“We’re going to try and convert commercial office space into housing,” Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller declared, as he announced a multi-level approach to creating new housing in the city, adding: “We’re proposing a $5 million fund to do that.”
The idea may strike many as unconventional, but increasingly across the country, empty office space is being used for housing, with repurposing particularly seen in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles.
Late last year, Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., said she was reaching out to the owners of vacant office buildings in order to find out “what they would need to consider transforming office structures into residences.”
City officials in Washington have said such adaptive re-use could also bring with it the additional benefit of having more people in downtown areas, particularly in evening hours when many of those areas are largely empty.
The San Francisco Chronicle, recently noting that city’s urban core had been gutted by hundreds of office workers now working remotely, has argued that an influx of people living in downtown office buildings could “foster a walkable community with a more sustainable economic ecosystem of new grocery stores, pharmacies, and other retail stores.”
According to the site RentCafe, a combined 6,000 apartment units nationally were created as a result of either hotel or factory space conversions in 2021. But the largest number, at roughly 7,400 apartment units, were created as a result of office project conversions, a number that has grown by double-digits in the last decade.
But such transformations are not without challenges: A report published last year by the National Association of Realtors noted that office-to-housing repurposing projects may require zoning variances and regulation changes.
The report also pointed out that the shape, size, and location of a building can drastically impact conversion project costs. “Wedge-shaped or cube buildings lend themselves more easily to conversion than rectangular buildings where much office space is far from exterior walls with no natural light.”
The report, Office to Housing Conversions, added that in such cases repurposing projects “may require modifying the basic building structure of the building roof to allow light in the inner space.”
By Garry Boulard
