HOUSTON -- Across Houston, there are some 250 big, empty buildings that once housed retailers including big names like Finger Furniture, Target, Circuit City and Albertson’s (according to figures provided by brokers CBRE and Grub & Ellis). Some have been vacant for months, some as long as five years.

“Empty, desolate, no one was here,” is how Vannessa Squirrell described what happened near her neighborhood in Alief. A Food Lion went out of business and for months, nothing replaced it.

“No, it was not a good thing having it vacant like that. People were sitting in the parking lot I imagine shouldn’t have been there.”

“When it does happen, it’s never a good news story for us,” said Bill Calderon with the Greater Sharpstown Management District. He said the big, empty stores have a ripple effect.

“It’s made it harder for other businesses to come into that part of the district,” Calderon said.

“There are not a lot of takers for such a big, empty box,” said James Myers, Brays Oaks Management District as he stood outside a vacant Randalls in a strip mall at the corner of West Belfort and Gessner in far southwest Houston.

The number of empty big-box stores is actually growing with the bankruptcy of several huge retailers and the cutthroat competition among grocery stores.

Across from that empty Randalls is a new Wal-Mart.

“That was the end of Randalls,” said Myers.

Are the big, empty stores now good for nothing? Not if you ask Winston Dahse, an Associate Vice Chancellor of Houston Community College.           

“I guess one person’s loss is another’s gain,” said Dahse.

HCC has now bought two big retail spaces and converted them into campuses.

One is that old Food Lion at 13803 Bissonet. Hundreds of students now study here, not knowing they may be sitting in the produce section. HCC completely gutted it and gave it a new entryway. Inside, walls were erected for classrooms.

“It’s awesome,” said student Anna Castaneda.

HCC did the same thing at what had been a big-box electronics store on the West Loop at the Southwest Freeway. The college paid about $21 million for the Incredible Universe store and transformed the huge space into classrooms and a library.

“In this case, it didn’t take a lot of effort because you had a big box. It didn’t have a lot of structural things inside of it,” explained Dahse. He said for the same reason retailers picked these locations, they now are attracting students: easy access from major highways and lots of parking.

It may not be the answer to re-using all of Houston’s empty stores, but in some neighborhoods, students are replacing shoppers and bringing new life to dead buildings.