Can any of these be turned into residences? I'm sure there's zoning and similar nonsense, but in the real world there's also problems like having enough water hookups.
The key issue is the extend and pretend thing that is preventing fore closures on these buildings and is artificially inflating the price per square meter for office real estate. This artificial price is about as high as it is for apartment buildings. The problem of course is that this is an artificial price in a market where nobody in their right mind is going to pay those prices. The real price will have to come down for things to start moving. That will happen eventually as these buildings stay empty but it might take a while.
Once foreclosures start happening and building owners default, the debt holders end up taking ownership of property that just isn't worth as much has housing real estate anymore. It then becomes a problem for them because empty offices still cost money. They can sell the building at a steep discount or do something else with it.
It's the the price difference between office and housing prices that might make it economical to convert buildings. The issue with that of course is that housing real estate prices are also under pressure as people are no longer as eager to live close to their now empty office buildings. So, it's still a risky investment and whoever ends up owning the building would need to finance that somehow. And there are those pesky zoning rules that outright prevent this in a lot of places.
Those rules are no accident of course. Banks have an interest in keeping housing prices artificially high as well. If those prices come down, they have another debt bubble to worry about.
I worked for one of the last companies out in ... I think it was 2014. Three years to refurb and now it's one of London's ghost towers - full of apartments bought by overseas investors, standing largely empty.
(Or in this case, from reports in about 2018, standing empty because it turns out that very few people actually want to pay 1.8 million pounds for a one bedroom flat, even in London. It's quite fitting as apparently the block spent nearly a decade empty after construction too.)
There have been many articles in the last few months about conversions. The regulations make it extremely expensive to turn in office into a home. There was an article last fall where someone backed out of doing that for a tower in San Francisco because in addition to the standard regulations there was also requirement that some of the units be set aside for low rent and that made the conversion economically unfeasible even for the biggest optimist
They can, with enough money. The problem is that these will need to be sold at an even steeper discount so that throwing enough money at the renovation makes sense. That means whoever currently holds the loan will eat a huge loss, whether there is a conversion to residential or not.
What was i told... the market is always a gamble? Or should we once again bail out smart "investors" on the backs of hard workering Americans tax dollars?
Heck, I'm a bachelor, I'd take temporary-style housing, as long as we decide who's cleaning the bathrooms. But governments are pretty skittish about "reducing standards" for housing (or anything they could be so interpreted), so not only would I be even more pessimistic about such an arrangement being allowed, but there are pretty good reasons for that skittishness so I would be extremely careful about pushing against it.
