Meanings
present singular third person shopsteads · participle present shopsteading · participle past shopsteaded · past shopsteaded
- To buy and renovate abandoned shop facilities that are offered for sale inexpensively as part of an urban renewal policy.
Many of the previously vacant commercial buildings along Baltimore Street have been "shopsteaded" (the commercial equivalent to homesteading).
1983, I-83 Construction from Gay St to I-95, Baltimore1 more example
The city offered businesses the option to “shopstead,” a program that rented storefronts for $1 per square foot per year, renewable for up to forty-seven years (Jordan 1986).
2011 Fall, Jennifer Ryan, “Beale street blues? tourism, musical labor, and the fetishization of poverty in blues discourse”, in Ethnomusicology, volume 55, number 3
plural shopsteads
- A commercial building that has been or is being renovated as part of a shopsteading program.
This means that there must be an identifiable market for goods and services in the shopstead area.
2010, Edward J. Blakely, Nancey Green Leigh, Planning Local Economic Development: Theory and Practice, →ISBN2 more examples
The program is supported by merchants, who see abandoned storefronts in neighborhood shopping strips as hurting their business, and by neighborhood residents, who have been given a say in what types of businesses they want in the shopstead properties.
1978, “Carter Reveals New Urban Policy”, in Land Use Law & Zoning Digest, volume 30While renovating shopsteads, residents and city officials discovered artists needed affordable housing they could adapt for large, open studios.
1994 January 30, Lorraine Mirabella, “Residents fought razing and created model of renewal Washington Hill's REBIRTH”, in The Baltimore Sun
Origin
Cite this entry
shopstead. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/shopstead
“shopstead.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/shopstead. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “shopstead,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/shopstead.
Source: shopstead on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.