The conversions of office buildings into condos have potential to seed residential life in New York\u0027s corporate bastions. Read more.
“This is all he does. He sort of wrote the book on this,” says Marty Burger, chief executive of Silverstein Properties, which owns the World Trade Center, among other properties. Last year Silverstein partnered with Berman’s company, Metro Loft, to buy and convert 55 Broad Street, a 30-storey office tower in the financial district. It is now raising a US$1.5 billion fund to pursue other conversions.
Even some panel members doubt that conversions will create much, if any, affordable housing without generous government subsidies. In any case, there are myriad reasons — from architecture to economics — why conversions have been such a rarity, and why most New York City developers have found easier ways to make money.Article content
In this emerging era, the newest and most modern buildings are still fetching record rents. But their many dated and middling competitors are fast losing tenants and collapsing in value. By Berman’s rough estimate, that lower class could cover about 20 per cent of New York’s 460 million sq. ft. of office space.Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters files
If successful, the initiative could leave a lasting imprint on the city, according to Vishaan Chakrabarti, the renowned architect and a member of Mayor Adams’ panel. They have the potential to seed residential life in corporate bastions like Midtown Manhattan. And yet, like Berman, he acknowledges that conversions can be daunting, saying: “I think you need a certain amount of intestinal fortitude because it’s a big risk.”Article contentOne sober developer likens the sudden buzz around conversions to the burst of enthusiasm last year for turning office buildings into life sciences laboratories to serve the biotech industry — until developers discovered the complications.
The Empire State building out the window of a meeting room at the Bank of Montreal offices in New York.Elevators are also an issue. Office buildings tend to have many of them to accommodate a rush of traffic in the morning and evening. For a residential building, that would be excessive. Some buildings are off limits because they have been landmarked or because they are in neighbourhoods where residential buildings are restricted. The latter is a remnant of an earlier era when planners wanted to separate housing from the noise and pollution of manufacturing in areas such as the Garment District. Since then, manufacturing has largely departed and the ideal touted by developers is the blended “live-work-play” neighbourhood.
Downtown has been the best terrain for conversions. Many of its buildings hail from the pre-air conditioning era and so tend to have smaller floor plates and operable windows. The underlying real estate is less expensive than it is in Midtown. And, by a quirk of zoning, more buildings are eligible. Those built before 1977 can be converted under the most lenient rules. In Midtown, the cut-off date is 1961.
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