New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a new adaptive reuse task force that will explore the vast untapped potential for rehabilitation present in the city’s considerable stock of outdated office buildings.
Born out of the new Local Law 43, the task force is charged with producing recommendations by year’s end for how to best approach the rehabilitation of these buildings in the face of crises of affordability, homelessness, and the loss of tax revenue caused by corporate America’s yet-unresolved pandemic exodus from the city.
The creation of the panel indicates the further migration of large global cities towards adaptive reuse policies in the hopes of making strides in the area of sustainability before the end of the decade.
The 12-member panel is composed of four staffers from the city’s Department of Buildings, Economic Development Corporation, Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and Department of City Planning. FXCollaborative Principal Wendi Shafran and Tishman Speyer’s Head of Affordable Housing Gary Rodney are also on the list, along with Cea Weaver of the nonprofit Housing Justice for All. City planning Director Dan Garodnick will serve as the chair. Together, their recommendations will complement the “New” New York economic panel that was appointed by Governor Kathy Hochul in May.
An important element to keep in mind as the task force deliberates is that the vast majority of these structures are located in midtown and lower Manhattan. The progressive notion of maintaining middle- and low-income housing in the center of a metropolitan area is likely to be challenged even as the city’s real estate markets reach unattainable new heights.
The Adams administration has made housing a top priority, recently introducing a five-pronged strategy that includes key provisions for NYCHA and supportive housing. His efforts are, however, hundreds of millions of dollars short of the $4 billion in annual capital fund contributions promised last year during his run for office, angering skeptics who say that figure would only marginally increase production above current projections.
5 Comments
I’m picturing individual buildings as fortresses one never has to leave. Between pandemics and the heat no one will want to go outside anymore.
That was the proposed WeLive/WeWork model before Neumann was kicked out - live in a WeLive dorm and then work downstairs. Tech campuses (and some architecture firms too!) in general use that principle too - live, work, play 24/7 in the same campus so you never have to leave the office.
Live work play is a cute sales pitch for slavery
I hope the task force looks at the need for better design to make the units and common spaces better in these kinds of office building conversions. A lot of the conversion jobs I've seen haven't turned out terribly well.
What's missing nowadays are the large, wide open spaces that characterized the early NYC loft units of the '60s and '70s. The relatively huge units of the period allowed for great live-work spaces. Today's office-to-housing conversions are mostly small units chopped up into box-shaped rooms.
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