Budget Breakdown: It’s Hard to Tell This South Phoenix Home Was Once a Convenience Store

They used to be places where you might grab a Coke or a quart of milk. But in some residential pockets of North America, corner stores that have sat vacant are turning out to be prime real estate not for proprietors but for homeowners disillusioned by prohibitively expensive housing markets. This story and two others—one in Victoria, B.C., and another in the San Francisco Bay Area—share how clever owners applied pluck and perseverance to turn disused mom-and-pops into dream homes that, dollar for dollar, beat out anything they could have found doomscrolling on Zillow.

Where most people saw a closed, sagging corner store in a Central Phoenix neighborhood, interior designer Amy Williams saw a diamond in the rough—old brick walls, exposed ceiling trusses, and the kind of layered history the HGTV crowd could only dream of. "I fell in love with the idea of turning it into my home," says Amy.

The 1925 building was originally The Palmdale market and was run by a succession of owners over the years. It had been closed for about six months when Amy purchased it, but everything was eerily intact, including refrigerators full of light beer and soft drinks and shelves lined with boxes of candy bars and snacks. A two-bedroom apartment that still had tenants sat behind the store, with a locked door connecting them.