Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
New York City's recently launched Office Conversion Accelerator Program has drawn interest from 64 building owners in Manhattan as planning officials mull changes to help speed up the process intended to deliver 20,000 new units of housing by 2033. The market for conversion in Lower... View full entry
The adaptive reuse design for the Shepherd Gallery and Art Center inside the new Little Village in Detroit has been revealed ahead of its public opening on May 18th. The project from Peterson Rich Office (PRO) transformed a 110-year-old former church into a new cultural center for the local... View full entry
Gensler Principal Steven Paynter shares an update announcing important statistical findings related to his firm’s work surrounding the adaptive reuse and conversion of office buildings worldwide. The data report has been updated to reflect changes in office conversions. The firm shares that an... View full entry
Amid the backdrop of a national trend of tumbling enrollments, brutal pandemic-era learning losses and an ongoing flight of young families from urban centers, the dilemma of how to repurpose empty schools is that many cities face. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 2,200 public schools closed from 2019 to 2022. Chicago’s experiences offer some insights into what can happen to these spaces, and the communities around them, after the students get sent home. — Bloomberg
Lamar Johnson Collaborative Associate Principal Max Komnenich tells Bloomberg the other side to the growing problem of school closings can offer a “beacon for reinvestment” given the proper incentives. His firm’s Aspire Center conversion took advantage of a $12.5 million TIF that’s... View full entry
Gensler Principal and Studio Director Steven Paynter sat down recently with financial news service Marketplace.org to detail his firm’s year-old proprietary office conversion metric, a unique tool that has become indispensable as the industry looks to position itself for the mass-scale... View full entry
New economic reporting compiled by Yardi Matrix suggests that apartment conversions will yield 122,000 or more new units in the United States in the coming years despite a recent turndown that’s been recorded in the market since January 1st. RentCafe has the latest data analysis to highlight a... View full entry
California has become the first U.S. state to establish general code standards mandating the reduction of embodied carbon emissions in large commercial and school buildings. The decision, recently announced by the California Building Standards Commission, encompasses commercial buildings exceeding... View full entry
As Massachusetts continues to suffer from a shortage of affordable housing, former mills like those in Lawrence are a bright spot. With the assistance of state and federal funding, developers have renovated and converted more than a hundred mills around the commonwealth into housing complexes in recent decades — projects that both provide much-needed homes and help revitalize post-industrial areas. — WGBH
Conversions are often marketed towards high-end buyers, critics say. But the demand from young professional renters and the state’s affordable housing crunch means its stock of former textile mills are once again a vital economic cog considering their costs versus new construction and in spite... View full entry
California’s Building Standards Commission has voted to ease barriers to the safe conversion of underused existing commercial buildings. The move has been described by AIA California as “an action that simultaneously addresses the climate emergency and California’s housing crisis.” The... View full entry
The historic hotel, with its haunted reputation and 600 rooms, reopened in December 2021 as a privately funded permanent supportive housing project. With most of the rooms reserved specifically for those in the bottom 30% of the area’s median income, it’s open to any [...] with a government-funded voucher. Many viewed the project as a promising new model in L.A. because of its size and flexibility.
And yet, a year later, two-thirds of the Cecil remains unoccupied.
— Los Angeles Times
The rare privately-funded $80 million conversion project for the influential Skid Row Housing Trust is one of many case studies on the issue of vacant single-room occupancy (SROs) in Los Angeles. The city housing authority’s Section 8 director thinks an absence of in-unit bathrooms and... View full entry
In the last two years, apartment conversions jumped by 25% compared to two years prior. More precisely, this increasingly popular real estate niche brought a total of 28,000 new rentals in 2020-2021, well above the pre-pandemic years of 2018-2019 when 22,300 apartments were brought to life through adaptive reuse. — RentCafe.com
The new data set from real estate researchers Yardi Matrix gives some additional context to the information in yesterday’s 2022 AIA Firm Survey, which said that almost half (48%) of all projects currently being pursued by U.S. firms involve the renovation, rehabilitation, extension, or... View full entry
Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations
The rise of remote work today won’t kill off our downtowns, but they will be forced to change once again. And with smart strategies and perseverance on the part of city leaders, real estate developers and the civic community, they can become even better than they were.
— Bloomberg
Writer Richard Florida is back with a new look at the “basic reason” behind his predicted rebound of central business districts, which he claims is an inevitability based on the historic evolution of such areas and recent building trends to convert hotels and office buildings into residential... View full entry
Through the doldrums of America’s pandemic-triggered office downturn, the nation’s capital is quickly turning into a case study for the conversion of former commercial spaces into residential housing and mixed-use development. The Washingtonian magazine recently did a survey of different... View full entry
For instance, by the end of this year, approximately 20,100 units in older buildings (that previously served other purposes) will be starting a new life as apartments — that’s almost double the number of apartments converted in 2020 and 2019 combined. So far, through adaptive reuse alone, this new decade has already created nearly 32,000 apartments, 41% of which are in former office buildings. — RENTCafé
The shift to work-from-home caused by the coronavirus pandemic has also resulted in office spaces becoming one-quarter of the adaptive reuse projects that will make more than 12,000 rental units available by the end of next year. Hospitals, hotels, and even a houseboat are among the disused... View full entry
Shield House is just one example of “permitted development”. It is an outcome of a government experiment in deregulation, which allows homes to be made out of old offices and shops without planning permission, that has been going on for some years. An estimated 65,000 flats have been made in this way. — The Guardian
The Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore highlights in his latest Guardian piece the failed outcome of a government program that seeks to speed up the conversion of old commercial properties into residential spaces. "The experiment has been catastrophic in several significant respects, but... View full entry