In January and June I wrote about the impending glut of office space in downtown areas. This is the result of the widespread adoption of telework starting with the Covid crisis. Now, more than three years later, it appears that the teleworkers remain resistant to full-time work in those central offices. Although the number of days they do come to the downtown office have increased, the average appears to be between two and three days per week. City centers clearly need remodeling.

So, the dilemma remains for the owners of all these office-dominant buildings. In many cases rental income is not just down, it’s seriously less than expenses. The problem has expanded to other areas as well. Businesses that depended on the daily influx of all those office workers now find that the flow has been cut at least in half. Once crowded sidewalks are now almost empty. Shops have been closed. Tax income has dropped for the cities. Crime rates in downtown areas have increased. The central cities as we knew them seem to have died.

But the buildings are still there. All that expensive real estate still exists. It would be foolish to just let it rot. So, what should we do to save the situation? Here are some ideas.

Conversion to residences.

This is the most popular approach being taken by realtors and building owners today. Convert large amounts of that employee office space to residences. This sounds good but it immediately runs into difficulties. Foremost among these is the fact that most skyscrapers were not designed to be residences. Except for some of the older buildings, the layout is wrong. All the window space is around the outside of the buildings while large parts of the insides are view free. Hence unattractive to potential residents. Some design approaches look to arranging the interior of such buildings as arrays of so called “shotgun” residences. The view is at one end of the residence and the entry door is at the other end, near the middle of the building. An article in the Wall Street Journal shows such a layout. 

Multi-use buildings.

There is at least one possible variant of the residential layout for the larger of such buildings. Arrange the residences so they form a hollow square and fill the empty middle with retail or other non-residential spaces. After all, when you go into a shop, a museum or gym you are probably not looking for a view. An immediate problem comes to mind for this sort of arrangement. Namely, tall buildings tend to have their elevator systems running up and down the middle; the area where the shops would otherwise be.

In cases where the elevators can be moved or rearranged some long term downsides to this option include: 

• shopping  is increasingly online, so existing shops are emptying out, regardless of the work-from-home effect. 
• demand for shops and related business activity located directly next to residents may not be high. 
• residents may demand separate elevator and entrance options.
• there can be other security issues since shops, and other venues that do not necessarily control access may be a concern for residents.

Yet such arrangements have been proposed by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright and have been implemented in Sweden.

We are likely to be in a state of transition for the next few years as and if large parts of the workforce insist on working at home. It may be an unpleasant experience for owners of large buildings but it appears to be unavoidable as climate change and energy conservation put their thumbs on the decision scale.

It could be a wild ride.