What Would It Take to Turn More Offices Into Housing? Vast amounts of empty real estate are a crisis for building owners. But some politicians and business leaders hope they can be converted into something new — and transform downtown neighborhoods. [nyt]
What Would It Take to Turn More Offices Into Housing?
Vast
amounts of empty real estate are a crisis for building owners. But some
politicians and business leaders hope they can be converted into
something new — and transform downtown neighborhoods.
There’s about 998 million square feet of office real estate across the United States that’s available but in search of a tenant.
That’s
thousands of old cubicles, conference rooms, pantries and cafeterias
sitting in ghostly quiet. That’s a vast amount of empty space — nearly
13 percent of the market — that could be turned into two-bedroom
apartments, big-box retailers, boutique hotels, community college
classrooms or even studios for artists. At least that is what city
governments and developers are discussing with more urgency, as
researchers estimate that office value will plunge 39 percent from
prepandemic levels.
What looks like a
catastrophe to many building owners presents an opportunity, a possible
catalyst for converting some older office spaces to new uses and
transforming downtown neighborhoods into areas where people can also
live, especially as the United States faces a deficit of more than three million homes.
City and business leaders from New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and
Seattle last month began a series of meetings, convened by the Brookings
Institution, where they will exchange ideas on re-envisioning the
future of their downtown business districts.
Members
of the group are gathering data on the downtown share of jobs and
housing, real estate leasing trends, public safety and public transit
ridership in their cities. The task force hopes to help city leaders
invigorate commercial areas that have sat eerily quiet for nearly three
years, even as mayors like London Breed in San Francisco and Eric Adams in New York have implored office workers not to, as Mr. Adams put it, “stay home in your pajamas all day.”
“We’re
not focusing on recovery in terms of trying to create a time machine,”
said Tracy Hadden Loh, a Brookings researcher who created the group.
Couldn’t
at least some of those empty buildings be housing? Especially in cities
where rents continue to rise and availability is scarce, that is one of
the more compelling proposals being discussed. It’s also one of the
more complex ideas.
Most office
buildings are laid out differently from residential spaces. They might
have columns every 20 feet, windows that don’t open and too much space
from wall to wall. And, most critically, office real estate has
historically been far more expensive per square foot than apartments.
In
Washington, D.C., just one in about 20 office buildings is a good
candidate for housing conversion, said Josh Bernstein, chief executive
of Bernstein Management, which owns and operates both residential and
commercial real estate. The conversion alone might cost about $400 or
$500 per usable square foot, Mr. Bernstein added, and would in many
cases be more expensive than building a new development.
A
recent Moody’s analysis of New York offices found that just 3 percent
of the buildings it tracked would be viable for apartment conversions.
The median rent for apartments in New York is $55 per square foot, which
just 36 percent of office properties now fall at or below — and on top
of that, there’s all the cost of conversion.
“It’s much easier to theorize about office-to-residential conversions than to execute and profit on them,” Moody’s analysts wrote.
But
if office value eventually dips low enough, some real estate developers
are noting, the math for more conversions could begin to work out.
Between
2016 and 2021, 218 offices across the country were converted to other
uses, or about 36 each year, according to the real estate group CBRE.
Roughly 40 percent of the conversions were for multifamily housing,
creating 13,420 apartments. This year has seen a slight uptick, with 42
office conversions completed so far across the country.
Some
people contemplating the future of downtowns are thinking even more
creatively. Emma Wiseman, a puppetry artist, started working on a horror
movie just before the pandemic about an apocalypse in which only office
supplies like staplers and paper clips survived. Then she watched as
offices sat empty and people locked down at home. Now she is writing to
real estate experts asking what it would take for New York to turn some
of its empty buildings into studios and venues for artists.
“There’s a sadness to all these things that are built for a purpose and then go unused,” Ms. Wiseman said.
No comments:
Post a Comment