Why don't we just turn empty offices into housing?

What is your city doing to fight the housing crisis?

A lot of offices would convert better to student housing, where common amenities like floor bathrooms and 1 large kitchen, quiet study space, would make a lot of sense and you could have larger spaces shared by 2 roommates. I know a lot of student housing is needed in many cities too and I think it might be a better middle ground.

A few years ago, my friend lived in a converted office block. It had been purchased by a charity and converted into social housing. It was an excellent flat, though a little quirky. He had a large sitting room, with large windows giving views across to one of his city's universities. To one side was a kitchen, in a separate room, benefitting from a window. The extra space that was left over from the generous hallways, which led to the lifts, could have been wasted, but the designer had incorporated an entrance hall linking the bedroom, bathroom, and living areas. The quirkiest part was the bedroom, a long, seemingly narrow room, which nevertheless contained a queen-sized bed and a large dressing area. Public areas included package room, 24 hour concierge service with a dedicated office, post room, and laundry. This was social housing, and it shows that conversion does not need to be bad, nor does it need to be only for luxury. My friend has good memories of his time in that flat.

The housing crisis was created by the for-profit housing industry and predatory landlordism. Fixing it requires abolishing them in service of a housing for people. This measure simply opens up more spaces for enriching private profit-generating companies through new avenues of renting.

I think that in the future, we have to build more mixed-use buildings. In city centers, we can easily have buildings with shops, restaurants, and fitness centers on the ground floor, office spaces on floors 2-5, a hotel from floors 5-9, and apartments from floors 9-15. In this way, people don’t need to commute far for daily errands like shopping and fitness; their office can be in the same building or just two streets away, because many buildings have office spaces. Tourists have all the shops, stores, and other activities that do not involve sightseeing close by. It’s just an idea, maybe not ideal for all buildings and all locations, but some areas of cities can be used in this way. I also don’t understand why everything has to be concentrated in the city center or CBD. Why can’t we have smaller centers in different parts of the city, like every major residential area or suburb having a small center with a city-center-like vibe? Some apartment buildings, offices, shops, squares, entertainment areas, playgrounds, parks that serve the surrounding areas. I mean, they had them and they called them malls, which are awful representations of this.

I think the plumbing would be one of the worst problems to deal with. Office buildings have one bathroom for each gender per floor, with multiple fresh water and drainage pipes. Apartments need fresh water and drainage pipes for all the kitchens, and all the bathroom, tubs, toilets and sinks in every unit. To install all those pipes and water supply would be daunting. Lots of tearing up of walls and floors. You almost have to gut the entire inside to do that. And all those extra pipes must have an impact on the load-bearing capabilities built into an office building. And then the video also noted individual heating and cooling in each unit that can be controlled by the unit. Most office buildings have master controls per floor and central heating and cooling systems. God bless if they can do it, but I wouldn't want to be the engineer figuring all that out.

From the challenges that they are alluding to in this video, it sounds like office buildings are much more suitable for creating rooming houses, hostels, and cohousing, instead of luxury or single family homes. This could serve the lowest income bracket really well, with homes where tenants who share a home have access to a common bathing and kitchen facility, and private bed /living areas. They could be great stepping stones for singles and young people, and offer a lot more dignity than just cramming four adults into a home designed for a family.

This is a great idea in theory but in practice in the UK it has too often resulted in cramped and airless apartments. Proper planning and building regulations need to be enforced to make it work.

This reuse was done in a building near me. Apartments sold for $78K and had 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, large living, kitchen areas. I'm sad I discovered them too late, all sold out. But it was a great opportunity for a few Millennials to buy their first homes

Living in the US, it is so refreshing to see a European perspective where this is considered possible. The predatory perspective here is to use this idea to get rich rather than to solve a problem. Developments I see in cities like NYC seem unlikely to ever come down in cost for renters, even decades after they are fully converted. At the same time, most of the postwar tenement and apartment buildings are falling apart.

Thank you for presenting an “incremental-but-valid solution” perspective. It seems to me that we often discount solutions because they don’t completely solve the problem, when instead, the desired outcomes can come from employing multiple, smaller innovations. ❤

This seems like a very good way to also support downtown businesses like restaurants, etc which could benefit from people who would live downtown all day and not just during daytime business hours.

Most of us don’t need luxury apartments!. How about converting some of them for low income rather than just sitting empty. Many of us would even be grateful for pods with shared bathrooms.

It's not that some office buildings are totally unviable, they just wouldn't work with antiquated zoning rules or at the density that developers would desire. The main issue i see with these conversions is that developers are driven to squeeze as many units as possible or make them as high-end as they can to make more profit.

I live in a large city and have watched many downtown office buildings being converted into housing. I wondered why it sometimes took a very long time to complete those projects. I hadn't thought about things like access to elevators and the like. Thanks for answering some questions I had about those conversions. [edit] Forgot to mention I live in a converted city hall building, originally built over a hundred years ago. I love the spectacular architecture and construction details they were able to retain (terrazzo floors, cast iron details, etc.) They cordoned off each floor almost with a rabbit warren like maze, not sure what was going on there, but most apartment entrances are 'hidden' down a short L-shaped corridor, or around a bend, rather than all the doors being lined up like dominoes along a long central hall. Some apartments wound up with two floors, one has a third floor in the old clock tower.

Oh cool, Calgary is mentioned! I'm so happy they moved quickly to help transform the buildings. There was about a year near the start of Covid that I was the noisy wheel in the city trying to get the grease of transforming the office towers to residential. It's surpassed my wildest expectations. Calgary remains an awesome city! Just hope we can stop building so much low density car oriented developments. It's nowhere near as bad as a median US city, but it still could be better with more intensification within existing communities.

A few big hurdles to convert office to apartment that I can think of - office buildings typically have curtain wall which can't be opened - bathroom - apartment needs to be fire compartmented from each other - office building may not have enough exit staircase when convert to apartment

I'm an MP design engineer in the buildings industry and I'm really hoping to work on one of these office space to apartment projects someday. It would be a serious challenge to figure out out those systems, but I would be so motivated.

Mixed use seems the most practical conversion. Nice units on the ends with windows, stores, offices, restaurants, fitness centers, and daycares in the center. A true live-work space in the city would be amazing. You could leave your unit, drop the kids into daycare, then go get some work done in an office space.

For offices that aren't vacant, convert a portion of their parking lots to building affordable rentals. Give priority to employees that have long commutes or low incomes. Rentals by default should not have parking space. Occupants can save $10K per year not owning a car.