An Empty Family Dollar Becomes a Free Store and Skate Rink

NEW ORLEANS — On a corner in the Lower Ninth Ward, an old Family Dollar store sits covered in graffiti, its parking lot dotted with debris and trash. It looks abandoned. But twice a week, neighbors line up outside, and when the doors open they rush in to find racks of clothing, shelves of household goods, mattresses, purses, shoes — and, on Wednesday nights, a roller skating rink. Everything is free.

The space, known as the New Orleans Free Store and formally named the Fred Hampton Free Store, is run by Dan Bingler and his mutual-aid organization, the Greater New Orleans Caring Collective. It opened in a former Family Dollar in the spring of 2023, occupying the roughly 9,000-square-foot building rent-free while Bingler pays only the utilities. According to NPR, the store has become a lifeline in a neighborhood still marked by the scars of Hurricane Katrina more than 20 years later.

A Store Built on Mutual Aid

The store emerged from emergency organizing that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. After being sent home from his restaurant job in March 2020, Bingler started arranging grocery deliveries for older residents, meals for families, and laundry help for people who could not safely reach a laundromat. Within months the effort had scaled to roughly 1,100 families and 300 volunteers, and a single Facebook post drew about 90,000 views. When Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, the group carried out what Bingler estimated was $5 million in relief work across six parishes.

That momentum led him to the vacant Family Dollar. Bingler struck a deal with the building’s owner to use the space rent-free, paying for water, electricity, and trash pickup himself, and keeping the property from falling into disrepair until the owner decides to redevelop it. “It’s just a crazy opportunity,” he told NPR. “I don’t think it’s really been tapped.”

He estimates the space’s market rent at about $20,000 a month. “I’m stealing like $20,000 every month from the capitalists right now,” he told ANTIGRAVITY Magazine in a December 2024 interview. The store receives no federal, state, or local grants, nor any foundation money; every item is donated by community members and organizations.

More Than a Thrift Store

The Free Store functions as several things at once. On Monday evenings, volunteers from partner organizations set up on-site: free STI testing, basic medical care and wound care through Freestanding Communities, hot meals from Food Share, and harm-reduction supplies including sterile syringes via Trystereo. Clothing, furniture, books, toys, mattresses, and over-the-counter medications are available at no cost. Emergency contraception is always stocked — “in the bathrooms,” Bingler noted — a decision tied to the organization’s broader commitment to basic health access.

On nights the store is open, more than 100 people typically visit, and about 150 come through on Mondays for services. Roller skating runs Wednesdays from 4 to 10 p.m., with families and children from 4 to 7 p.m., and the store has added Saturday skate sessions. There is a dance pole, couches, and an old Nintendo 64 loaded with Super Smash Bros. All-ages punk shows help offset utility bills, with bands renting the space for about $100 to $200 a night.

Bingler’s philosophy is deliberately about dignity rather than mere giveaways. “My rule for volunteers is: If you would feel dignified receiving this, it’s good,” he told ANTIGRAVITY Magazine. “It’s about creating a retail experience, but one that’s divorced from money or even barter. It’s truly mutual aid.”

That approach matters to shoppers. “They see the graffiti on the outside of the building and it’s a misconception,” Ernestine Lane, who was shopping with a friend from church, told NPR. “I say ‘Go in, there’s blessings in there, go in.’”

A Neighborhood That Never Fully Recovered

The Free Store’s significance is inseparable from the Lower Ninth Ward’s history. In 2000, roughly 14,000 people lived in the neighborhood, 98% of them Black, with an average household income just under $40,000, according to The Data Center. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 flooded the area when the levees failed. A decade later the population had fallen to about 4,400, and by 2020–2024 the neighborhood’s population stood at roughly 5,100 residents.

The area is also a food desert. Per the U.S. Department of Agriculture definition cited by the Kresge Foundation, a food desert is a low-income census tract with at least 500 residents and no grocery store within a mile. In the Lower Ninth, the nearest grocery store is nearly two miles away, and many residents lack reliable transportation.

Erin Sims, a lifelong resident who volunteers at the store, said the neighborhood never fully came back. “You can’t get groceries… Even to get medicines you have to go to the Walgreens or Walmart,” she said. “There’s nothing down in the Lower Ninth Ward for that.” Bingler calls it “the number one food desert in Louisiana.”

A Lifeline Amid Shifting Policy

The store has taken on added weight amid changes in national policy. As KFF Health News reported in January, the space’s role has grown more critical as federal funding for social services has been cut and the administration has taken aggressive approaches to homelessness and drug use — including clearing encampments and calling for forced treatment — while criticizing harm-reduction practices that public health experts say keep people alive.

The Free Store positions itself as a haven in that landscape. One man, James Beshears, told KFF Health News that the harm-reduction supplies he picks up there keep him going; without them, he said, he would have “one foot in the grave.” Stephen Wiltz, a Lower Ninth Ward native now in sustained recovery at 56, said the volunteers “cared for people who didn’t have nobody to care for them.”

For Bingler, the work is also about preparation. “The next storm is coming someday, and we’ll be doing hurricane relief and we’ll be a shelter, if need be,” he told NPR. “Even if it’s just skating with a generator.”

What to Watch

The store’s future is not guaranteed. Bingler leases the building at the owner’s discretion and expects the property will eventually be redeveloped. He is already looking at other locations. Still, he argues the model — turning empty storefronts into free community hubs — could be replicated far beyond New Orleans. “It’s just a crazy opportunity,” he said.

For a neighborhood that has spent two decades waiting for recovery, the former Family Dollar offers something tangible: a place where goods, services, and a polished concrete floor for skating are open to anyone, at no cost. As Bingler puts it, the space is “not ‘The Abandoned Family Dollar.’ It’s a community center. It’s a radical space. It’s a disaster relief hub.”