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 1974

with 112 stores, two anchor departments,

a food court with 14 restaurants, and a

parking lot that held 4,000 cars.

On its busiest Saturday in 1988, over

23,000 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 2019, the last store closed.

>> [music]

>> The anchors had left years earlier.

The food court had been dark since 2016.

[music]

The parking lot, which had once held

4,000 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 2022, the mall was a 700,000 square

foot concrete shell sitting on 42 acres

of land that generated zero revenue and

cost the holding company $11,000 a month

in property taxes, [music] insurance,

and minimum security.

Nobody wanted it. Nobody could afford to

demolish it. Nobody had a plan for it.

>> [music]

>> It sat there the way dead malls sit in

every mid-sized American city, [music]

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 2022,

a man named Terrence Akhafor 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 3 years.

The last time he had been inside, he was

buying shoes for his daughter.

This time he was looking for somewhere

to sleep.

>> [music]

>> Terrence was 51 years old. He had been a

janitor at the mall for 11 years. Not a

facilities manager, not a maintenance

engineer, a janitor. The man who [music]

mopped the food court at closing, the

man who emptied the trash at 6:00 a.m.,

the man who scrubbed the tile grout on

his hands and knees every Tuesday and

Thursday night. He was the man nobody

saw.

The man the store managers walked past

without making eye contact. The man the

shoppers stepped around without

registering as a human being.

But he was also the man who knew the

building better than anyone who had ever

worked in it. Because a janitor goes

everywhere. A store manager stays in his

store. A security guard walks his route.

But a janitor goes into every room,

every closet, every stairwell, every

space that has a floor.

>> [music]

>> In 11 years, Terrence had been inside

every square foot of the mall.

He knew which storage rooms behind which

stores were empty

>> [music]

>> and which were full.

He knew which fire stairwells were used

>> [music]

>> and which had not been opened in years.

He knew which sections of the second

floor had been abandoned long before the

rest of the mall closed.

He knew where the homeless men slept on

winter nights when they [music] snuck in

through the loading dock because he was

the one who found their blankets in the

morning and never reported them.

He knew the building

>> [music]

>> the way only a man who cleans a building

can know it.

Not from blueprints, not from

schematics, from his hands and his knees

and 11 years of being in every room that

everyone else forgot existed.

The mall closed in 2019.

Terrence lost his job along with every

other employee.

There was no severance. There was no

[music] transition program.

A final paycheck and a handshake [music]

from a property manager who flew in from

Columbus for the day and whose name

Terrence [music] never learned.

He applied for janitorial positions at

office buildings, [music]

hospitals, and schools across Montgomery

County.

He was 51 years old. The positions went

to younger applicants who would accept

[music] $8 an hour less. He worked temp

jobs for 4 months, warehouse loading,

parking lot sweeping, the kind of work

that pays daily and disappears [music]

weekly.

His savings, which had never been more

than $3,000, lasted 5 [music] months.

His wife, Angela, took their daughter to

her sister's house [music] in Cincinnati

when the eviction notice arrived. She

asked Terrence to come. He said he

needed [music] to stay in Dayton to find

work.

That was true. It was also true that he

could not bear to let his daughter see

him without a home.

He slept in his car for 2 months. When

the car was repossessed, he slept in a

tent behind a church for 3 months. And

every night in that tent, he thought

about the building he had cleaned for 11

years.

700,000 [music] square feet sitting

empty while he froze behind a church.

He knew every room in that building. He

knew which ones were warm.

He knew which ones nobody would ever

check.

On the night he climbed through the

loading dock fence, Terrence walked the

mall alone in the dark for 4 hours with

a flashlight.

He checked every space he remembered.

>> [music]

>> The storage rooms behind the old

JCPenney, still locked from the inside

with the key code [music] he had

memorized 11 years ago.

The fire stairwell on the north side

that nobody had used since [music] 2015.

The second floor above the old Sears

anchor where three stores had closed

years before [music] the rest of the

mall and where Terrence had stopped

cleaning in 2017

because management said it was not worth

the labor. [music] He walked those empty

stores with his flashlight and saw what

he had always seen, spaces, rooms with

walls and floors and ceilings and doors

that locked.

He did not see electrical panels or

water mains or HVAC zones. He was a

janitor, not an engineer.

He saw rooms.

>> [music]

>> And he knew that rooms were what people

needed. The systems, the electricity and

water and heat, those required people

who understood them.

>> [music]

>> Terrence did not have those skills, but

he knew where to find people who did.

He walked through the dark food [music]

court at 2:00 in the morning.

He had mopped this floor more times than

he could count.

He knew every tile and every crack in

the grout. His flashlight beam swept

across the empty counters [music] where

14 restaurants had once served thousands

of people a day.

He had cleaned those counters every

closing shift. He had never [music] sat

at one. Janitors do not sit at the food

court. Janitors clean the food court

after everyone else has left.

He stood in the middle of the floor he

had mopped 2,000 times and [music] he

made a decision.

He was not going to save himself. He was

going to save everyone [music] he could

fit inside this building.

And to do that, he needed people who

knew the things he did not know.

He started with three people. Marcus, a

53-year-old electrician who had been

sleeping in his van in the mall parking