Homeless Man Turns Abandoned Fast Food Restaurant Into Hidden Home With A Secret Entrance & Heat

There are more empty commercial buildings in America right now than there are homeless Americans. Let that sit for a moment. Approximately fourteen percent of all strip malls in this country sit vacant. Tens of thousands of standalone restaurants, big box stores, office buildings, and warehouses across every county in every state are completely unused. By the most conservative estimates, there are over a million empty commercial structures in the United States with intact roofs, intact walls, and intact infrastructure. At the same time, over seven hundred and seventy thousand Americans sleep outside or in vehicles or in shelters tonight. The problem is not a shortage of buildings. The problem is not a shortage of people who need them. The problem is that the buildings are tracked by one system and the people are tracked by an entirely different system, and neither system is designed or permitted to bring them together. The empty buildings sit on real estate ledgers as commercial assets that have to be sold for a price the owners want, even when the owners are out-of-state investment firms that have not visited the property in years. The homeless people sit on social service intake lists waiting for shelter beds that will never become available because the shelter system was designed for a crisis a fraction of this size. The buildings rot. The people die outside in winter storms. And nobody in any official capacity is allowed to look at the situation and say what every honest person knows when they see it. There are buildings sitting empty. There are people who need shelter. The math is not complicated. Only the systems are. One man named Russell Garrett looked at this situation and decided to solve it for himself.