Budget Breakdown: To Stay in the Bay Area, He Renovated a Former Market Into a Home

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 Phoenix, and another in Victoria, B.C.—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.

As a kid, Will Meeker dreamed of living in some mysteriously cool industrial building—something with concrete, character, and a little bit of grit. Decades later, during the pandemic, he and his wife, Megan, were living in San Francisco and looking to relocate elsewhere in the Bay Area. Regular trips up to Marin took them past a defunct 1924 building in San Anselmo with a For Sale sign in the window. It was originally a market serving train passengers from nearby Yolanda Station, a stop on the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, back when the train and horses were the primary modes of transportation; more recently, it had been a health food store. Will’s inner child got loud enough that he decided to draft offer paperwork.

It was priced out of his and Megan’s budget, but since it had already been sitting on the market for about a year, they threw in a wildcard offer, just in case—$1.5 million, about $500,000 under asking—that came with a condition: The sale would only be finalized once the town had approved Will’s application for live/work use. There wasn’t much to lose, they figured. And if everything worked out, turning it into a home could offer far more bang for their buck than buying one in San Francisco. But nothing came of it…at least not at first. It was such an outrageous pitch, thought Will, that he quickly forgot all about it. In fact, he and Megan had moved to Portland by the time they got a call from the realtor, several months later, saying that the owner was willing to accept the offer after all. Game on.