"According to Colliers, more than 1.4 million square feet of office space in downtown Portland was available for sublease at the end of 2023. The total available amount of space available for lease downtown was more than 32%. Collier expects that figure to reach 40% over the next year.
“We’re predicting vacancies to continue climbing into 2025,” Shields said. “Unlike other markets that are starting to see a turnaround, Portland hasn’t hit the bottom yet.”"
I know there’s all the reasons why (both legit and straw man) we can’t repurpose these spaces to housing for the massive unhoused population around here but, fuck y’all, it’s insane to see all of the encampments across the city and have huge amounts of uninhabited space just sitting there collecting tax write offs.
Wealth inequality needs to be seriously addressed in this country and it never will. I just hope we have something decent left after the vultures stop swirling the bones of capitalism.
I mean, if you look at my office floor, which is now 1/2 empty, it’s plumbed for 2 bathrooms, 1 full kitchen, and 1/2 a kitchen.
Just the plumbing it would take to turn that into apartments would be insane. You’d also have to remove the drop ceiling, install room by room thermostats, and so on.
Then, when all that’s said and done, it still has to be affordable…
I’m well aware that the logistics are ridiculous. However our immediate response of “it just can’t be done” is always so disheartening. I’m not meaning that as an attack on you either, more a musing on how we got here.
Yes it would take effort but it’s not impossible. It only seems that way since we can’t imagine a world where our efforts are directed towards helping those in need. Just bums me out.
I also wonder, as a thought experiment, if there’s value in adjusting how we think about reallocating these spaces. The automatic reaction is to make them individual dwellings with private baths and kitchens. Is there the possibility of thinking more in terms of rooms with shared spaces for cooking and shared bathrooms?
I mean, I’ve pulled some long ass shifts during hardware change over and maintenance windows where I slept in a cubicle… if we expanded out that space to say 4 cubicles wide we’d have enough space for some personal effects, a bed and a sheltered place to sleep for several people per floor.
It might not be exactly what someone who’s accustomed to even a studio apartment would prefer but it could be a start to a more long term solution as we help folks transition from utter destitution to something more permanent and sustainable.
However our immediate response of “it just can’t be done” is always so disheartening.
We label many unfeasible or inordinately expensive things as Impossible . It shortens a conversation that ends the same anyway.
In the same way that a surgeon can’t typically perform mechanical work on a 2024 Jeep Cherokee, most office space is in purpose-built highly-specialized construction that would take incredible amounts of cash and time to remediate into another specialized format.
I’d like to see building code require the potential to be converted into apartments, so that rez towers or office space is built to the most inclusive of building code to permit transvesting it back and forth as required over the 100-year lifespan, but that’s gonna add cost based on how completely it can swing to either direction (ie 100% residential conversion will require different infrastructure than a well-executed 50-50 mix), and it’s not something that will have been done to ensure the particulars of this building has space to hold the guts of both kinds of use.
Projections from McKinsey Research show demand for office space in 2030 ~13% lower than 2019, with some extreme examples like SF going down by as much as a fifth.
Knowledge economy firms are increasingly having to earn their employees commute and are doing so by turning their offices into hybrid places with WeWork like amenities and collaborative spaces (in its glory days).
All of this means tons of lower quality buildings will get dumped on the market as the overall price of office space goes down. We certainly need more conversion projects when feasible but pandemic trends also reduced demand for residential space inside urban cores, so I wonder if the demand for the converted old buildings will even be there.
