Writing osmnx queried footprints to shapefile

Question

I'm attempting to pull a set of building footprints from open street map using a shapefile boundary. I have success getting the buildings into a geodataframe, but when I attempt to write them out to a shapefile I get the following error:

ValueError: Invalid field type class 'list'

Here's my code

import osmnx as ox
import shapefile
import geopandas
from shapely.geometry import shape

shp = shapefile.Reader("StudyArea.shp")
feature = shp.shapeRecords()[0]
first = feature.shape.__geo_interface__

#convert to shapely shape
shp_geom = shape(first)

fprints = ox.footprints.footprints_from_polygon(shp_geom, 
footprint_type ='building')
ox.plot_shape(ox.project_gdf(fprints))
type(fprints)
fprints.to_file('footprints.shp', driver='ESRI Shapefile')

Everything works except the last line when I attempt to write the file. It actually writes a shapefile but it writes an empty polyline shapefile (based on the icon in ArcCatalog) I've read about others who've had issues with the datatype conversion of some of the footprint attribute info but am new to geopandas and didn't find a clear solution.

Answer 1

Open StreetMap building footprints include a 'nodes' column that is of datatype list. I ended up using this code to drop the column and afterwards the shapefile was written correctly

fprints.drop(['nodes'], axis = 1)

Thanks to joris for getting me on the right track