Kramer Levin recently hosted a seminar titled “Emerging Issues in Land Use: The Year in Review and What’s Ahead,” where experts discussed New York City planning initiatives and land use.
How Easy Is it to Repurpose Offices into Apartments?
Adaptive reuse is a hot concept, but regulatory and financial hurdles have made it slow to catch on in practice. April 28, 2021, 11am PDT | Diana Ionescu |
With many companies offering their employees long-term remote work and ending their leases on large urban office buildings, the future of business districts may lie in adaptive reuse, writes Henry Grabar in Slate. Many business districts face the highest vacancy rates in decades, and a hundred million square feet of new supply from the pre-pandemic cycle is still coming online each quarter. There’s ample precedent for adaptive reuse as an engine of urban revitalization. Light industrial buildings in New York City’s Cast Iron Historic District (today’s SoHo) were converted into live-work lofts starting in the 1960s. The rich stock of 20th century office buildings in Chicago and Los Angeles have been converted into apartments. New England mills have been appropri