tony Casey of Blessed Sacrament Church, who from 1982 to 1988 housed homeless people in the church’s basement until the building was torn down. In 1988, after the church building was gone, the nonprofit formed to preserve homeless support. Over the next 30 years, the nonprofit “evolved from a small group of concerned citizens providing little more than bedding on cold nights in Alexandria churches and warehouses into a leader in finding solutions that permanently end and prevent homelessness.” In 2016, according to its Form 990 filing, its revenues totaled $2.26 million.

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