“The United States has a shortage of 4 million to 7 million homes and, at the same time, an all-time-high office vacancy rate of 20%, meaning that more than a billion square feet of office space is unused,” according to a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts by Alex Horowitz and Tushar Kansal. 

Unfortunately, the notion that cities could easily convert empty offices into comfortable housing encounters numerous obstacles. For example, office buildings typically have a great deal of square footage with no windows – but people aren’t inclined to want to move into a home lit only by light bulbs. Then, too, the cost of making office-to-home conversions has been too high, even with high rental fees.

But here’s the good news. According to Pew and Gensler, a global architecture, design, and planning firm, there’s a “more economically viable approach to office-to-residential conversions using a design that reduces construction costs and enables low rents that are affordable for people earning well below an area’s median income. Rather than conventional apartments, the design calls for converting buildings to co-living dorm-style apartments. Each floor features private, locked “microunits” along the perimeter, with shared kitchens, bathrooms, laundry, and living rooms in the center.”

This approach can solve the window problem and others. For example, reports Pew, “Concentrating the plumbing and kitchens in the center of each floor (where they usually already are in offices), rather than in each unit, and other savings from this building style trims the construction costs by roughly 25% to 35% versus conventional office-to-apartment conversions.”

Clearly these new kinds of units aren’t aimed at the folks who seek out a luxury dwelling downtown, but the relatively low-rental fees that could be offered for these dwellings could be ideal for students, low-income workers, young professionals, and retirees who are living on fixed incomes.

Another potential advantage is that this option could help with the homelessness epidemic that’s affecting many large cities. As the report says, “Creating this new lower rung on the housing ladder that is attainable for those who cannot afford a rent increase in their current homes also would help curb the flow of previously housed residents into homelessness. Previous Pew research has found that housing costs are the primary driver of homelessness.  Further, co-living development could improve housing access for people with federal Section 8 vouchers, who often cannot find landlords willing to accept their vouchers in the current environment of housing scarcity.”

The primary obstacle to this novel kind of housing are zoning restrictions that are prevalent in many large cities which require “parking minimums, minimum unit sizes, maximum numbers of co-living units per building, or even outright prohibitions on co-living (or sometimes any residential) in commercial areas.”

But, Pew concludes, “the potential payoff—revitalized downtowns, reduced homelessness, improved housing affordability, and more economic opportunity—could be substantial. And although office-to-residential conversions have so far been limited, this new research identifies a cost-effective path forward that could enable cities that see even a few converted high- or mid-rise buildings to realize benefits as soon as the buildings are fully leased. Ironically, low-cost housing, rather than high-end conversions, may be the most financially feasible option for the nation’s underused office space.”

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