Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. The depth and shape of the building matters quite a bit. A lot of office buildings are very deep and would result in a lot of rooms/space without windows or access to natural light.
The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit.
But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?
A few months ago Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this:
> Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects.
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-it-really-takes-to-conve...
I may be overlooking a downside but it always seemed obvious to me office and apartment buildings should be intermixed. Separating living, shopping and office into different zones always felt strikingly absurd. I am happy to live in a place where it's not the case so my office building is less than 15 minutes walking from my home, as well as a supermarket, a swimming pool, a forest, a university and everything else one can imagine wanting in their life.
Plumbing (Kitchens & Bathrooms)
The huge issue in conversions is the amount of plumbing needed (and associated cost).
It's not uncommon that an entire office floor might only have 1 restroom area & 1 mini-kitchen.
But that same floor, configured as apartments, might have 10+ apartments ... which means 10x the plumbing for bathrooms and kitchens that didn't exist before.
And having feeder plumbing that can support that 10x (or more) increase in water/waste volume.
The thesis isn't about "downtowns" across the country but a particular developer in NYC. Older buildings have more usable space because they aren't subject to the same standards as new buildings.
And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.
The target demographic doesn't care about windowlessness:
New York remains a place where many ambitious young people go to start their careers, if not to stay, and this demographic is ideal for the hotel-style conversions for which office towers are most suitable. Moreover, Berman said, “young people are social—they don’t want to sit in the middle of a forest on a Zoom call.”
Renters are now used to the layouts of chain hotels, where there’s one window by the bed, so Berman’s bathrooms and kitchens didn’t need to be sunny, and the kitchens could have a minimal footprint. “Our demographic doesn’t cook,” he said. He referred to the other rooms without windows as “home offices.”
Avinash Malhotra, an architect who has done several conversions with Berman, noted that a single office tower can be carved up into hundreds of little units, as in a hotel. “He is not making housing for the homeless,” Malhotra said. “But I often joke among my employees that what we do is slums for the rich.”
Yes and no. Lots of new residential can save downtowns. Just build new residential however. It's not that much more expensive. The existing office can continue to be used as commercial real estate, especially by the new residents.
Together, this will help create walkable, vibrant downtown with no need for a car to commute to work. The only thing preventing this is zoning, which currently bans most new residential.
Absolutely 100%. There is no reason why office buildings cannot be rezoned and regulations loosened to allow for all office buildings to be changed into affordable housing.
The only problems are a lack of political will with regard to zoning and codes. A common retort is, "well some apartments won't get access to natural light" or "utilities are in one place".
In many countries where housing security is tight, there are people who live inside apartments without windows.
Secondly, share housing where kitchens and bathrooms were used communely (aka a dorm) used to exist for many working class poor. Again, if the choice is the street versus a share house the choice is obvious.
No one said affordable housing needs to provide natural light, private bathrooms, and kitchens. Until the political will exists to return to what used to be normal for America and in many respects the entire world homelessness will continue.
Sometimes a roof over ones head and a place to sleep is all the homeless want. Price it accordingly.
A big issue is what we're building rather than how much we're building or what we're converting.
There is way too much ultra-luxury buildings getting built in NYC. It's simply too profitable and there's little to no incentive to build (or convert) apartments normal people can afford.
Another problem for NYC in particular, a lot of the buildings that exist already would be illegal to build now. I get the desire to avoid streets being in constant shadow from surrounding buildings but large footprint buildings are simply a more efficient use of space once you factor in things like elevators, fire escapes and electrical/mechanical ducting.
The NYC government works at the behest of property developers so this is unlikely to change.
There was a big value drop during the pandemic which is still ongoing because of home office. Turning them into housing could indeed be a good option for people in big cities, but the real estate market cares about money and housing is not the best option for them.
Let's not "save" them, which is just an attempt to bail out the landlords who have been gouging the rents and manipulating building codes and laws, sabotaging rail, and doing everything in their power to keep rents artificially high.
Step 1: Let all the landlords go bankrupt. The buildings will be repossessed and owned by creditors, but still there.
Step 2: New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty lot.
Any other plan is an attempt to transfer wealth from the people to the landlord class to save their skin. Hard pass, let them use their 75 years of ill gotten rents.
I'm not so sure New York City is a valid comparison with other cities (in the US) wrt "downtown" living. NYC has a long, solid history of this kind of living that most other cities just don't have. For example, transportation: NYC is perhaps the only city in the US where you can live a completely full life without a car. Most other cities have developed around cars as the primary transportation method, so if you want to live any sort of normal life, you're probably gonna need a car. If you live on the Upper West side in Manhattan and want to see a friend in Hicksville, Long Island, it's a simple subway/train ride. However, if you live in downtown St. Louis, and you wanna see a friend in Oakville, South County, you're not getting there without a car. And I think most cities in the US are like this - maybe exceptions are San Francisco and Chicago? Maybe?
Sadly, it's probably cheaper or a similar cost to tear down the office buildings and just build new residential housing.
It's more than just a density problem. People need to be locally consistent.
They need a place that caters to their culture(including the town or city itself - micro culture) - they need a place to hang out with people of like mind, they need hobbies and places to go, they need restaurants, events, parks, quiet places, loud and busy places, areas to connect with nature, areas to focus on business or meet fellow enthusiasts. It's not a numbers game .... it's human emotions and reality.
we need hospitals and daycares and public pools, arcades, shops, zoos, heritage sites, pop ups, concerts, etc ...
it's more than just walls + plumbing and electrical codes.....
New growth cities have a supreme advantage here, because they can redistribute prior growth strategies into their current growth models. The faster these newer cities are currently growing the less they will be disrupted by loyalty to prior growth patterns. Older cities are doomed to empty at their cores unless they have something unique and specific that is cause for perseverance. There is no illusion to any of this. Wishful thinking and nostalgia won't fix it.
Its just economics. The answers to over coming economic disruption are always the same: be where you are not expected or do that which others cannot.
Nope, absurd property-speculation driven tax burdens and chaotic zoning inevitably drive out both residential dwellings and business competition.
Cities were traditionally a side-effect of communication hubs, trade collocated with rail/shipping locales, and centralized labor-driven stable factory lines. Communication is now decentralized due to technology changes since the early 90's, trade is now settled with online brokerages/logistics, and factories were either outsourced or moved into more favorable tax districts to maintain competitive posture.
Most modern cities are now running unsustainable theme-park service economies. Note municipal districts are never stripped of jurisdictional tax boundaries, and this still holds true even for areas in economic decline due to mismanagement/arrogance.
Have a wonderfully awesome day, and I thank god it is not my task to try and fix these issues =)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Archived: https://archive.is/Rg8g2
Save from what exactly? This is phrased as if the current state of affairs where nearly all real estate is owned by investors whose only goal is to milk it for maximum value at the expense of the working class and common people. What exactly do we need to save these down towns again?
I don't see how downtowns without offices would thrive. The main attraction of downtowns where people live are that they don't need cars because work and social lives are within walking distance.
The idea quickly falls apart once you need a car to get to either social events or to work.
It's funny, I've been writing for years that the CRE market is terminally doomed and we might as well turn the skyscrapers into affordable public housing. Refreshing to see this reality leaking into the public consciousness.
A simple note: why people should want to live there? If there is no more work in cities except for city services, witch happen to be more and more bound to some bigger/external entities, so no real margins to evolve for any local company, why be there?
Yes, there are many desperate enough to flock anywhere if they see a possible accommodation, but how can they survive locally?
After the '80s logistic revolution and then TLC/IT progress finally making offices useless in cities there is no viable economy anymore. The new right density for the economy of scale are single-family homes and small buildings spread enough to have room to change but not too far, intermixed with homes enough to avoid the US suburbs error. We can't have a new deal in dense cities.
P.v. works best for self-consumption only and we heading toward cheap enough batteries to make almost-autonomous homes the norm in a large slice of the inhabited world (30kWh capacity per home at minimum), we can collect and store and clorate enough water to make semi-autonomous homes and various shops. It start to be cheaper than creating large aqueducts. We start to being able to treat sewers enough to been able to have local treatment instead of a sewerage network, we are not there, but near enough. The world change and we have to change accordingly meaning we can't keep up the immense infra we have made for cities while people move around to escape too frequently flooded areas, too hot areas and so on. We need infra for industries, and many industries need a certain size to be viable, but the trend it's clear we need to produce modern way to live less and less dependent on complex services existing on ground networks. We still need roads, personal air mobility and last-mile air mobility is still far despite certain claims https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but we know where we should go. Smart cities can't work like the old Fordlandia can't. Classic cities already not work anymore, so we do not have other options so far and we need to evolve anyway.
Hasn't RTO (return-to-office) mandate solved the issue of empty office towers. Other day I read 90% of employers have forced RTO. And for companies with significant downtown real estate they are really aggressive with 100% compliance.
1) smaller office complexes around the perimeter of downtowns make cheap tear downs while businesses concentrate into most desirable office space.
2) older buildings are more viable for residential conversions, if subsidized into positive economics
3) permit + incentivize residential construction - you'd be surprised how much of typical US downtowns are made up of parking lots/structures which can easily be scraped for housing.
Lastly as people do fill into downtowns, that will naturally convert into the ecosystem that serves those people - for all but capital intensive projects which will need to be spearheaded by municipalities and developers alike.
> Although fewer people may want to work in Manhattan, more than enough still want to live there.
And if you can live closer to work, there's a better chance you'll want to show up in person instead of telecommute.
Turning office buildings into apartments or small businesses (or both) could be a good solution. there's a severe lack of housing in a lot of cities in many countries
Turn them into low income housing and service centers for the poor.
How come nobody ever talks about industrializing the suburbs? I live 6 minutes by car from the small scale manufacturing concern where I work. It’s kind of amazing.
Yes certainly, now that people have realized they can work from home, the corporate jig is up. Time to convert those offices into more residential buildings!
How would that fix the broken governments, schools, and rampant crime?
The cities I live near seem to have no problem attracting young singles and couples. Young urbanites I've worked with have all moved out when (a) they have kids and realize how bad the schools are, (b) when one of them gets mugged, (c) they get married to a non-urbanite, (d) they want local governance that is at least slightly sane.
I've looked at the cost of converting office space to residential, and every time, it was slightly less costly than a tear down and rebuild - and in one case it was a lot more. And that's before you deal with parking. The other issue was taxes: the city would not get the same tax revenue out of the building and wasn't very interested in the project as a result.
There's lots of stuff in the article about the feasibility of turning the buildings into apartments. But I don't see anything convincing about it saving the downtown. It seems to me that a lot of people who do leave downtown areas are leaving for non-housing issues - lack of services (police), high taxes, bad schools, etc.
Are we rapidly brushing past the question “do we want and need to save downtowns in the first place?”?
I have not really thought that through; at first blush it seems obvious that one would want to save these downtowns. But also some of the best innovations arise out of the creation that follows destruction.
I’m open to clarifying opinions on the matter
> Residents would be provided with compact HVAC units under certain windows, as in a motel.
Sounds like https://vxtwitter.com/GoodGuyGuaranty/status/175753305627604...
> And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.
You'll hear the owners and developers crow about how it's not worth it.
No, only safe multi-modal infrastructure and improved safety will. Fix that and the highest and best use of properties will sort themselves out.
Non-starter due to fundamental differences in slab between commercial and residential. Not financially feasible to convert
That article says "we're building slums for rich people".
Will we be able to afford them is the real question.
No because it's very hard and costly to do so and even then the units have to meet habitability requirements.
who bought the office towers during covid and wants to sell/repurpose them? ya
why would people want to live there if there are no jobs there
Save? Absolutely not.
Evolve? Yes.
No
return to office boomer cto policies are in full swing though
[dead]
TL;DR: No.
No
Large buildings with controlled ventilation offer the prospect of better control over air composition, in particular reduction of CO2 levels. As CO2 rises this could become very important.
I don't understand that argument too much.
If you turn office towers into apartments, where are people gonna work?
May work in some cities that benefit of high tourism or are high status enough (Manhattan, city of London) that you'll always fill them, but it just doesn't scale beyond them.
Ain't nobody dreaming about living in downtown Columbus or Cleveland or Detroit. You live there if you work there.
It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic.
From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*.
There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions.
These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.