We all know how terrible housing markets are in cities these days. Too little supply for too much demand – and almost zero affordable housing.
But these tight housing markets make it seem like there’s no vacant space in cities. That’s not true. There’s a lot of vacant space – office spaces.
We were recently featured in an article from the Detroit Free Press about how reducing car ownership means that people won’t be able to sleep in their cars. Since housing in major cities is so expensive, where will millennials sleep if they don’t have cars?
Our response: We should turn vacant office spaces into either temporary or permanent affordable housing so that more people can live in dense, transit accessible neighborhoods – not their cars.
Our hometown of Arlington, Va. is doing exactly this: last month the county announced that it is rezoning the former headquarters of the Red Cross to allow developers to convert the building into 97 affordable housing units. The plan “adds to our stock of affordable housing, and importantly, adds affordable homes in our Metro corridors,” Arlington County Board Chair Katie Cristol said.
In a county with great transit, expensive housing, and a commercial vacancy rate of almost 20 percent, converting vacant spaces into housing like this is imperative.
Washington, DC’s city council considered a bill last year that would incentivize developers to turn their vacant office spaces into housing – a hard sell when developers believe they’ll make more money from offices than housing – but its progress has stalled.
The United Kingdom works around developers’ interests with laws that make temporary housing conversions possible. Property guardianship allows people to live cheaply in vacant buildings in expensive areas, with tenants “protecting” the properties from damage. However, these tenants often have less rights than tenants of traditional rental homes.
Some British start-ups are trying to improve property guardianship. Lowe Guardians builds prefabricated micro-homes that guardians can place inside their properties, in order to improve guardians’ quality of life.
But new housing doesn’t have to stop at vacant commercial spaces: underused parking garages can become housing, too. Although connecting to utilities is an even bigger challenge in these spaces than commercial properties, art students at SCAD turned an Atlanta parking garage into the host of their co-living experiment with micro-homes.
It takes ingenuity to turn vacant commercial spaces into housing. But it’s worth it. If more people can afford to live in transit accessible areas, they won’t be pushed out to suburbs where they’ll be car-dependent – and forced to pay on average $8,500 per year to own a car.
Photo of Washington DC’s busy K Street by Rich Renomeron.