Empty offices could ease housing crisis

Repurposing our built landscape presents, as the buzz-phrase goes, challenges and opportunities.

The High Line, a onetime rail track turned delightful urban walkway, is a fine example in New York. In Toronto, Maple Leaf Gardens, Summerhill Station, the Brickworks and numerous churches turned condos have all been put to new purpose as the city evolved.

An intriguing example of what’s known as “adaptive reuse” is the application to repurpose the former Canadian Pacific Railway Building at 69 Yonge St., once the tallest in the British Empire, to new residential use.

As the Star’s Victoria Gibson reported, the building’s small, dated floor plans were not competing with the larger, sleeker offices emerging nearby even before the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered working lives.

Over the last three years, the pandemic emptied out downtown offices and the popularity of remote working has made many employees reluctant to return. As a result, downtown Toronto has a vacancy rate of more that 15 per cent, prompting some brainstorming on how to keep the core bustling with people and activity.

With residential rents increasing and a housing shortage, the conversation around turning empty offices into housing has grown. Such projects are under way in many cities across Canada and have been proposed in others.

Such initiatives might restore life to towers no longer operating at capacity and increase the opportunities for businesses that once depended solely on the comings and goings of office workers.

Among the uncertainties, however, is the ongoing workplace flux, though it seems apparent that there has been a fundamental attitudinal shift among workers from which there is likely no going back.

In Toronto, Brad Bradford is among mayoral candidates proposing to enable more conversion of the city’s nearly six million square feet of vacant office space for residential purposes.

“Something has to change,” he said in releasing part of his housing platform.

Bradford would ease guidelines and zoning restrictions that currently make it difficult to convert office floor plates into housing.

With so much empty office space, ensuring that urban centres remain vibrant “requires a new approach that better responds to the realities of new ways of working,” according to a Bradford campaign release.

Finding new uses for empty offices

With rents increasing and a housing shortage, the conversation around turning empty offices into housing has grown.

Such projects are under way in many cities across Canada and have been proposed in others

Adaptive reuse has happened for decades on a small scale. But the pandemic has accelerated interest. In U.S. cities, task forces have been struck and city ordinances amended to reduce regulatory obstacles.

Still, the complications are many. Location, whether floor plans lend themselves to apartments or condominium units, the size and number of windows, plumbing, mechanical and electrical needs, elevators and parking must all be dealt with.

As the Star reported, planners and architects says few existing offices are easily convertible. Larger floor plans are hard to carve up to offer window access to each unit. Moreover, current city policy says any lost office space in areas such as the Financial District must be replaced.

But the pandemic proved that policies can be changed. And there is at present a convergence of forces to encourage creativity and flexibility. A housing crisis. A huge change in how people

want to work. Property owners facing the huge losses that vacancies bring. There are also social costs associated with commercial districts that become ghost towns. If nothing else, Bradford et al. might be providing an exception to the old Kim Campbell axiom that election campaigns are no time to discuss important issues.

Ideas that let people make their lives where others once made their livings deserve applause.