Old prisons in the United States get new lease of life as stylish apartments

UNITED STATES – Ms Diamond Pearson needed a new place to live and was looking for something with an industrial feel. When Liberty Crest Apartments in Fairfax County, Virginia, came up in her online search, she was intrigued.

“I checked it out and fell in love – the brick, the concrete floors – it was so beautiful,” said Ms Pearson, 32, who works at Fairfax County Schools. Every unit in the complex is unique and she liked that too.

It was not until she was signing the lease agreement that someone said: “Did you know this is an old prison?”

Indeed, the development, now called Liberty, had a former life as the Lorton Reformatory, a prison housing inmates from Washington, DC. Built in 1910, it is best known for the dozens of suffragists who were imprisoned there in harsh and violent conditions – including forced feedings – after they picketed outside the White House.

The prison shut down in 2001, and the next year, Fairfax County bought the 970ha site – which had included a farm and work areas where prisoners could learn trades like metalworking and carpentry – for US$4.2 million. The county gradually turned the property into a park and golf course, three schools and a sprawling arts centre.

In 2008, the county started working with The Alexander Company, a Wisconsin developer with expertise in historic preservation and adaptive reuse, to convert former cellblocks and other buildings, and to build new structures. The complex now includes 165 apartments – of which 98 per cent are leased – 157 town homes and 24 single-family homes, as well as commercial spaces.

In 2017, tenants started moving in, many attracted by amenities like a swimming pool, 24-hour gym and yoga room.

The first night in her new place was the hardest, said Ms Pearson, who – together with her son, Britain, and dog, Nike – has been in her apartment since 2022. “It was a little spooky. I thought, ‘Wow, this was actually a prison’, but I adjusted,” she said. “I love it. The architecture here, every bit of it tells a story – every inch, every crack.”

The entities in charge of the redevelopment – Fairfax County, Alexander Company and Elm Street Development – worked closely with community members during the planning process.

Local residents pushed for mixed-income housing, and the developers ensured that roughly a quarter of the units were affordable to people making 50 per cent of the area’s median income. Market-rate, two-bedroom apartments are US$1,600 (S$2,160) to US$2,500, which is roughly average in the area.

The Lorton Reformatory’s redevelopment has become an example for cities across the country as increasing numbers of states elect to close some of their prisons.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the US experienced a prison-building boom. More than 1,000 facilities were constructed from 1970 to 2000.

Around 2010, however, the number of incarcerated people began to decline, partly because of sentencing reforms and the decriminalisation of some drug-related offences. Almost 200 state and federal correctional facilities closed from 2000 to 2022.

In New York state alone, the inmate population has dropped more than 50 per cent since 1999. In November, two correctional facilities in New York, in Sullivan and Washington counties, closed. Those institutions join 24 other prisons in the state that have ceased operations over the past 13 years.

Of those, some are being reused in ways that will benefit their communities, but many are still vacant.

The success stories include Warwick, New York, near the New Jersey border, where the municipal government led the effort to turn the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility into a business campus and sports park.

In Manhattan, the former Lincoln Correctional Facility is set to be an affordable housing complex called Seneca. And in Fishkill, in the Hudson Valley, Conifer Realty recently bought the Downstate Correctional Facility site that closed in 2022. The company plans to turn the complex into a mixed-use development with housing.

But Liberty and the complexes in New York are all in somewhat populous parts of the country.

Many detention centres in rural regions, where most US prisons were built over the past half-century, have no takers.

Those facilities were often courted by local government officials hoping a prison would bring jobs to the area. But when those detention centres, sometimes kilometres from any vibrant economic activity, are abandoned, companies do not often line up to open their businesses there.

“There’s a lack of awareness that there can be a future for a closed prison beyond incarceration, a lack of imagination about what a closed prison site can be transformed into,” said Ms Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for Sentencing Project, a non-profit organisation that promotes fairness in the criminal justice system.

Ms Porter’s group, which pushes to minimise imprisonment, supports repurposing the facilities so that they can never again be used as prisons.

Older prisons are often located closer to urban centres, making them ostensibly better candidates for redevelopment.

But in some cities, including Dallas; Indianapolis; Nashville, Tennessee; and Pittsburgh, sprawling complexes sit empty because redeveloping a prison can be costly, Ms Porter said.

The walls of prisons are thick, making them expensive to renovate. Or, as in the case of the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville – a castle-like structure built in 1898 by architect Samuel Patton – the building might be full of asbestos.

And redeveloping these sites requires resources and the engagement of many parties, including local residents.

Community involvement may mean some plans never get off the ground, as is the case in Thomaston, Maine, where the 6ha plot the Maine State Prison used to be on is still sitting empty two decades after the prison closed because residents have failed to agree on options for the property.

Despite the hurdles, officials know that redeveloped former prison sites could be catalysts for communities.

In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul created a Prison Redevelopment Commission in 2022 to push shuttered sites towards reuse.

In Utah, the 240ha site of a closed prison is being redeveloped by Lincoln Property Company of Dallas, and local firms along with state government. Utah State Prison was built 70 years ago in what was then a rural area, more than 30km south of Salt Lake City. The region grew around it, and today the property lies in the state’s most populous area.

Almost a decade ago, an economic study highlighted the prison’s strategic value, so the state built a new prison west of the city and formed a land authority to guide the older property’s revamp.

Much of the site has been razed. The plan is to turn it into a huge, dense development called the Point, which will take at least 15 years to complete. The state will own the land and is guiding the process of building thousands of housing units and a rail station and bike trails to connect it to the rest of the area.

The property is near universities and Utah’s fast-growing tech sector; and the development will also house an innovation district, which aims to bring research institutions and companies together in proximity. Utah governor Spencer Cox and legislative leaders broke ground on the project in December. NYTIMES