Why office-to-residential conversions should be approached with caution

With office vacancy rates nowhere near pre-pandemic numbers and pressures on housing seeming to increase by the day, much has been made of the idea of altering unused business space for residential needs. But as new research from the University of NSW showed, though this idea has merit, it’s far from a silver bullet to solve our cities’ housing woes.

Even so, it’s a conversation that’s happening way beyond just Australian shores.

New York City, for example, is pursuing legal and regulatory reforms to increase opportunities for adapting spaces, while the country’s biggest conversion project has just gotten underway in the building that once housed the New York Daily News and JPMorgan Chase.

The UK has changed zoning restriction laws to encourage conversions, while the South Korean government is converting underused hotels and office blocks into new rental accommodation.

As associate professor Philip Oldfield from UNSW’s School of Built Environment noted, the appeal is huge. 

One of the main arguments in favour of pursuing office conversions is the sustainability factor: “Construction is inherently carbon intensive,” Mr Oldfield said. 

“Well over a third of our future global carbon budget is likely to be used just for creating new buildings, which is unsustainable”.

“So we’ve got what I call an environmental contradiction: that we need to contribute to far fewer emissions, but we need to build far more [homes]. So there’s this shift towards thinking about when do we need to build, and how can we adaptively reuse existing assets? We need to be creative and converting these [underutilised] office blocks into apartments is one possible way,” he said.

There’s also the obvious financial incentive. There’s limited demand for office space but huge demand for dwellings, and conversions offer a return on investment that has so far gone unfulfilled.

But, the professor has conceded that there’s only a slender set of circumstances under which an office conversion would be appropriate.

In practice, many office buildings do not readily translate to quality accommodation, and as Mr Oldfield said, “We know that housing has an incredible impact on our health and wellbeing.”

“It’s all about balance. We’re obviously trying to make money and we’re trying to save carbon emissions. We’re trying to reuse assets in a sustainable way, but we cannot do that to the detriment of people’s health and wellbeing”.

Part of the issue is the type of spaces that are becoming available for adaptable use: they’re not necessarily best suited to serve as healthy dwellings.

“We’re seeing a big shift away from generic open office floorspaces to offices with atria, to allow people to move between floors with break-out spaces to work more flexibly, more collaboratively. They have to be attractive spaces so people want to come in to work,” Mr Oldfield explained. 

The buildings that are sitting empty, however, are the former “cubicle colonies,” with large expanses of space that may be far flung from natural light.

Similarly, large expanses of glazing can carry health risks, particularly when residents are in charge of their own heating and cooling — and the associated costs.

“Hundreds and thousands of people across Australia are living in energy poverty. Energy poverty doesn’t just mean you can’t pay bills … it means you’re not putting the heating and cooling on because it’s too expensive and that is affecting your health.” Mr Oldfield explained. 

Buildings with highly glazed walls are particularly vulnerable in heatwave conditions. For more mobile residents, that might not be a problem, but for those who are elderly, unwell or living with a disability, these kinds of accommodations would be untenable during weather extremes.

And for any resident, a lack of natural light can become a health hazard. 

“Office buildings are fundamentally different in terms of space; they are typically big and open and deep, and this impacts their ability to meet the architectural and design needs of residential space,” Mr Oldfield said.

This frequently translates to long, thin apartments with limited access to natural light and restricted access to ventilation, both of which are important for comfort, health and wellbeing”.

Office-to-residence renovations, then, need to utilise appropriate buildings or radical architectural interventions to ensure they are fit for use.

While Mr Oldfield applauds ambitious plans to make use of existing buildings to fit modern needs, he asks those who are eager to move forward with these retrofits to think in personal terms.

“When we build, we build for the next 50 to 100 years, so we’re building the housing for our grandchildren. We need to ask ourselves, ‘Would I want my grandchildren to live in this [home and] within a warming environment?’” he said.

And ultimately, he cautions against seeing office conversions as a magic solution to our current ills.

“We can convert offices to residential where the offices are shallow. And where it makes sense in terms of location, access to amenities, quality of space. Absolutely. But as a strategy to create more accessible, equitable and resilient housing, its impact is going to be limited.”