How to Convert Empty Offices Into Luxury Apartments | WSJ

''we don't want a residential building, this is an office district, we want to preserve jobs...'' What jobs are you preserving in an empty building?

The lack of light and air in "modern" offices is also part of why a lot of people don't enjoy working inside them.

Local governments should also be realistic and be open to change zoning codes in their cities. Cities need a mix use area wherein people can live, work and have quality life within 20 mins of walking. Wouldn't it be nicer if workers can just walk or have shorter commute to and from work?

600 units that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. That’s great, hopefully we do more conversions in the future and decrease their cost. An empty office building helps no one. And housing can revitalize an area.

Man I worked on this deal quite a bit. The boys at vanbarton know what they are doing. But the real reason this works is because they are working with Nathan Berman who happens to own the sister mirror building, 180 water st so it’s a much easier “copy paste” conversation than it would be otherwise. (Easier not easy)

Glad to see lots of innovation in this area! I remember seeing a lot of naysayers insist that office-to-residential conversions were impossible/prohibitively expensive, but I think building light shafts/wells is an interesting solution.

Appreciated the explanation of converting older vs newer buildings. Going forward all office buildings should be designed with conversion in mind because housing is going to remain a big issue. We have the design software so let's use it properly.

business is wild they're like: there's not enough air and light to live here but please still come into the office and spend 40+ hours a week in the space anyways.

Remote workers finally got a break from outrageous cost of housing plus exhausting commutes.

All Americans have it wrong. We don’t need “affordable housing”. We just need more housing. Doesn’t matter if it’s luxury. The key is more supply. This will reduce costs long term.

Great news. There are so many people needing luxury appartements nowadays.

The opening lines of this piece highlight the problem with housing in this country. We are short on housing, yet developers only want to build luxury housing. We don't need anymorw luxury housing! Hardly anyone can afford it!

There's actually a fairly simple solution to areas in the middle of the building that don't receive light and air: turn them into public storage space. In most cases, you DON'T want light and air in those places. You also kill two birds with one stone wrt access control, and dealing with running plumbing. And because of the way that people tend to use storage units, you won't have heavy foot traffic from non-tenants. This might not apply much to NYC, which lives in its own reality distortion field, but in other places, it would solve a lot of the problems associated with trying to make every single square foot liveable.

Wow. The buildings are actually being coverted after 20 years of talk. Impressive.

HEY NEW YORK THIS IS A MSG FROM THE SECOND MOST EXPENSIVE CITY IN THE WORLD VANCOUVER CANADA. Surprisingly enough our housing crisis are quite similar as it seems like multi million rental corporations and slumlords are now controlling most to all rental housing stock. New apartments are labelled “LUXURY RENTALS” or “STARTING FROM LOW 700,000 CONDOS”. What’s funny is both our cities government are quite Democratic for you folks or Liberal in Canadian terminology. The developers get incentives in Vancouver to build affordable homes but they come with so many segregated systems built in place. Separate doors or as Vancouver calls it “Poor Doors” for the regular folk renting and Luxury entrances for the rich and elitists. Condo units are shrinking and prices are now at or close to the Million dollar mark with nothing seeming to give way. I know many friends and family members I grew up with who have moved further out taking long commutes on the Metro Skytrain system to get to work. It’s a shame both our cities are heading in this downward spiral where the elite win and the working class are shoved aside. The housing market is bound to burst at some point. We just gotta hold on until then!

sounds like since pre-war buildings are better for conversions nyc is more primed than most of the west coast (like SF)

It’s funny how removing square footage actually helps some of these conversions.

Luxury has become one of those words like communist or diversity or conservative, a word that has no meaning anymore. But NYC has no shortage of "luxury" apartments - there's tons of empty units. Theres a massive shortage of affordable units that regular working people could afford.

I hope they do this to more places, but make the apartments regular and not "luxury" (which really means nothing nowadays).

This is a puff piece, the building next to this one was converted from office to housing back in 2009.