Converting vacant office buildings into apartments

Love how they showed contrast between the two developers. One developer complaining about how “work from home is ruining the real estate market” & the other developer shows how they adapt and innovates a way to meet today’s Market. 👍

Maybe 60 minutes can do an update once the building is totally converted?

Even if they’re not affordable, that will take the pressure off of other neighborhoods that are getting gentrified

Mix used buildings might work. Apartments on the upper floors, and offices on the lower floors, or vice versa.

They don't convert well in part because they don't have enough light. That says something about how healthy the environment is in all of those buildings that don't convert and reflects of the health of the population. I'm now in a new building where 30% of the walls are glass to a green space. It has altered my life in a physical and emotional sense.

Key thing: “we are not talking about affordable housing”

Another thing that is also an obstacle for converting existing commercial high rises to residential is that multi-story residential buildings have a lot more building code requirements for safety. For example, if a fire breaks out at night in an office building, the code doesn't assume ppl are sleeping, but in an apartment building they would be, so there are many more fire separation requirements between units, at corridors, stair wells, elevator shafts ,etc. To allow ppl time to either get out or stay inside while fire fighters respond.

I hope this will become a trend, especially for urban areas. In Metro Manila Philippines, the rent is really expensive compared to other ASEAN countries. There are a lot of vacant offices, and hybrid/full work from home setup is becoming a trend now. This will definitely help reduce the market-value of properties and rents.

A lot of commenters completely MISSED the point of this story. It's about converting downtown office buildings into urban housing. NOWHERE does it mention or talk about affordable housing. That's a completely different story for a different day.

Maybe if they install supermarkets, dry cleaning and Starbucks on the ground floor of these buildings, it might work.

Well it’s clear now that commercial real estate is the next bubble that will burst. We’ve seen this same thing happen with the failures of malls across America when online shopping destroyed that market. Along with urban burn where alot of urban cities are becoming more & more vacant. Work from home or remote access is very cost effective for companies & for the labor force & this too will destroy the remaining commercial real estate. The race is on my friends to quickly turn office space into residential asap & neighborhood style activities in such buildings such as gyms, spas, coffee shops & so on, heed the warning. Prayers for all. 🙏😊

$3500 for a studio 😂

Because no matter what New York City does it will be extravagantly expensive so it doesn't address the problem the city has for affordable middle-class housing. Real estate people in NYC can't conceive of not ripping people off, so it might work but it won't work.

I love more apartment units available

$3500 is consider affordable? Really ?

@60minutes You mentioned that in order to attract tenants to these converted buildings, the developers had to also build amenities (like rooftop fire pits, lounges, gyms, etc). Those amenities certainly drive up the cost per unit. I'd like to know where the desire for amenities really comes from. I've seen those amenities in buildings in my neighborhood/area (Greater Boston) and they are usually empty. One realtor of a luxury building said the amenities available (gym, lounge, heated pool, game room) contributed to about 30% of the rent. Where is the data saying tenants want those things so badly, they are willing to pay so much more for them? And if there weren't amenities, would the math work better for the developers for conversion?

it could be affordable housing if the federal government used 5% of the defense budget to provide grants to the city to purchase the buildings that are possible to convert.

People will always want to live in New York City, many times only for a few years. Converting office buildings to apartments is a great idea, and should eventually start to eliminate the city’s longstanding housing shortage.

It's cool to think how midtown could some day become a modern-day soho. soho used to be industrial, and people said those old building floorplates were too big and awkward for residences, with similar lack of light in the middle of the apartments. but people love living in lofts. I wonder if living in a converted office tower would be nice. Ideally we'd want to build density but the light problems are exacerbated by adding more apartments.

great video, both of them spoke in a way we can all understand