From empty office to apartment
An initiative that turns empty office buildings into affordable inner-city apartments could be a fix for central Nelson, a councillor says.
In Wellington, developers are converting 195 Willis St in Te Aro into affordable apartments, and the council will act as landlord, renting them out as a social housing initiative.
Nelson councillor Matt Lawrey spoke at a Nelson City Council meeting last week about the project, which saw Wellington City Council sign a 15-year lease on the converted office building.
Alex Cassels, one of the developers for The Wellington Project, said he’d been keen on the idea, given the sustained shortage of rental accommodation in the capital.
Cassels said that with Wellington’s large proportion of sparsely occupied office space, it made sense to innovate. ‘‘The speed at which you can convert an office building to residential is much greater than having to build that same number of units brand new on a greenfields site.’’
The Willis St conversion had to meet building code requirements for access, heating and insulation, fire safety, and earthquake compliance. The Wellington council signed a 15-year lease and agreed to annual rent increases at the rate of inflation.
Cassels said he had been concerned about the long-term impact of rental unaffordability on Wellington. It was a barrier to people wanting to live, work or run a business in the city. The conversion of commercial spaces that would otherwise be sitting empty was a way to combat this.
‘‘Affordable accommodation is good for residents and also very good for the city, because the benefit of growing the inner-city population is experienced by a wide range of businesses and people, and has other benefits, like enhanced safety.’’
In 2017, the Wellington council went to developers with the idea of converting commercial spaces, offering to lease the buildings for 15 to 20 years.
Cassels has been invited to
speak to the Nelson council about the initiative by Lawrey, who heard about the project while attending the Local Government New Zealand conference in Wellington earlier this year.
‘‘I think the advantage of what they’re doing in Wellington is by giving the landlords 15 years, they are giving them a reason to invest in the properties,’’ Lawrey said.
‘‘One of the problems we have in Nelson is we have a whole lot of buildings in the CBD which are a bit neglected, and we’re not seeing that investment going into them. If the council can give a property owner security that they’ll pay them a rent for them, they’ve got a reason to do it.’’
Lawrey said there were buildings in Nelson in need of earthquake strengthening, and the project could be a way to combine that work with some repurposing of empty space, with the possibility of converting a number of different sites under the same umbrella project.
‘‘We absolutely have to have some innovation in terms of the central city and getting people living there, but we haven’t really seen that happening.’’
He wanted to see the idea put before the new council, to be elected later this year, and see what appetite there was for it, from both the council and property owners.
Community Action Nelson’s Kindra Douglas said that after seeing the idea presented at the council, she emailed the attendees of a workshop on affordable housing, including local architects, builders and developers. She said the idea of converting commercial spaces into affordable housing received a very warm reception, and was just one thing in a suite of options the council could look at.