Earlier this year Mayor Eric Adams announced NYC’s latest office-to-residential project, converting the former Daily News and JPMorgan Chase building into residential space, but in the coming years NYC will see way more apartment conversions than that!
According to data released by RentCafe, New York is set to create 3,987 apartments from conversion projects in the next few years–the second highest number after Los Angeles.
The conversion projects come as a result of the pandemic, which left many commercial and office spaces abandoned. To combat this issue, adaptive reuse emerged as the solution to rejuvenate these deserted buildings while also keeping up with the increased demand for housing.
Though while these conversion projects peaked in 2019 and 2020, they’ve since slowed down.
The interest in these projects, however, still remains high, and it’s expected to display impressive amount of growth in the coming years.
In fact, RentCafe data shows a whopping 122,000 rental apartments are currently undergoing conversion– a 63% increase compared to 2021. 45,000 of these apartments are office repurposing.
Out of NYC’s 3,987 future apartments, 2,609 of them will result from the conversion of former office buildings, with the rest being made in former NYC hotels.
And 758 of them are already under construction, so they’ll be livable soon enough.
“Hotels were built with a shallower core to window depth, which makes them quite easy to convert. Conversions to apartment from hotel that you’re seeing, come as a result of the almost death of the hotel industry during Covid,” said Steven Paynter, Principal at Gensler, one of the world’s largest design and architecture firms.