Is living in an empty office the answer to the housing crisis?
The lack of affordable housing and the emptying of many downtowns in the US are what doctors might call co-morbidities: different problems that occur simultaneously and can exacerbate each other, making the entire system worse. But some people are able to look at the US housing crisis and the state of the nation’s downtowns and feel a shred of hope. After all, here are two problems that can each become a solution to the other.
The 2022 State of the Nation’s Housing report from Harvard University revealed that the US housing supply is at a deficit of 3.8m homes. Meanwhile, in a city like San Francisco, where the availability of affordable housing has reached an acute crisis, the downtown business district has all but hollowed out. Now that remote work has become the norm, with knowledge workers logging in from everywhere and anywhere, only 73% of the city’s office space is in use, according to one study by the real estate firm CBRE.
To many, the fix is obvious: turn the unused office space into apartments. This rejiggering – applicable in numerous metropolises across the nation – would create housing for those in need, while giving downtowns a muchneeded jolt of new life.
There have long been commercialto-residential projects, such as smallscale factories converted into lofts, but the idea of converting towering office buildings into apartment complexes is a different, and increasingly popular, proposition. In Washington DC, developers registered 1,565 commercial-toresidential conversions from 2020 to 2021, according to statistics from RentCafe and Yardi Matrix, while Philadelphia saw 1,552 conversions over the same period. Developers and city agencies in Chicago are working together on the LaSalle Street initiative, which seeks to bring 1,000 homes (including 300 affordable ones) to a mostly shuttered stretch of the city’s financial district.
“We have a challenge, and then we have a need, and the challenge could actually help us meet the need,” says Marisa Novara, commissioner of Chicago’s department of housing. She’s talking about the stretch of former banks and law firm offices that mostly sit vacant on LaSalle Street, blocks away from the Google offices that are soon to open. Working with the city’s department of planning and development, Novara’s team crafted a call for proposals for mixed-use developments. “Our expectation is that 30% of any residential [housing] that you create in these buildings will be affordable – which is 10% more than the city’s inclusionary housing regulations,” the commissioner says. “We would like to see at least 1,000 units of residential housing and, thus, around 300 would be affordable.” As of now, there are but two affordable housing units in the community area.
Most days, San Francisco’s oncebustling financial district feels eerily empty. Whole floors of buildings sit unoccupied and the whimsical, customizedoffices where hundreds of tech companies are still nominally based are quiet, their grab-and-go kitchenettes empty and intra-floor slides collecting dust. At the same time, San Francisco’s protracted housing shortage continues to make headlines, pushing out countless longtime residents and driving up the city’s homelessness crisis.
“It kills two birds with one stone,” says Marc Babsin, president of Emerald Fund, a San Francisco-based housing developer that converted 100 Van Ness, a 28-story tower that was previously home to an AAA office, into an apartment building. Rents there are admittedly steep, but there is a lottery for affordable housing units. Some housing rights advocates say current market-rate-to-subsidized breakdowns aren’t equitable. And community resistance has also stymied a number of similar projects in other areas. Worries about noise, density and even shadows can scuttle new developments.
Creating homes out of office space doesn’t always fix a community’s dearth of housing, cautions Melissa Checker, a professor of urban studies at Queens College in New York. “Adding supply doesn’t always solve the problem. It can drive the cost up instead of down.” She suggests extra measures be put in place, such as inclusionary zoning that would require developers to make more units accessible to people across the economic spectrum. Furthermore, she says that developers should be required to accept housing vouchers. “I’m very pro the idea,” she says of the commercial-to-residential conversions that have been mushrooming of late. “But it’s a long-term solution, not the short-term solution we need.”
“The biggest problem for San Francisco is a sort of lack of imagination,” says Sonja Trauss, executive director of Yimby Law, which advocates for new housing throughout California. (Yimby is short for “Yes in my back yard”, a twist on the complaint often heard from residents who don’t want anything new built near their homes.) “Cities need to think about what the point of downtown is and what needs to be there.”
The complications aren’t just political. One of the biggest physical challenges of turning an office building into an apartment building, according to EB Min, founder and principal of San Francisco’s Min Design, is rethinking the large floor plans common to most office towers. As anyone who’s ever worked in a typical high-rise office knows, windows are usually on the outside with most employees working far from views and light. (This is why the “corner office” is such a coveted perk.) Residences, however, require light and ventilation, as well as bathrooms and kitchens in each unit. Not every building is appropriate for this kind of conversion. (Sorry if that crushes your dream of living 1,000ft up atop the Salesforce Tower skyscraper in San Francisco.) “You’d want to pick buildings where it would make sense to do it,” Min explains.
Conversions take an enormous amount of capital and, perhaps more crucially, time. That’s something that people who require housing and the small businesses that need customers can scarcely wait for. “Given how hard it is and how expensive, I don’t see a snap of the finger and then there’s 40,000 more people living downtown,” says Sarah Karlinsky, senior adviser at the non-profit San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (Spur). It will also take a major leap of faith: a citywide reconception of what neighborhoods look like and what, ex