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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Office buildings are generally unfit for apartment conversions since they have so much interior space that isn't really appropriate to use as homes - there's usually a requirement that you get an actual window in your apartment, something I don't think is particularly unreasonable.
A great podcast episode on the topic: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/551-office-space/
Lies.
Office space is easily remodeled. Most high rise commercial buildings have windows. they are designed for it to be changed every few years.
Older buildings regularly get turned into housing and sell well exactly for their unique characteristics.
I lived in a converted building that had an enormous industrial crane structure inside of it. They had retrofitted a pool, hot tub, and basketball court on the roofs. It even had two stall parking.
They have windows, yeah. They also tend to have way more internal space than your average residential high-rise.
I'm all for reclaiming unused office space, but sometimes it's just better to build a new building on the lot, that is fit for purpose.
More internal space means more or larger units. Or am I misunderstanding?
Usually it's that the insulation sucks
Also, the plumbing isn't suitable. Office buildings have all the lines routed to a few huge bathrooms per floor, plus maybe a standard break room that's in the same place on every floor.
An apartment needs its own bathroom, its own kitchen, etc. So, instead of the pipes going to two areas on each floor, they now need to be re-routed to go to 50 small areas on each floor. So, the entire plumbing for the building needs to be redone.
Also, modern office buildings are very big, and there are a lot of cubicles / offices / open areas that are nowhere near a window. When the place doesn't have many walls, maybe that's not so bad, because you can still vaguely see a window off in the distance. But, when it's an apartment building, you can't now have an apartment that doesn't have windows. So, the apartments have to end up being these narrow things with windows only on one side at the end.
Big windows, but only on one narrow bit of an apartment is bad for ventilation, and it also means the place gets really hot when the sun hits those windows. When the thing was an office building the entire floor was one "climate control area", with a limited number of walls and lots of wide corridors. So, if it got hot on one side it would even out across the floor. That doesn't work when that floor is subdivided into 50 individual apartments. So, now you need brand new solutions to the problems of ventilation and climate control.
It's less work than building a whole new building from scratch, but there are a lot of trade-offs.
Is there a written version of this podcast, all this article says is there are structural and governmental problems, ending with if we want more have the government doing it, which is what they did.
There's a transcript here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/551-office-space/transcript/
But really, I recommend you give it a listen.
My conclusion from it was that, sad as it may perhaps be, it's probably better if we replace these buildings with actual purpose-built apartment buildings. The juice is not really worth the squeeze for these retrofits, in most cases.
Around here the commercial buildings are insulated very differently from the residential. I don't know the specifics, just that commercial has worse insulation (per my insulation guy)
They're not converting the building. They're tearing it down and building new ones.
That's a different story then. I could only really go off of the fact that the image said "converting".
It's more costly than doing cookie cutter patterns that have been used for residential buildings. It's way cheaper than demo and rebuild though.