In Chicago, there are efforts to convert office buildings into residential units.
https://www.costar.com/article/1334232190/chicagos-plans-for...
https://www.costar.com/article/1334232190/chicagos-plans-for...
(1) It might be expensive to add a lot of extra plumbing, but is it really more expensive than the revenue your building isn't generating as office space? (I imagine this will vary a lot from one building and owner to the next).
(2) It's possible to have housing with shared bathrooms and kitchens. HN commenters sometimes ask "Yeah, but who wants to live in a place with a shared bathroom?" The answer: someone whose current housing is even worse, or nonexistent. Sleeping in a clean, safe bedroom with a door that locks but having to go down the hall to pee is a big improvement over sleeping on the street.
not with current zoning laws... and good look changing them. never gonna happen.
>> Sleeping in a clean, safe bedroom but having to go down the hall to pee is a big improvement over sleeping on the street.
Now you are talking about people that likely have no money, and thus your profitability is out the window. There is a reason why most new housing in large cities are "luxury" and not "affordable"... Affordable housing does not make money
This used to be very popular 100 years ago. You could rent a room in a “boarding house” with shared bath and kitchen. I don’t know why that model failed and no longer exists.
I am living in a converted office high-rise (built in 1914) right now in fact: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kales_Building
And there is another in the middle of conversion right next door: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Artists_Theatre_Build...
It is hard to generalize, but I would be willing to bet that it is cheaper to convert more modern, recently built or still under-construction office high-rises.
No, it's harder.
As anyone who has visited a doctor's office or somesuch in an older office building knows, they tend to be already divided up into smaller, discrete spaces off hallways, like apartments, and often have individual plumbing into each space. Modern office buildings with big, open floors aren't like that.
There are many department stores and theaters, for example, that had wide open floors.
Conversions of department stores to residential units is popular in Detroit since we had so many at one time.
The United Artists Theatre high-rise I mentioned has no divided offices from the photos taken by urban explorers: http://www.detroiturbex.com/content/parksandrec/uat/index.ht...
I believe that the Kales Building did not as well.
It is certainly not clear to me that, in many of these Detroit conversations, that just because the space was divided into discrete, smaller spaces that plumbing was run to them.
I imagine there is a big market for 10,000 sq ft single room apartments with glass on four sides and hookups for a restroom+kitchen (or 2 x 5000 sq ft, 4x1250, etc).
Of course those factories were sold at firesale prices. For commercial high-rises, to get a nice outcome like that, they’d need to sell the building off a floor at a time.
Hopefully that will happen this time. Let the new residents figure out what to do with each floor.
The result would probably be incredibly nice, but too quirky for a typical flipper to put in.
There have been some efforts in NYC to explore allowing "bedrooms" that don't have windows, probably because there's interest in making use of some of these spaces in this fashion.