When I see beautiful old buildings neglected like this, it's heartbreaking to me. The only reason nobody lives there and makes a storied life of it that enriches the life of the city is because of some quirk of bureaucracy. The converse is when someone does inhabit something like this, it's criticized as a "sweetheart deal" with the implication if not the outright accusation of corruption. In Toronto, we have an island downtown with homes on 100y leases that cannot be re-sold at market rates, but also cannot be willed to heirs, and that has a pretty transparent waiting list system, which still gets periodic criticism as corrupt.

These library apartments could be revitalized to operate on a similar scheme, even though there would be huge risk of them going to the politically connected and patronage. Political classes tend not to understand that it is these exceptions that produce the stories that provide the character that makes cities desirable, and not their rules.

I lived in a historical apartment building for several years, and it has occupied a psychogeographical landmark in the culture of the city for generations, appearing in various novels and with a cast of storied occupants. They were too large and expensive and a bit out of the way for fashionable rentals, so the people there always had a reason to be oddly both transient and yet still maintaining the refinement they were used to. Society divorcees and scandalized people in transition, politicians from remote ridings, elderly widows, downwardly mobile sons of establishment families, mistresses, professional artists and musicians who needed to be in the city but could never raise enough for a down payment - these characters and archetypes form the mythology of cities, and buildings like those library apartments and other historical buildings contribute to it. The promise of hidden beauty and riches and the ability to find it is the essence of the appeal of a city. I hope they find a way to open them up again.