“You need a number of factors to work together for this to work, and that’s what they happened to do at 100 Van Ness,” said Babsin, noting that the project started in 2012 after the Great Recession and took three years to complete.
“A few years later, [100 Van Ness] as an office would have made more sense, “he said.
Often times, such conversions only work in densely populated cities where land is scarce, and even then only certain types of buildings can be converted. After all, even with such conversions, the majority of the apartments are usually rented at high market prices. While it seems that the empty space could be better used for people without shelter, architects face challenges such as finding the right space between the elevator bench of a building and the windows.
“There’s a Goldilocks factor: the floor slab can’t be too small or too big,” says Kristina Garcia, a researcher at real estate agent Cushman Wakefield, and uses an industry term for the rentable space on a given floor of a high-rise office building. “There are limiting factors as to why adaptive reuse has not happened as often.”
Most modern office buildings have floor slabs around 25,000 square feet – about half the size of a soccer field – a number that has generally crept up over the decades. Newer high-rise office buildings are often significantly larger than their decades-old counterparts.
Architectural firm Gensler, following a recent inventory study in Calgary, Alberta, concluded that “the worse the office building, the more suitable for residential conversion”, especially in a city with an office vacancy rate of an impressive 32 percent. This usually means that older and often run-down buildings are ripe for renovation.
“For modern office buildings, the concept was to build the largest slab possible,” said John Cetra, a New York City-based architect whose CetraRuddy practice has worked on several notable renovation projects in the past few years, including 20 Broad Street in the area Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.
The office tower, built in 1957 and connected to the New York Stock Exchange, was reopened in 2018 after the renovation was completed. The age of the building means that the distance from the elevators to the edge of the building, known as the “leasing margin,” is no more than 45 feet, which is roughly the edge of the practical. In other words, newer office buildings are often too big to be used as apartments – large parts of their interiors would have little natural light.
“The donut around the building is the habitable zone. What do you do with the interior?” said Cetra.
An empty workspace in an office building in San Francisco on June 9, 2021.David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images
While Forgan’s company SCB has also completed a similar remodel of 1132 Bishop St. in downtown Honolulu and is evaluating a “confidential skyscraper remodel” in downtown Los Angeles, he said the projects represent a very small percentage of the firm’s total portfolio .
“We do a lot of multi-family high-rise projects and probably 90 or 95 percent of that is new build,” he said, saying that’s where the money is. “They’re typically urban. They’re more aimed at the more luxurious end of the market. Hence, they’re more new builds than adaptable reuse projects.”
He said such buildings are in a “sweet spot” that makes them ripe for transformation. In the event of the Los Angeles remodeling, the property owner has plenty of vacant office space, he said.
“He has empty office space that is more valuable than living space,” Forgan said.
Growing interest
In Dallas, James McKey, the city’s interim assistant building officer, said that while requests for such remodeling had declined last year, there appears to be renewed interest this year in converting office buildings into mixed-use properties.
In 2019, the city received 19 renovation applications, last year there were only three. However, this year it has increased again and has risen to 12 to date. The surge in applications could be helped by a recently completed renovation of the former First National Bank Tower, a 52-story building built in 1965. It was closed for most of the last decade.
The redesigned tower, now called The National, is part hotel, part residential building, part offices, and part retail.
“Since I’m an older Generation X, I wouldn’t rent an apartment at The National for $ 3,000 a month,” McKey said. “But the generations behind me – as soon as one shows up, they want – it’s a paradigm shift. There are people who take the chance to live downtown – it’s too noisy for me – but I guess if you’re on the 52nd floor it doesn’t matter. “
California dreams
Back in California, as the state tried to address the decades-old problem of too little housing for too many residents, the answer for some developers was to avoid office conversions and focus on modifying other types of real estate.
The tactics are as varied as the state’s plan to adapt motels, repurpose ground floor retail space as living space, allow religious establishments to build on their own land, to a great proposal to streamline the process of transforming old big boxes -Style retailers.
The draft law, known as SB 6, would explicitly allow the development of former commercial areas such as shopping centers or wholesalers. A recent analysis by Urban Footprint, a city planning software company, concluded that the bill, when it comes into effect, “could add up to 2 million new homes to market-driven capacity while providing cities with significant tax benefits”.
The draftsman, Senator Anna Caballero, who represents a large portion of the agricultural communities between San Jose and Fresno, points to a long-empty Kmart in Salinas, a farming town where she was once mayor.
“You could just take the Kmart out and put single-story retail stores and condos on top or expand the whole store,” she said. “Make it feel like something people want to go through!”
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