newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/art-architecture-design/adaptive-reuse-should-we-convert-empty-offices-address-housing?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social
Should we convert empty offices into apartments to address housing shortages?
SocietyConverting them into whatever is useful for that area is better than nothing. Housing, grocer, medical, warehouse... If not feasible then knock them down and start fresh.
I think with commercial spaces, they can’t be easily converted to single-family units – – think about office spaces you’ve been in… The HVAC and plumbing isn’t really set up right you got one or two bathrooms per floor etc. Cost prohibitive to retrofit for residential.
That said, tear down and start fresh. There’s zero sense in wasting perfectly good space, especially when multi family dwellings could occupy the space. Revitalize downtown/business districts that will never come back to the levels. They were pre-pandemic.
If the ceilings are tall enough Id guess that false floors could be built to tie in all the necessary utilities to the existing "nodes".
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1.1y
There's always a plumbing stack each floor IME too.
Very easy to tie into apartments. You're not going to maximize the space efficiently but retrofitting isn't a lost cause. Much more expensive to knock down a 3+ story building than just take a small hit on a few tens of square feet per floor.
I get where you're coming from, but as someone who works in high-rise construction, I have to disagree.
The issue is the tolerances to which everything is built. The existing riser for each respective mechanical, plumbing, or electrical system is sized and constructed to suit the intended occupany type.
It's also important to remember that high rises are built using a core and shell method, and the core of the building provides much of the structural integrity for the building, as well as 2-hour rated fire protection for a variety of systems.
The main plumbing riser size would need to be significantly increased, electrical rooms would have to be completely redesigned for unit metering, building automation would have to be completely revamped, you'd essentially be doing a core upgrade to a high rise.
This would require the building to stay vacant for a significant period of time, during which the building generates no profit. Most developers in this arena are billionaires and are actively developing around the globe, and it just doesn't make fiscal sense to their board to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on converting these things.
Even if they sit at 25% occupancy, the smart financial decision is to let the asset sit and appreciate.
Personally, I'd love to have a developer with an interest in doing this. I'd love to help build it! But I don't think it will ever gain any real traction. There may be one or two built out for some good PR, but I just don't see it happening large scale.
Oh I'm not saying it isn't without its difficulties or faults.
It's just... there's no real other solution to this problem. "bring everyone back to work" is a fools errand, if you want urban centers to survive you need to increase affordable living spaces. Covid killed and disabled millions of people died, and everyone's just sitting on these commercial properties with no tenants. There's no other way forward without sitting on these properties for a decade or more.
No tenants means no revenue, no tenants also means no business to other businesses, that means even less tenants, so on and so forth. This makes your property worthless the longer you roll the dice on waiting for appreciation too.
The utility problem is real. My city is providing developers with subsidies to convert offices right now. The main developer involved said that to make it work financially they'd only be able to build one kitchen/shared bathroom setup per floor. They claim this is "living European". Seems more like a college dorm to me. For the right price that might appeal to students right out of college, but there's probably a pretty limited market of folks that want to share a kitchen with 25 people.
Europeans share kitchens and bathrooms with dozens of other people?
So what’s a better move if you own the building?
Option A: Continue to make low profits.
Option B: Sink hundreds of millions into a retrofit with a payback period in the decades.
I live in a small city where many vacant downtown buildings were converted to apartments in recent years. This occurred with the involvement of government money (state or locals, or both) one hundred percent of the time. There is literally no conversion project of significant size that didn’t get government help.
Why? Because it’s not possible financially. It just doesn’t work. You can’t do the work for less than what you’d be able to charge for the end product. Do you think a bank is going to hand out a loan for that?
This conversation goes nowhere without the involvement of government, and government would like to see offices return to their original use because government knows how tremendously expensive any other idea will be.
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1.1y
government knows how tremendously expensive any other idea will be.
And how expensive do you think it'll be if no one returns to the office in a significant enough amount to drive the economy? Or there's just straight up not enough people alive and functioning in the region to do so. This is just the sunk cost fallacy in another form.
Yes, the idea was always that the government would help sponsor these ideas.
Saying it's without its difficulties is an understatement. It's not just a question of the building itself, it's a question of whether the city can handle it. Can the city's sanitary sewer system handle the additional flow from thousands of extra showers running all at the same time? Can the current water distribution system supply that? Can schools handle all the additional children? Can all that additional garbage be collected?
It would realistically take coordination between various developers between themselves and the city, take over a decade of planning, billions of dollars, and over a decade of various phases of construction. These are the things that are looked at for population growth and predictions and the planning starts way before capacities are reached. A drastic population increase over a short period of time isn't happening. It would take much longer than a decade.
Hear me out. We don't convert them into just apartments. We make them arcologies. Mini cities in one building. I'm talking office space, green space, restaurants, shopping centers, daycare centers all in one building. Each in different floors according to what's feasible. Sure, we're never getting people to commute to work again, but how many people would be willing to rent a private office in their building to do their remote work from? Daycare on floor 20, office on floor 25, apartment on floor 40, pick up dinner from floor 4, late night walk in the park on floor 15 etc. It's time we start thinking like we're living in the future we are.
Converting to arcologies is even more expensive and expensive: instead of a standard conversion design for each floor based on its core-and-shell setup, you then have a dozen different build-outs to support and have to negotiate multiple kinds of leases and governing arrangements for the shared common spaces.
I like the idea of arcologies quite a lot and kinda want THE LINE to succeed just from that perspective, but converting an existing high-rise to a self-contained village strikes me as a much higher barrier to action than building a purpose-built arcology.
Even if they sit at 25% occupancy, the smart financial decision is to let the asset sit and appreciate.
I mean, is it really going to appreciate if no one is ever coming back to occupy the other 75%?
The buildings arent appreciating anymore in many locations the occupancy rate on commercial high rises is like half or less because workers are refusing to come back in. Companies are already starting to downsize their foot print in places like SF, and nobody is looking to expand sooo it seems like eventually the situation will turn
Until it turns again. SF is a highly desirable place to live, and has been for a long time. Prices will fall, people will move back to take advantage, industry of some type will be attracted back to the area. And then appreciation starts again.
These people play the long game and are diversified. They can wait for trends to pass. And if SF becomes an actual ghost town they sell off the building and will already have a development in the new, emerging area.
My apartment is a converted office... So are like 4 other buildings in my area.
I think there are probably alternative designs besides the basic 3. Bed , 2 bath, kitchen, dining, family room concept, that could be developed under existing constraints. It may not be as marketable and gain as much rent, but 25% occupancy actually hurts the city more than just the developer/owner. The loss of sales tax revenue from lost restaurant, retail, and other incomes is proving to be catastrophic to cities.
this guy gets it. the real issue is that if not regulated properly, the building owners will cut all sorts of corners and the end result will be high density, poor quality housing. essentially turning them into slums.
Personally, I'd love to have a developer with an interest in doing this. I'd love to help build it! But I don't think it will ever gain any real traction.
I just don't get the naysaying on this. One of my sisters lives in an apartment building that is a converted former office building from the early 1900s. Pretty much nothing was up to modern code, and everything that had to be torn down was built to last a couple centuries. And yet a developer made a killing doing the conversion!
I think there's something else behind the doom and gloom preaching on this issue.
This would require the building to stay vacant for a significant period of time, during which the building generates no profit. Most developers in this arena are billionaires and are actively developing around the globe, and it just doesn't make fiscal sense to their board to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on converting these things.
Even if they sit at 25% occupancy, the smart financial decision is to let the asset sit and appreciate.
I want to state clearly that I don't disagree with anything you're saying here; as-is, I agree completely.
I do want to point out, however, that tax laws can (and in my opinion should) be crafted to discourage this kind of wastefulness.
You'd be amazed how expensive retrofitting is. I worked on a job recently where a 4 story (~32 units) building had to have its whole roof replaced because the original design was not properly detailed and due to some venting/ condensation issues the wood trusses rotted. The building is under 25 years old.
These units are maybe worth 200k each and the cost to remove the roof and put in a new one came in over 2 million. And that's with us doing a lot of research and design work to keep costs down. It's going to cast each of them over 65k (plus interest) on top of their exisisting mortgages to do this.
Often times retrofitting involves lots more planning, removing a lot of the existing material anyways, then taking extra time to slip in and maneuver everything you need, then cleaning and repairing anything you worked on. And in the end, you're left with a compromise on performance & efficiency because you can only do so much in an existing building. Retrofitting is probably an option sometimes, but the utilities in living spaces (and the noise and fire separation on the walls and floors between them) are surprisingly specialized and complicated.
There’s another big problem that’s hard to overcome and that’s the depth of the building away from the windows. You’d end up with all sorts of rooms with no windows further in towards the core. Code requires every bedroom to have a window. Some say ok we’ll just change the code to make windowless bedrooms ok, but do we really wanna go there? Just seems like a ripe invitation for developer driven inhumane living conditions. Some office buildings with smaller footprints could potentially convert well, but many could not.
You’d end up with all sorts of rooms with no windows further in towards the core.
The core doesn't have to be living space. You can have apartments along the outer walls, allowing light in to the living spaces/bedrooms/etc. and the inner most parts of the building can be used as storage spaces for those living in the apartments. Or you can put a communal gym in there. Or a general communal area. Or anything, really. There are so many possibilities that don't need to be living areas.
There are probably going to be some rooms within those apartments that don't get natural light but that's okay. My bathroom doesn't have natural light, for example. Some people would have no problem being in a room with no exterior light.
also can’t it all be loft-style? if it’s open concept af you won’t have a bunch of walls sucking up all the light and everybody eats that shit up.
I know it is only a game, but this is generally how I arrange my fortresses in Dwarf Fortress and it works out fairly well.
I will have stalagmites with houses towards the outside, everyone gets a personal bedroom and a family room. Then closer to the stairs, where each house meets up, I have a communal garden/meeting hall for 3 houses. Then from the garden it leads into the main walk way towards the stairs, with the center being split up into 4 parts. Storage for a siege, workshops, a shopping center, and then whatever seems useful for that floor as the 4th option.
That last one can be a beer garden, or an armory, furniture supply, farms, or in the case of some more troublesome floors a room filled with starving giant spiders.
There could also be structural changes done to these high rise office buildings, and just open up areas around the core for lichthofs. This is a solution (and a fairly good one) that has been used for centuries.
The kitchen in the first flat I owned didn’t have natural light. Obviously not ideal, and not something I would want now, but at the time, it was a sacrifice we were willing to make for the location/price/size etc.
Starbucks. They'll shove a freakin' Starbucks in there.
Plus you can just make the apartments bigger that order the windows. There are plenty of apartment buildings that had the same proportions as office buildings.
Plus you can easily make the apartments narrow but long and still be more than liveable.
came here to say approximately this. There are so many ways an internal space could be used as storage or communal areas, and creative interior designers can design layouts that will work. I used to be a real estate photographer and photographed a number of condos that were converted from old warehouses that had really cool and unique layouts. It is doable for folks with creativity.
I was with a family member looking at apartments for sale recently, and came across one where the master bedroom was not on an external wall, so had no window. I fell in love with it. It seemed so cozy to sleep in (it was a big room, so not the small definition of cozy).
As a nightshifter I wish I had a bedroom with no windows... no matter how much you cover your window with black out tape and curtains the sun finds its way in...
Tinfoil is your friend!
If you do this make sure you put some cloth on the frame THEN foil so the foil is not visible and the neighbors don't call the cops on you for being a crack house
If you're a crack house, make sure you put some cloth on the frame THEN foil so the foil is not visible and the neighbors don't call the cops on you for being a crack house.
I had crack house windows for a year, and never heard a thing.
Now, though, that's against the strata rules, so I have double-layered curtains. Sheer white on the outside for the heat, solid colour on the inside for the light. It's not perfect, but the eye mask cuts the last specs of light.
The rule that bedrooms must have a window is because of fires. There needs to be a second way out of a room, to the outside
Great way to ensure you die in a fire too!
I want to point out that windowless bedrooms are only against code in certain localities, like NYC. Places like San Fransisco do allow windowless bedrooms.
Also you'll see it all the time that NYC will advertise a "one bedroom, one bath, with a home office large enough to fit a queen bed." There's no law against a person sleeping in a windowless bedroom. The law only applies to advertising it as a bedroom.
San Fransisco doesn't allow windowless bedrooms... that's against state building code and would make the unit uninhabitable according to state tenancy laws. As a fire safety measure, all sleeping rooms below the 4th floor must have an "emergency egress" (door/window of a certain size) that opens directly to the outdoors. Source
Of course in tight housing markets landlords often skirt the law by advertising places the way you describe. But it is against the law.
You can obviously use an existing building however you want but we are talking about new construction here. You will never ever get a building permit for new construction if it doesn't meet egress requirements.
Hence the mixed-use (imo). Residences on exterior walls for code; and small offices/ storage/ utilities on the interior. Shouldn't be too hard to retrofit wet walls and window wells or shafts as needed.
Developers certainly had no trouble rehabbing warehouses into lofts when they saw the $$$.
Most apartments never have enough storage so this could be a wonderful way to provide storage space. Mind you, the idea of a media room with no windows really appeals too.
Any deep interior spaces could theoretically be dedicated to common areas, or shops, or gutted entirely and used for like.. hydroponics or something. I don’t know. Really seems wasteful and inefficient to tear something down and rebuild when it can be repurposed.
Lets go hydro! Lettuce, devils lettuce, swiss chard, devils swiss chard
Gyms, community centers, hangout areas, maybe a shop or two. An indoor playground for kids on one floor, a space for teens (like a basement vibe, lol), a rentable meeting room/room for conventions/larger get togethers for holidays or whatever.
Well, asking $2500 for a 250sqft studio is a little more inhumane, if you ask me, than someone willingly deciding to live in a windowless bedroom at a fraction of that rate.
Even if you only have one ring of apartments around the outside of the floor, the empty space in the middle can be used as communal space. Bike lockups, gyms, home businesses, party rooms, workshops, libraries, you name it. Basically make the buildings into mini arcologies.
I lived in an old converted factory that did just that. It had a gym and some indoor storage.
There’s another big problem that’s hard to overcome and that’s the depth of the building away from the windows. You’d end up with all sorts of rooms with no windows further in towards the core. Code requires every bedroom to have a window.
I don't know why you think that this is an issue that is hard to overcome. Bedrooms are the only rooms that are required to have windows which means that you can put all the other rooms that do not legally require windows towards the core and keep the outside for bedrooms. If your office building is so large that you cannot justify occupying so much space for non-bedroom living areas in apartments then you can just use that extra interior areas for other purposes (e.g. communal play areas, sporting areas, gym area, etc).
Funnily enough, looking at generic floor plans for some of the biggest office buildings in the world, none of them are actually large enough to have issues with having too much area without access to windows - some of them even already have apartment areas built into them (e.g. the Burj Khalifa and the Bank of China Tower). The most awkward one to convert to apartments that I found would have been the WTC which you would only be able to make decent apartments along two sides with the other two remaining sides too skinny to be able to do anything beyond making like hotel rooms.
My bedroom in my condo doesn't have a window. I love my condo and my windowless bedroom.
Just make interior rooms something else, those could be showers or closets.
Reorganizing the offices and conference rooms is often very easy. Moving bathrooms is mostly a hard no from the building owner.
Another very important thing is fire safety and building codes: People usually don't sleep in commercial buildings and are required to have safety staff on-site.
Risk of fire is also a lot higher in apartment buildings, as risky things like 'cooking' (under modern building codes) is done in fire safe environments with literal firewalls. And yes, if you renovate a building from the 80's, you have to conform to modern building codes.
Everywhere on Reddit every time this comes up it’s “it’s not worth it, tear it down and start over”. When I tell them I own an electrical construction company and think that idea doesn’t make sense they argue about a deep as thin crust and then stop replying.
It’s so universal on here I’m suspicious that there’s an effort to push this very specific narrative. None of the people I’ve tried to talk with here about it know what they’re talking about.
For the record I think the bigger factor holding this back is zoning and city planning. City planning has decades of engineering behind it with a specific plan in place for transportation, water, sewer, livability and so much more. We need a huge push to rewrite the book to make this happen on a large scale. Until then little things will help. We recently converted a strip club into a women’s shelter/housing. It was awesome and the irony wasn’t lot on me.
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1.1y
Exactly and the I personally (although have not been in the situation to come up against it) think the bigger roadblocks are zoning and city planning. Those folks are the city gatekeepers and they don’t want to just toss their 20 year plans (even though this is more important than infrastructure).
Edit: I also just have to reiterate I’ve seen just about every commercial space converted into housing. It’s faster and insanely cheaper that ground up. If someone thinks they know better please comment. I’m curious to the thinking behind the people who can’t seem to articulate why we can’t use existing buildings to help make housing affordable and ease the homeless problem.
I think the tides are starting to shift in the planning arena, at least slowly but surely. There is a push to adapt more mixed-use zoning, like how almost every place in the US was originally set up, and abandon single-family housing only zoning. Planners in the 50/60s were inspired by Le Corbusier types, most notoriously possibly Robert Moses in NYC. His thing was ramming highways through the middle of cities, which we've learned was a terrible idea. Zoning also became exclusionary.
With the arrival of Jane Jacobs, I think we're going very much away from the central planning and more towards community participation. Planners at the end of the day are beholden to the public. In bigger cities with more bureaucracy it might be more layers to get to them. The plans are likely updated every few years and changed anyway.
Also, totally agree about reusing/rehabbing buildings. That makes way more sense. Some of these are literal skyscrapers. Do people know how much waste and expense that is? We can absolutely turn office buildings residential - it will just take some time and money, but certainly much less than an entirely new building. The focus always seems to be on new construction, but we direly need to retrofit more buildings, for energy reasons as well.
Thank you! This supports what I’ve been seeing and fills in a lot regarding the zoning/planning stuff. I’m not crazy!!!
It’s very possible, it’s just difficult. The biggest issue is typically the depth of the floor plate. Office towers are far wider and deeper than residential towers, the issue is typically access to daylight. Often the costs to retrofit exceed the cost to tear down and start new. For example, if an office has 16’ floor to floor and is 20 stories tall it’s incredibly inefficient. A typical residential would be 9’, thus would fit almost twice the amount of residential units in the same height. There’s a lot to it. Source: I do this for a living.
It's a question of willingness not feasibility.
Yeah but there’s also floor access, bathrooms, and kitchens.
Offices are designed for everyone using elevators in the morning, at lunch, and at 5. So they’re in one central spot, they’re not convenient for all day use.
The thing that people seem to miss, is that these are investment properties. It might be cheaper to renovate (still really damn expensive retrofitting all the plumbing, electric, and housing) than rebuilding. But think of the rents it’ll get. How much rent would a weirdly renovated decades old office tower generate vs a brand new apartment tower.
I’ve thought about this a ton, and the only way that’s feasible is if the government buys the offices and turns them into low income housing. Like $550/mo units. And even then it doesn’t seem like the best use.
It’s one giant conundrum, where the end result seems to be just tear it down and build a real apartment tower.
Because it's literally millions of dollars, plus it isn't always easy to get permits to even be able to even do it in a big city. You might even have to get the thing rezoned...good luck with that.
It's a whole different set of building codes to boot.
Apartments have to have windows and stuff too. You will either have gigantic luxury apartments that solve nothing or a good chunk of the people don't even get an exterior wall and no windows. How they get out in a fire?
I agree with what you are saying, but it's not that easy in a lot of cases.
Also, if you are the building owner, you have to spend all that money or take in outside investors, AND you go from having to collect money from 1 business to 18 individual tenants. That's a lot of extra work, and a lot of extra laws to deal with.
They are in a situation where the only thing that makes sense is to either hold it, pay the taxes, and wait. Or sell it to somebody that is going to do the same thing.
Plus a lot of stuff is owned by gigantic corps that at the end of the day will just be down 2.4% for the quarter with their share of buildings empty. They can hold out forever and ever because land is always worth holding on to in a population explosion. If anything, they will absorb more units during times like these by buying out other land holders.
It is totally feasible to retrofit existing commercial building space to residential. For a year I lived in an apartment building that used to be a school. My only complaints were it took forever for water to get hot, no dishwasher, and because of the high ceiling (they didnt put in false ceiling) it was expensive to heat the place. While I did love the layout of the place, with my bedroom at the end of the hallway from the living room allowing whoever was in the living room to make noise, after one winter we decided we werent doing that shit again.
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1.1y
Also I'm not sure I'd care if I only had one bathroom if I had an apartment as big as an office. Just needs to be cheap. Which of course, it wouldn't be
I guess they mean to have multiple flats per floor, and then you'd need a bathtoom per unit
I definitely get those concerns but I'm in the DC area and I've seen them convert commercial office space into apartments more than a few times, so they must have their ways.
E: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sinclaire+on+Seminary+Apartments/@38.8319689,-77.1166834,18.25z a recent example but far from the only space I've noticed get converted over without having to tear down.
Hell, they've converted old malls to apartments.
https://www.popsugar.com/home/Providence-Shopping-Mall-Converted-Apartments-37434301#photo-37434319
I honestly feel like the major obstacle is motivation.
What about dorm-type living? Although, I'm not sure if it would work socially.
If the price was right, a lot of young people and new Canadians would probably go for it
We did this with the BC Electric building downtown and it's an awesome condo now.
http://vancouverarchitecture.mikepriebe.ca/bc-electric-building/
It's usually banned due to the old anti-flop house/cage hotel laws.
Great for 18-22 year olds that want to he social and fuck like rabbits. Bad for adults with adult shit to do and their children with children shit to do.
Tell us more about these rabbits.
I’m 37 and live in a dorm style place.
No kids. No wife any more.
I didn’t need a whole house so just rented it out to cover the bills and live in basically a room for 250 a month. I walk to work daily now, and don’t even have a car.
It’s perfect for me. A little different because of who’s allowed to live there. Just military members. Some members get their kids on weekends and have another room for them
Maybe house the homeless in SRO type dwellings with shared toilets and kitchens.
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1.1y
There was a longer piece on this in the NYTimes a while ago: the biggest problem is the footprint of office buildings, the amount of windows per unit would be atrocious to downright impossible - important for dwellings, not so much offices
Solution: make each floor its own house. Family housing. With its own “yard” (big open space in front of the windows. depending on how big it is.
I think we always think of it as, how do we fit more people in here, but really, how do we give people more room?
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1.1y
You are correct that commercial spaces are not going to be economically feasible to convert into what we are familiar as apartment style units.
That being said - if a new more communal style of living configuration can be made that IS both technically/financially feasible and acceptable as living accommodations, then that could open up some options for homeless and poor.
Commercial spaces don’t have sufficient plumbing and bathroom capacity to expand into multi-unit living spaces.
Commercial spaces don’t have sufficient kitchen plumbing and ventilation to expand into multi units.
Ok fair enough. However, when I was living as a college student in the dorms, the building layout was quite similar to a commercial office building. We had about 50 private rooms per floor that could accommodate 2 people per room comfortably.
The rooms did not have plumbing or kitchen. However they had electricity and lighting.
This is similar to having a bunch of offices in a commercial building.
For the bathrooms, we had a central communal bathroom with toilets, sinks, and a few shower stalls.
Nearby, we had a small room with a handful of coin operated laundry machines.
There was a communal lounge area and one communal kitchen. Many offices have a similar setup with an employee lounge and kitchen/break room.
People had small individual fridges in their rooms.
So if this kind of setup is acceptable, then an office building could be converted into livable spaces. The occupants would just have to understand the limitations of this setup and that it’s not like having individual apartment units.
It’s not ideal but it’s not terrible either.
Retrofitting the buildings would still be a lot cheaper than knocking them down and building over, also consider the loss of revenue. 3 months for permits and then 6-8 months to retrofit for apartments; versus 3 months for the permits to knock it down, then another 2 years for design, planning, getting approval for the plans, then permits to build plus all the zoning/town hall hassles, then another year to build.
For context, they demo’d a sears by my previous job 5 YEARS ago to build apartments. They aren’t scheduled to have it move in ready for another year.
Not easily but possible. I was in a hotel in London years ago and the room to the bathroom was like 6 inches up from the floor (and I had to pay extra for it). The floor also had communal bathrooms similar to dormitories. I can see some floors being used as a half way house/Single room occupancy situation for low income.
More cost prohibitive than tearing-down and rebuilding?
Where is all the waste from tearing down supposed to go? That's a FUCK TON of wasted materials.
Knocking down perfectly usable space is almost never feasible. ‘Feasible’ is mostly made up accounting jargon for the large companies that do these things and includes profit for investors who add zero value. Quite different than average Joe feasibility assessments.
I work in construction in a city. Loads of our work right now is tearing down and remodeling entire floors of office buildings for new tenants. It can cost into the hundreds of thousands to millions per floor. It's definitely being done, but not being turned into housing as far as I've seen.
It's not really complicated, does it cost more to tear down and build a new apartment building then it does to convert the office building to apartments? Then it's not feasible.
People in apartments like things like private bathrooms and views of the sky that office drones tolerate or are forced to do without
True, because anyone paying for the conversion is going to simply compare cost to retrofit v. coat to demolish and build new (whether gov’t, private or both, plus their lenders).
A conversion might make sense in some circumstances, but there are a lot of barriers to conversion of many office buildings:
Most tall apartment buildings are rectangles, so everyone has some decent lighting and ventilation (and maybe elevators in the middle). But many office buildings that are more square-shaped, with offices in the perimeter and windowless cubicles on the interior. This results in less light-ventilation for interior spaces, which results in space that less rental value (as unusable or lower-value space).
And the plumbing retrofit is probably more expensive than what you would think.
There also may be residential safety or code requirements that aren’t present in office buildings. (Although where I live, we have a strong safety code for office buildings.)
If it’s economically impossible to convert a building (like office buildings) then the only feasible solution is to tear it down
Not really. Office space demands will drop and so will prices. There will always be demand though.
The cost to demolish and redevelop a site is often more than letting it sit partially occupied for many years.
The ONLY way these projects happen is if they are subsidized, or if new codes allow for mixed use alternatives that enable portions to be converted to residential without changes to an entire structure
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1.1y
Exactly. It's getting really hard to talk about the future on this subreddit because anti capitalists have taken the whole thing over.
future on this subreddit because anti capitalists the innumerate/financially illiterate have taken the whole thing over.
Knock them down! Bring back plant life
Instructions unclear, have turned the building into a marijuana factory
Good point. Cities need green spaces.
Not ontario we’re getting rid of ours and the science center while we’re at it
What will take their place?
The Doug Ford and friends monster truck and private interest centre for capitalism
Tree houses! I love it
Convert some into hydroponics greenhouses as well
Vertical farming.
End euclidian zoning.
Turning an office space (ie, a large tower) into apartments is nearly impossible logistically. It’s actually cheaper for a developer to demo and start fresh.
I find it hard to understand how everyone agrees to just knock them down and start over.
It's easy to understand if you know the requirements to convert commercial space to residential space.
Things like building codes exist. If you have a building that's 30 years old and you repurpose this, you have to conform to the current building codes. Building codes for residential areas (where sleeping, cooking, etc happens) is vastly different than office space (where people are awake and there are required safety staff on-site)
Commercial buildings are flexible by design; office walls are easily replaceable and movable so it sounds simple. However, there are things that "can't" or can't be changed. It's virtually impossible to move a bathroom, and it's literally impossible to move an elevator on just one floor.
Infrastructure in buildings is often built to be 'just enough' for the purpose. A floor has just enough water pressure to supply the coffee machines and toilets. If you want to change the purpose to add per-apartment showers, toilets, faucets, the underlying infrastructure won't do. And water supply is just one of the infrastructure requirements. There's also water disposal, HVAC, power and probably factors I'm forgetting.
Because it’s more expensive to retrofit tall office towers for residential use. Sure not every office building needs to be turned into apartments but that majority will after the work from home “scandal” settles out and offices become vacant
I do this sort of thing for a living. It's very hard for a few reasons.
- Office buildings have little provision for venting of kitchens and restrooms. This is one of the easier issues to solve on most buildings since they do usually have some sort of vent stack but you do have to grow the system out into the space.
- Modern office buildings have centralized bathroom pods in the center of the building where the drain stack is. Adding drain lines further out is either incredibly expensive or structurally impossible and takes significant investigation and expense to even consider. Think finding a very aggressive engineer and doing a sonar analysis of the rebar system to try and find places you can drill without collapsing the entire structure. If you can actually do it you then have to build floorplans for bathroom and kitchen placement around those penetrations or build an entire false floor to run the drain pipes under. If you can't penetrate you either are SOL or can have a grinder and booster pump on every single thing that needs to be drained knowing that everyone that fails will create a sewage problem/leak when it does.
- The floor dimensions of large floor plate office buildings are very wrong for residential. They are usually square and several hundred feet wide. A typical 1000 sq.ft. apartment is going to be 25x40 or 20x50. So maximum you want a building 100-120 feet wide to accommodate a center hallway and apartments off each side. Anything wider than that is wasted space that at best you can derive revenue from as storage or create very large apartments with weird rooms with no windows. You cannot have a bedroom with no windows which is why traditional lofts were created. If you have no internal walls then the sleeping area has a window.
- Metering electrical and water and running all new lines for them is expensive and negates a lot of the reasons for reusing the building.
- You also need an air handler for each unit rather than one per floor unless you want high rise living without temperature control for individual units.
- Unless someone else has done a lot of this you are going to try and teach your fire marshal about alternative compliance fire code in the context of the scariest potential fire setting they are trained for(high rise residential). They are union but don't give two shits about your egghead liberal enviro bullshit you gave city council to get tax incentives.
- And I mentioned tax incentives because all of this is going to cost serious money and will be underwritten by your lender as if you were a tract apartment builder and you score no points with them for helping to save Downtown or the planet.(you may get some CRA points if Downtown happens to be in a poor census tract).
So you have to solve all these problems and end up with a product that competes in quality and pricing with purpose built residential. Some buildings you can buy cheap enough to do it. Others you just can't due to such esoteric things as how high the ceilings are or how the rebar got laid out 50 years ago. You functionally are buying a shell of a building so unless it's very cheap you just can't do it and make money.
I saw one estimate of NYC/Manhattan that it was less than 15% of buildings that were physically compatible with residential conversion, and this included no assumptions about cost or feasibility (i.e. It was just things like window frontage, access to main stacks/utilities, fire escapes, etc.)
Adding financial considerations would likely take things well below 10%, and given the refurbishment costs, none of these buildings would hit the market at any affordable price point - to recoup costs they would have to be premium units.
yes block sizing and therefore building floor plate size will knock most out of immediate consideration. Manhattan has 200 foot wide blocks which isn't too bad if you can find a 100 foot wide building with no other building on either long side or a 50-60 foot wide building on the end of the block. 200x200 office building towers is the norm. I used to drive the central business district folks nuts in my city because they kept trying to get someone to convert my family's old department store which was four stories and 200x300 and I kept saying it could not be done. They even had some guy sepnd half his fortune developing a plan for 15x 140 foot units and get laughed out of half the banks in the state. I actually went and spoke in favor of the permission to tear it down when we found some guys from Austin who would tear it down and build a new building with a central swimming pool on the lot.
Did anyone try to oppose the demolition? NYC has a lot of people that work hard to stop any building.
Yep there were holdouts with wild eyed ideas of how it could be saved or stories of how great the store was with no resources to execute such a vision. It had been vacant for 40 years and no roof.
The store was owned by my great great aunt and her husband who had no children and made my grandmother, her favorite niece, their heir.
My speech focused on the fact that they were business pioneers who opened the first department store in our community. As pioneers of the cutting edge they wanted and built a future for our community and it's people and it was a personal affront that that mission was being stymied in the present to preserve a brick shell that housed it. It was a far better honor for them to put up a plaque and have a building where people could live and work on the same place they and their staff lived and worked. Tearing the building down would preserve the cultural and social history of the place as a center of downtown life. Cities are about people not about buildings.
I finished by telling a story about how the owner had inherited a pair of diamond earrings from her mother that she set into a ring which she gave my grandmother and who gave it to my father. My dad took one of the diamonds for my moms engagement ring and when my brother and I each got engaged we got the diamonds to make our engagement rings for our wives made. They are heirlooms but each generation has made it it's own and so we needed to make this space, a community heirloom, a place that honored it's history by adapting it's use to modern times. That's how you truly honor a pioneer. Keep on pioneering!
The building wasn't particularly architectural noteworthy; tan brick. It did have kinda a cool above the roofline sign element which as an homage they recreated on the new building with a variance since above roofline signs got banned in the 70's and they mostly recreated the shop glass effect in the modern retail they put in.
Historic Commission approved the plan unanimously.
Thank you for elaborating. It is a wonderful story.
Woah cool story. Glad it got approved.
Absolute GOAT 🐐
I think the math on the pricing will change if a wave of defaults hits commercial space owners, which is something that is rumored to be coming but no one knows when or how bad it will be. If that does indeed happen, which is likely given that the amount of utilized office space likely won't recover anywhere near pre-pandemic levels, then some of these buildings will be significantly cheaper and may really have the potential to be repurposed.
Defaults in the commercial space are behaving a bit differently this go around, because most of these properties were highly leveraged buys, so there's been more renegotiating than repossession. The banks don't want a plummeting asset dumped on their laps, so they'd rather figure out a refinancing scheme that allows the owner to keep making payments on a very large book value that was heretofore considered gold-plated. This does push the breakeven point lower, but probably doesn't bottom out the way a true crash would.
The only really toxic assets will be the ones that were purchased near the absolute peak and the owners don't have the means/appetite to weather the downturn in the short term, nor the longevity to wait for the revitalization of the market. In practice this probably means smaller B and C class office space, in less prime neighborhoods, that might become stranded. And those are likely to be more distributed among lenders, and therefore less impactful than some massive $2-3B AAA failure torpedoing one bank's books (which, in my belief, is unlikely to occur).
Good summary, not to mention ripping up the street to upsize all the sewer lines for several km, as well as having to run a drastically oversized chiller, praying you have enough heating in the central plant, and removing most of the glazing to add operable windows.
You don't have to have operable windows but yes hvac and heat is an issue. I had forgotten about sewer since I got my city to guarantee to the property lines utilities for adaptive reuse when they were bitching about no one doing it. That was a useful incentive in eliminating risk. Think we got about 1500 units as a direct result of that.
(Edit up front - Seattle 5 years ago in single-family zones an attached ADU (AADU) was rare, now we are building up to 3 units on a SF lot (SF home, AADU, and DADU (detached)). This is a huge change and AADU/DADU construction is outpacing SF home construction in the city. Plus WA state legislature is working on a bill to allow 2, 3, or 4 units per lot based on city size statewide. Things can change!)
Per your points, some ideas:
Replace a stack of windows between units up the side of the building with a spandrel panels to accommodate the vents.
I used to work for an architect/space planner and we would sparingly do core drills regularly to reconfigure electrical/water in hi-rise buildings in downtown Seattle. If a whole building, or many floors, are being converted then it could be cost effective enough to do to make the project happen.
City blocks are usually around 100,000 sf. Less sidewalks, etc. and with a central core of 50' (elevators, stairs, halls) that leaves around 125' max. depth for the unit. Open plan loft style apartments with open floor plans could just be a compromise for the style of unit in these buildings. Something has to give, and part of that is rigid thinking that these spaces will be 'normal' apartments. Much like the current push for AADU and DADU units to increase density - turn architects loose on demonstration projects to work out the best model to go forward.
Make these buildings have shared utilities and charge appropriately instead of metering everything. Do annual audits if someone is using more and give them a surcharge.
Abandon the conventional HVAC system for the units and put in hotel room style heating/cooling units. The building is probably ready for an upgrade anyway.
This is a real problem in some cases, I too have dealt with fire marshals. At least the buildings will already be sprinkled. The occupant load will be greatly reduced overall, the residents would need to do regular fire drills. We would need a rewrite of the code to have a prescriptive path to settling issues with the fire marshal and be something they are comfortable with.
You bring up realistic issues and it needs to be financed. But I think that subsidizing a lot of this would really help out downtown areas. Better buildings get better sized/configured spaces at higher costs. Maybe some of the less desirable spaces are made into more dorm style with common living rooms spaces, communal baths, kitchens with resident staffs that serve good quality meals each day. Co-ops, boarding houses, generational homes are some other ideas. How about requiring a store (with produce) in each building to eliminate food deserts? Restaurants in larger buildings, common areas as a park-like space - some modest zoning requirements, just in a vertical sense instead of sprawl.
Seattle, as an example, has a median single-family home price of $785,000 and condos at $471,500. The downtown is slowly changing toward have more people living there but a big push of units would help out on our overall housing crisis. 'Affordable housing' is literally hundreds of thousands of dollars here, but what if it could be $30,000-$70,000 for a small co-op or efficiency unit buy-in? Ownership would change the dynamic of many of our issues as a city.
As a single family home owner, I'd be willing to subsidize some of the development to ease the spiral of inflation. Prices in the city are very high because they need to be to attract workers that will commute long distances into town. Having everyone just be able to live here would be amazing for prices and quality of life.
- plumbing code usually specs venting out the roof but you could probably variance that on a building with no operable windows or decks and not having exterior wall intake for ac. Usually you want the ac and to vent through the roof. They make closet pack units for the five story buildings wrapped around garages.
- Yep it's expensive though I live in a tier 3 market so money is tight.
- Lay one out with walls or tape sometime. It would be equivalent to living in a 767 main cabin with all the windows closed and a window at one end.
- You can apportion water some places not aware of anywhere you can apportion electric on scale. Most places have banned all bills paid for conservation purposes. I get the point though.
- Yes you do this but it removes a window bay and means you do have to vent bathrooms and kitchen to the stack meaning you really do need unit width. basically at 8 foot increments 125 by 24 is 3000 sq.ft. with 16 feet of window frontage 125 by 16 is 2000 sq.ft. with a single pane 8 foot wide window.
- If you don't have IBC existing building code you get that passed first. Even still I've had fire marshals ignore it and say "go to building standards board if you don't like it" which creates an insurability issue.
- What we did was use the TIRZ to create a pool of money and grant a flat per unit cash on CO issuance incentive. The amount works out to 10% of the typical unit cost for market rate apartments. So if you go market you double your return on equity. If you go lower it gets higher return. If you build high end condos it is less effectual. If you sell inexpensive condos(market rate apartments price point) we have a sales tax funded first time buyer grant that covers a 20% down payment so buyers can get no out of their pocket down payment financing to get the project to enough sales for federally backed mortgages and the developer can pocket the per unit grant as their profit.
Are there "simple" things that can be done for future non-residential buildings that make upgrading them more feasible?
Well...
- Make them no more than 130-140 feet wide and keep some space between the long sides and adjacent buildings.
- Put bathrooms away from the elevators and have a wastewater line running around halfway between the centerline and the windows on each side of center line buried in the slab with capped clean outs every 20 feet.
- Run electrical to panel rooms on each floor and and break runs up into sections between the clean outs.
- Similarly set up air handlers and ac ducting.
- Have 12 foot ceilings.
It would add significant costs to office buildings so I doubt they'd want to do it. I doubt anyone is building an office building in the near future anyway.
I just want to say thank you for this very detailed response. I learned a lot and found them to be very interesting!
Since residential units would only need three maybe four elevators couldn’t they just use the elevator shafts for running water air and electricity?
Yes that is possible but most of them have a utility chase in them. The big issues are wastewater since those are usually under the fixture and need a slope to get back to the chase. If you have very tall ceilings you can build a two foot false floor in the hallways and bathrooms and run sink drainage through the bathroom. The big thing on electrical and water is separately metering them which means instead of one meter at the service connection you have dozens somewhere inside and accessible to the provider. For electrical this means a big ass room on the bottom floor and then runs from every meter up to a panel in the unit. So basically an entirely new electrical system with very long runs. I know I asked my city to look at whether anyone was doing a system yet where you could retain the master meter and have sub meters at each unit and when it downloaded the read it would auto generate bills for the sub meters subtract the usage from the main meter and send a bill for the excess to the owner or owner association. You can't meter off at each floor because utilities own the infrastructure up to the meter and won't take infrastructure within a building. This why apartments to coops was a thing rather than going straight to condos. You were going to have someone end up having to split a utility bill and maintain the infrastructure.
Many states and municipalities allow R.U.B. Metering (ratio utility billing) to take the gross electrical or water bill and split it up by the sf of each unit and bill it that way. I build commercial high rise apartment buildings in the PNW that used this method for water and gas. Power had Meters. That being said the meter rooms were every third floor and fed about 40 apartments. The meter rooms are only like 15x8. Running every 50 or 100 amp circuit from the basement to the a unit say on the 15th floor would be absurdly expensive due to power loss and wire size. While it would take a lot of rework to convert an office building to apartments I don’t think utility billing is a serious problem.
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1.1y
It'd be interesting to hear what realistic options there are for retrofitting the space. It seems far more foolish to try and force things back to the way they were before the pandemic, yet the rich seem invested in doing exactly that.
You’re not wrong but very soon the option is going to be whether the government invests in that or dealing with squatting at insane scales.
Those people living in tents outside in Seattle and Portland will move right into vacant office buildings given half a chance.
So it’s a minor issue relative to all you listed but could heating and cooling be handled via mini split heat pumps rather than running ductwork for each unit?
2019: Go to the office to work
2020: Work from home
2022: Lose job
2023: Live in office
Home from work
“We already have work at home!” Work at home:
It's a lot of renovating. The costs would be massive and comparable with new construction.
Edit:. To add, older buildings had some suspect building practices, so in order to even start demo, and abatement company has to go in and carefully remove all the old dangerous material. Yearly scaffolding rentals, repointing/engineering/architect etc... Then there's zoning and permits...
have they tried not buying avocado toasts?
The bigger question is, would NIMBY cities even allow it to happen? Most of the big cities of the US have spent a decade using every possible excuse to slow down any new residential construction of any kind.
The question is how much is owed on the building and how much more would it cost to convert. A building financed on the hopes of $100 a square foot can not rent out for $20 a square foot unless a bankruptcy and subsequent sale drives the value way down.
Commercial real estate’s collapse could be the next 2008 type contagion.
This. People need to organize politically to actually make traction on housing. There are small signs of this happening. But not really.
It would be more cost effective to create a housing first program, ban corporations from owning single family loans, and tax second+ properties at a higher rate and first ones at a lower rate.
The problem is the immense cost to convert office space to livable quarters. A lot of water, sewer, and HVAC issues. Electrical changes, interior construction, etc;
Just build houses people want and can afford. Everything built now is either condos that are really expensive with huge condo fees or huge homes that cost millions.
...those are the things people with money want and that are allowed to be built with our zoning laws.
No.
Conversion of office space to living space requires a lot more than just throwing walls up and adding some lights, and not all office buildings are rated for human habitation.
Trying to add the necessary plumbing has got to be a nightmare, unless they have a communal bathroom.
It is expensive but we might just be at a point where it is more expensive NOT to consider it.
Los Angeles county has begun looking at buying motels/hotels through out the city in order to house people. They are also looking at the property the city owns to see if there is any possibility of using the land or converting the existing building into housing.
Motels/hotels already have plumbing and bathrooms so it's not as bad trying to convert them into permanent housing.
That's a very different ask then trying to convert office buildings.
True. Converting office buildings is astronomically more expensive. But motels/hotels are finite and probably not enough to fill the demand.
But neither are tents or cars... and yet families are now living in them
I guarantee you that the people living in tents and cars won't be able to afford living in a high rise former office building, either.
I foresee cities letting families put their tents and cars in abandoned buildings--- "concerned citizens" won't see them that way, and "compassionate citizens" will be relieved the homeless at least are out of the elements. Things will run smoothly until the cops quit bothering to patrol the place, then after a couple years John Stossel will highlight the squalid conditions and damage to the building, the local rag will pummel the city for overpaying the building owners for the space, and that will be that: back out to the streets for everyone
That was going to be my argument against as well. “No, because those bloodsuckers would just charge three times the normal rent for wherever the people live and still make a profit over leasing it to office work companies.”
Could they make the conversion (if possible/feasible) then use rent control like some of the New York apartments based on a fair analysis?
If not, let all the dickheads like Redfin and Zillow who snatched all the properties up during the pandemic continue to take losses. Fuck em!
Edit: loses to losses*. (Fury fingers!)
There is no housing shortage. There are a ton a vacant houses not on the market to keep the prices of rent and houses high. Start adding a Tax to corporations owning several houses that are left vacant for more than a month and the housing 'shortage' would vanish.
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1.1y
It's also zoning restrictions and homeowners voting for policies/politicians that prevent further building of houses.
Also high interest rates means developers don't get access to easy capital for building, plus less demand from would-be buyers due to the higher mortgage requirements.
That's simply not true for most cities.
I mean, they made an unsubstantiated conjecture. Of course it is not true. Building new units lowers the value of sitting on vacant units. The ability to build new unit is banned in many location by local zoning laws, large investors bought into these local land use cartels with cheap debt. Increasing interest rates undermines this business model and makes sitting on empty units more costly.
How many of those vacant homes are in places people want to live though? I suspect a huge number of them are in declining areas.
Like Newton, IA
I'm boggled to see this specific reference, and am so curious as to what made you choose it. The town's real, tiny, and in the middle of Iowa of all places. I only know it because of a news story a few months ago.
Newton is a classic one-industry Midwestern town that has been declining for years because that one major employer (Maytag in Newton's case) that held up the whole economy left.
Yup. Detroit has plenty of cheap, empty homes. Over 100,000 empty homes in just the City of Detroit alone, in fact, not counting every other area of Michigan.
But who wants to move to Detroit?
In recent years, they've been doing a lot to recover, but it's a very long road for them still.
r/usdefaultism And even in the case of the US, we still need supply even if we addressed the vacant places, because pricing is another part of the issue
I used to do trash outs, evictions, and upkeep on houses owned by banks. It was quite astonishing how many houses are foreclosed on and remain vacant for over a decade or more. Banks will just let the houses sit and waste away
Why though? They could spend a few months + some capital sorting a house for occupancy and that’s easy money, I suppose. Why just leave it vacant indefinitely?
You think they're not doing what's most profitable to them?
This is very very wrong.
You could even argue that a lot of Air B&B places bought up a lot of empty places as well to drive up prices.
How about banning corporations and investment firms from buying up all the houses to jack up the prices using the same pricing AI.
This is the real fix. We HAVE to make it illegal for foreign entities and corporations (Zillow, Blackrock, others) to buy single family homes in America. This should be an easy bipartisan issue.
Do you want the house next door to be owned by a foreign corporation? No. Nobody wants that. Lets make it illegal.
We can call them 'projects. I think the name Cabrini-Green is available for the first one.
Dallas is starting to do something like this. I hope it works but downtown Dallas isn't really liveable. Probably the reason why nobody lives there. https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/03/122219-dallas-ahead-game-adaptive-reuse
Who is we? office building holders would have to spend millions to do that and they have zero incentive to do so. Office space inventory isn't at critical levels of non- occupancy and we are not even remotely close to govt taking possession of private property.
“We” as in you and I? Do you have a business plan at least?
I would not want to live in a residential development where the sewer works were added as an afterthought. My answer is no, we should not convert empty offices into apartments to address the housing shortage.
There are issues other than supply causing the housing "shortage". In some places there is a problem with supply but in most places there are plenty of vacant homes, they're just not being let out, or the rates that are being asked are too much for the market to bear.
Yes. That is like my dream space to live . Spaaaaaace and light.
Smart money will convert or demolish the empty offices. We have way too much inventory and demand will only decrease over time as telecommuting grows.
That said, a lot of them will hold on to these spaces hoping that some miracle occurs that makes working in the office profitable.
Yes but here is the thing: A lot of places do not have a shortage of houses. They have companies buying them up and price gouging them back out/jacking the rent if its to rent it out thus causing an artificial shortage. That is the problem.
Wait... You have housing shortages? We have lots of empty apartments due to the developer wanting an arm and a leg for them here where I live. But they are building even more. xD
I would assume plumbing is the real issue. Providing water/sewer to 10 units on a floor that has two bathrooms would be the issue. If you changed zoning to allow for communal bathrooms/showers on a floor you might be able to make it work.
its not the worst idea but I don't think people consider the whole picture here. For one on average most office buildings have little to no true vacancy, most companies are using the majority of their office space and some never went remote. So you can't just convert the one or two truly vacant spaces into affordable apartments it doesn't work that way. Otherwise if you did say have a high rise fully unoccupied, the cost of gutting it and turning it into apartments is so high you would just wind up with another buliding downtown of $3500/month units that only the ultra rich or young people without kids can even begin to afford
As far as I'm aware, in the UK converted commercial spaces don't have minimum size requirements when made into flats/apartments.
In several buildings in my city, there are former office blocks that are now filled with 'studio' flats charging £8-900 per month for what is essentially a single room with a bed and kitchen in the corner, a small bathroom too.
These spaces, to myself at least, just seem like desperate attempts to use the space as efficiently as possible in terms of how many people they can cram inside without them being outright uninhabitable.
Without proper regulaton to not only make them comfortable, but also dignified - no, I'd rather knock the buildings down entirely and build dedicated housing or turn them into green spaces.
No, let s just leave them to fucking rot. Both the empty buildings and the people. /S
No no, the buildings are worth something /SSSSSSSSSSS
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