Tuesday, December 27, 2022

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]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/business/what-would-it-take-to-turn-more-offices-into-housing.html

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.

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