On the 31st floor of what was once a towering office building in downtown Manhattan, construction workers lay down steel bracing for what will soon anchor a host of residential amenities: a catering station, lounge, fire pit and gas grills.
The building, empty since 2021, is being converted to 588 market-rate rental apartments that will house about 1,000 people.
In the nation’s capital, Mayor Muriel Bowser has made office-to-housing conversions a cornerstone of her plan to repopulate and revitalize the district’s downtown. Her “comeback plan” for the capital city, announced earlier this year, seeks to add 15,000 new residents to the downtown area, adding to the approximately 25,000 who already live here.
“Developers who feel it’s going to benefit their bottom line will do it without an incentive,” said Erica Williams, director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “This is a very costly proposal for an unproven program.” “And even before the pandemic it was still missing basic stuff like playgrounds and dog parks and a normal non-Whole Foods grocery store that I could walk to,” Woods said. “I wouldn’t say I regret it, but if I was considering the same move right now, I’m not sure I would do it.”
But with vacancy rates at downtown office buildings continuing to rise, from 12.2% in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 17.8% in the first quarter of 2023, according to the real estate firm CBRE, there’s an urgency to do something. Some of the hardest hit places include San Francisco with a preliminary vacancy rate of 29.4%, Houston 23.6%, Philadelphia at 21.7% and Washington at 20.3%.
“We can also make a dent in this dire housing crisis that we’ve been in,” she said, noting that more than 70,000 New Yorkers sleep in shelters every night and there’s “essentially a functional zero-vacancy rate for the most affordable apartments in our city.” But conversions alone in New York and elsewhere are unlikely to bring back entire downtown neighborhoods, nor will they automatically put a dent in the affordable housing crisis. In a March report, CBRE found that office-to-home conversions only represented about 1% of new multi-family projects and that, despite the hype, that “there’s no evidence” they’ve significantly increased.
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