England's experience with it should probably serve as a warning too. We had a law change that meant office blocks could be converted to housing without planning permission. Having lived in 1 that was converted into studio flats at the higher end of the market I think they really become houses of last resort, some of the units in the UK ones ended up being smaller than a single car garage. Obviously there are chances for better conversions if the country has housing standards that are enforced but even the ceiling height, like you say, gets oppressive after a few months.
There have been many articles in the last few months about conversions. The regulations make it extremely expensive to turn in office into a home. There was an article last fall where someone backed out of doing that for a tower in San Francisco because in addition to the standard regulations there was also requirement that some of the units be set aside for low rent and that made the conversion economically unfeasible even for the biggest optimist
We've tried to convert offices to homes in the UK, and there's something particularly dystopian about the result. I think they have to make strange trade-offs to make the space useful, and its ends up being not very nice. I'm sure it's better than being on the street, but it isn't nice.
In the UK the change in need has for years (ie even before COVID) driven planning changes so that it's easy to get an OK to convert say an office building into residential. The results definitely vary, between "This is legal but nobody should have to live like this" (e.g. far too much light from floor to ceiling windows in some rooms while others are dark, not enough bathrooms, poor heat and noise insulation) to actually rather nice places to live. Most tend to be rental units for young people, rather than family homes, but it all helps.
Where bureaucrats actually get to just make the decisions at a high level, rather than everything being second guessed by NIMBYs it's just really obvious what you have versus what you need. If you know your city has an inventory of empty mid-size office buildings sat on the market for months, yet apartments within walking distance of the city centre go for crazy money, it's a no brainer to authorise conversions. Whereas if the last office building was snapped up an hour after going on the market, while residential sales are crawling, a conversion from office to residential is nonsense, tell them to go away.
I've been thinking about the office building in which I worked pre-pandemic. It's actually not that wide and could be converted into a residential tower without cutting any holes in it (we had about 5 metres worth of desks, then 3 metres of walking space around the building core housing the elevators, fire escapes and conference rooms), but the ceiling height would be an obstacle. A typical flat is 2.7m tall, 3m is a premium height. The office had ceilings that were at least 3.5m tall to absorb the noise of the open space.
Even if they could be converted (and most buildings after a certain height are basically the same except for the interior) they'd likely be torn down and rebuilt; if they even can be due to zoning.
People love to hate on zoning but there are reasons for it, even if the way it's done isn't perfect by a long shot.
At least in the UK, they're more likely to get permission to convert to residential if it's long abandoned.
Housing demand in cities is much higher than the normal available space on the boundaries. Carving a big box into 300 apartments more than justifies a couple of years of doing nothing with the place.
I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite a while, many apartments were once factories or something else 100 years ago.
I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.
Yes I'm thinking of buildings probably 1980/90s onwards. We are tearing them down and rebuilding apartments in some cases I'm aware of. That seems like a real shame to be honest.
I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.
They started promoting this in the UK in ~2013 when the planning laws were relaxed[0]. The early conversions were pretty poor I think; badly-sized and without enough natural light.
Where I live in the UK, they've converted multiple office blocks to student accommodation. They are also tearing down block of flats due to other structure issues. Generally it's easier to build housing on green field rather than brown sites due to contamination etc. Once you convert the office to housing, when you need office space you'll have to build it somewhere
Looking beyond the regulatory hurdles (others have covered that, plus it's being worked on), there are some real practicality problems:
1 - Windowless rooms are heavily undesirable in residences but pretty normal in office settings. In many areas they are also illegal (all bedrooms must have natural light) - but regardless of legality they are shunned by most buyers/renters.
Offices however have lots of windowless rooms in the form of supply closets, utility rooms, freight elevators, conference rooms, storage rooms, etc. This combined with the popularity of open floor plan offices means that office buildings are really deep dimensionally. You can easily find modern office buildings where a desk is 50+ feet from the nearest window.
This makes them nearly impossible to divide into residences, because the resulting apartments are dungeon-like, with only the very outer reaches getting any significant natural light.
2 - Cost of conversion is high but the resulting product is worse than purpose-built.
Keeping in mind the natural light factor above, a lot of office-converted apartments are less pleasant to live in than purpose-built residential apartments, but the conversion costs are very high, and the two opposing dynamics cannot be reconciled. The cost of converting an office demands a level of rent that it cannot achieve in competition with actual residential buildings.
3 - Utility usage increases in residential buildings. A lot. Electrical, water, and sewer needs in residential buildings are much more intense than in commercial buildings. This is non-trivial to retrofit - since additional conduit and piping has nowhere natural to go. Conversion projects often have to punch through the concrete floor plates in order to create new top-to-bottom shafts to run all of the additional utilities. This is intensely expensive.
4 - Commercial buildings have over-built elevators relative to residential buildings. Office workers move from floor-to-floor a lot more than residents, and so for the same floor area commercial buildings would have more elevators. They take up valuable floor space that can otherwise be rented, and removing them to recover the floor area for residential use is incredibly costly. Many modern commercial buildings are in fact built around their elevator cores, so removal may not even be feasible.
There are some successful conversions - but as others have brought up, they tilt towards conversion of pre-war office buildings where, because they didn't have powered HVAC, there are more windows and no office is too far from a window, creating good opportunities to convert into actually pleasant spaces. Modern offices with their gigantic floor plates are a whole different story.
There are a few conversions like this where I live (also in the UK) and I agree that the results definitely do vary. Where the conversion is in the heart of the city, it seems to work pretty well -- sometimes even better than knocking down and rebuilding, because the existing offices usually have stand-off space around the building that would be lost in a high density redevelopment. And from an environmental perspective, keeping all of that 1950s/1960s poured concrete in place has got to be a good thing.
What really doesn't work is the partial conversion of offices on industrial/commercial parks out of town. It seems to lead to completely incongruous buildings, dumped essentially in the middle of parking lots, without basic amenities such as verges and pavements. Those buildings tend to be flimsy, and it's hard to see the environmental argument for keeping them. I would rather see those sites razed and rebuilt as better quality housing.
Indeed, I wonder that too: when push comes to shove and the commercial office market is left with billions of dollars in worthless real estate, what happens next?
My hunch is that you're right, but that it will follow a different pattern from what is popularly imagined. I think we tend to have this lofty vision of office towers being converted into no-frills, affordable homes that will offer working-class families a place to live close to where they work, but this vision doesn't really match with economic reality.
Much more likely in my view, given present residential construction macro-trends and the actual costs of residential conversion, is this: A slow process of converting the buildings that are currently losing the most money into luxury housing. The conversions will be massively expensive, in some cases more than the cost of new construction, but they will happen.
The upside of this, while much more limited in scope than the popular conception of residential conversion, is that it will increase the housing supply, and stands a chance to ultimately improve affordability as those who can afford it upgrade to higher-end homes.
Ive been told in a lot if cases this is virtually impossible due to cost and structural constraints of office construction vs residential... notably ceiling heights, plumbing and floor plans are poorly designed for residential conversion.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/02/will-these-be-...
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