With housing in short supply, developers are converting more empty offices into apartments. But not all buildings are candidates for reuse, even as more than on
A video article covering some of the complications that come from converting empty offices into usable apartments.
That's a whole other set of problems, I know I've read articles about that too but a 15 second google didn't find it.
If I remember right, the main issue isn't the building shape like with skyscrapers, it has to do with power and plumbing. They're only set up for a certain amount of usage of both, and residential is massively higher so you'd basically need to ripe it all out and do it from scratch. And considering malls are predomenantly just in the middle of empty land anyway, at that point you might as well just get the next bit over of empty land and do it from the get go with the appropriate infrastructure.
Yeah but could you imagine having residential on the top floor and then shopping and possibly daycare on the bottom floor? You could have targets and grocery stores and all sorts of other shit in there and it would probably pay for itself in a very short amount of time