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By Jake Granoff
Senior Project Architect
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America has a housing shortage measured in millions of homes at the same time that nearly one in five square feet of office space sits vacant.
Freddie Mac estimated the U.S. housing shortage at 3.7 million units as of the third quarter of 2024, while CBRE reported a national office vacancy rate of around 19 percent in 2025.
That is not a coincidence we should ignore. It is a potential housing pipeline hiding in plain sight, but turning empty offices into homes is not as simple as putting apartments inside an existing building.
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Only the properties whose geometry, location and economics actually work deserve a second life.
The obvious conclusion is that we should convert offices into housing. The more important conclusion is that we need to become much better at identifying which offices can actually become housing.
CBRE found that 23.3 million square feet of U.S. office space was slated for conversion or demolition in 2025, compared with 12.7 million square feet of new office construction.
Another 81 million square feet was in the conversion pipeline, and 76 percent of active office-conversion projects were planned for multifamily use.
The numbers show that adaptive reuse is already becoming part of the response to changing demand, even if it will not solve the housing shortage on its own.
Those numbers are encouraging, but they can also create a misleading impression. An empty office building is not an apartment building waiting for someone to renovate it.
The geometry of the building matters. So do the windows, floor-plate depth, structural system, plumbing, elevators, parking, zoning, acquisition price and the cost of bringing the property up to residential standards.
A building can be perfectly positioned in a community with significant housing demand and still make no sense as a residential conversion.
I have learned to look at that question from both sides of the table.
The Economics
My work spans architecture and real estate development, giving me experience with both the design constraints of existing buildings and the financial considerations that determine whether a project can move forward.
That perspective has made one principle particularly clear to me: the first question should not be whether an office building is empty. It should be whether the building can physically and financially support the use we want to give it.
That combination has made one principle particularly clear to me: the first question should not be whether an office building is empty. It should be whether the building can physically and financially support the use we want to give it.
You have to understand how much of the existing building can actually be reused and whether the units can work within its geometry. Once the architecture works, the economics still have to work.
That may sound obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of when the need for housing is so significant. The existence of a housing shortage does not make every vacant office building a viable housing project.
Floor plates are one example. Residential units need access to natural light and ventilation, and the depth and configuration of an existing office floor can determine how efficiently apartments can be arranged.
Existing columns, cores and mechanical systems can further constrain the layout. A building designed to accommodate desks and conference rooms is solving a fundamentally different spatial problem from one designed for people to live in.
Then there is the financial side.
Adaptive Reuse
An existing structure can represent enormous embedded value. Reusing a foundation, structural frame or facade can reduce the need for some of the work associated with ground-up construction.
But that advantage can disappear quickly if a building requires extensive structural modifications, new mechanical systems, complicated plumbing infrastructure or expensive remediation.
The acquisition price matters, too. A building that looks inexpensive because it has lost its commercial value may still be too expensive to convert into housing.
This is why I believe adaptive reuse needs to be approached as a due-diligence exercise rather than a slogan.
We have examples of where the concept can work. In Norwalk, Connecticut, the Planning & Zoning Commission approved the conversion of two buildings at Merritt 7 into 300 apartments in February.
The plans include 56 studios, 182 one-bedroom apartments and 62 two-bedroom units, including 27 affordable homes.
Projects like this demonstrate what can happen when an obsolete commercial property is repositioned around an existing demand for housing.
They also illustrate why location matters. Converting a building is not enough. The resulting homes need to be connected to the communities, transportation, services and amenities that make residential development viable.
Preservation of Communities
Reuse can offer another advantage that is harder to quantify: preserving the physical character of a community.
This is particularly relevant across the Northeast, where older commercial and industrial buildings often form part of the identity of established cities and towns.
Demolishing those structures can erase architectural features and historic character that cannot easily be recreated. Reuse, when the building is genuinely suited to a new purpose, can preserve those elements while putting underused property back into service.
But that should not become an argument for converting every vacant office. Policymakers, developers and communities should instead focus on identifying the buildings where the physical structure, location, zoning and economics align.
The goal should be to make it easier for viable conversions to move forward while recognizing that some properties will be better suited to other uses.
America does not need to convert every empty office into an apartment building. It needs to get better at recognizing which buildings can become useful housing without ignoring the realities of architecture, cost and community context.
Jake Granoff is a licensed architect and senior project architect at Granoff Architects, and vice president of development at Granoff Real Estate. He works across design, entitlements and construction on multifamily, mixed-use and adaptive-reuse projects, including M7 Lofts, the firm’s 286-unit office conversion in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The views expressed in this article are his own.
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