What if vacant storefronts could be employed to test creative ideas for retail?
Meantime is a non-profit organization that began as an ISA initiative seeking to activate underutilized storefronts in service of urban communities. Working between the real estate industry, city government, land owners and neighborhood stakeholders, the organization’s mission is to activate spaces that facilitate connections, test ideas, reach new audiences and support local economies. Meantime explores multiple parallel paths of action including event curation, pop-up tenant occupations, partner collaborations and advocacy.
MEANTIME
ISA / Philadelphia, PA / 2023
Meantime grew out of ISA’s experience with mixed-use development in Philadelphia, where the zoning code often encourages or requires commercial uses facing city streets. These codes assume that market pressures will lead landlords to seek tenants, and the spaces will eventually become active, but there is no regulatory mechanism for post-construction leasing.
In today’s hot housing market, many new construction mixed-use buildings perform financially on the strength of their residential leases alone, creating a lack of urgency for landlords to secure tenants for commercial storefronts. Property owners often prefer to sit on a vacant space for months or even years, waiting for the lowest-risk, highest-reward tenant, with little regard for the negative impact the papered-over space has on the life of the city. While this condition was already an issue in Philadelphia in 2019, the pandemic only exacerbated the problem. Even active businesses were forced to close their doors, and many storefronts were converted into storage spaces for online retail.
As the pandemic has eased and a new wave of businesses look for street-facing space in cities across the country, property owners continue to hold out for traditional five- or ten-year commercial leases with established businesses instead of filling vacant storefronts. Meantime seeks to enable low-cost, short-term agreements between landlords and local entrepreneurs, artists and makers to activate these spaces. With minimal up-front investment and temporary certificates of occupancy, a Meantime partnership can lower the risk threshold for landlords and draw attention to vacant spaces in support of longer term leasing efforts while simultaneously activating streetscapes for the broader city.
To-date, Meantime has hosted four activation events across Philadelphia with our partners Now and Then Marketplace, Hungry Monsters and Modular on the Spot Philly and has received funding from The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and D3 Real Estate Development.
