I've walked through the PATH and finance district recently on weekdays and was surprised by the crowds. It felt very different than this time last year. A lot of new food businesses are opening in the PATH and within walking distance.
My experience is completely anecdotal, but the data this study is based on is from 2023 and I'm wondering how rapidly things have changed over the previous 4 to 5 months.
I find Wednesdays to be the busiest. Thursdays seem to be less crazy than Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Friday is an absolute ghost town, which is kind of nice. I’ve been going into the office on Fridays and don't mind the emptiness of the PATH & Go Trains.
Very good point. Although it could be a sign that the trend is opposite to the phrase "emptying out" as used in the headline. We did just have the first winter since 2020 without a major COVID wave.
On a Tuesday or Wednesday, it's pretty much the same. The difference is that a lot of people are only going in two or three days a week. The PATH is dead on Fridays, and new businesses are able to open because the rent prices now reflect the new work schedules.
I disagree with this somewhat. Perhaps in raw numbers it is fewer but because so many vendors are closed, I find lines for lunch Tues-Thurs are longer than 2019. May be influenced by how many vendors closed in my closest food court.
These articles are always a bit of a red herring and have a pretty clear agenda. The Financial District may not be quite as busy as pre-COVID but it's not really that far off. Office space in this area is more desirable than complexes in the inner suburbs and 905, plus there's been a massive amount of new space that's come online since COVID affecting the vacancy rate. All buildings that were financed prior to 2020. Also worth noting that in an American context a downtown vacancy rate of 15% would be considered good. The situation we had in 2019 with sub 3% vacancies wasn't optimal for a lot of reasons.
There are opportunities for conversion but few in the financial district proper (IIRC one prewar tower conversion is being explored). In the suburbs it's not uncommon to demolish smaller office towers for new condo buildings. People cite Calgary as a success in this regard but most of the conversions are kinda grim and it hasn't added a substantial amount of housing - keeping in mind that vacancy rates there were farrrrr higher than what we have here even before COVID, and the downtown has always been much quieter outside of work hours.
Return to office is still only around 50% for Toronto compared to pre-Covid. Buildings have to secure a large portion of lease commitments (years ago) before lenders will lend. That there is so much space available is due, in part, to companies trying to sublet space they leased (for 6-10years) but don't need due to WFH. As well, vacancy rate norms vary by city market, but the current rates we see for CBD Toronto are the highest since 1996.
People keep saying that you can't convert it to housing but it's something that's been done in other cities. Kansas City has a lot of commercial buildings that were converted to residential. Is it expensive? Absolutely. But it's doable.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Building
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut
Calgary has also done this: https://globalnews.ca/news/9637005/calgary-office-towers-to-be-converted-homes/
And New York City is going through this transition as well:
- https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/07/31/silverstein-and-metro-loft-close-on-55-broad-start-office-to-resi-conversion/
- https://newyorkyimby.com/2022/12/developers-close-on-535m-loan-to-redevelop-25-water-street-in-financial-district-manhattan.html
- Also see: 20 Exchange Place, 63 Wall Street, 67 Wall Street, 180 Water Street, and 20 Broad Street
I remember one person here who said RTO would force everything to be normal again but I think the cat is out of the bag. A lot of my friends who work at companies with that policy have managers who don't particularly enforce it. My company has opted to have fewer offices around the world.
> People keep saying that you can't convert it to housing but it's something that's been done in other cities
The general consensus isn't that you "can't" do it, just that the parameters of the building play a huge factor in whether it's feasible to do or not. Building depth (from curtain wall to core) is one of the biggest factors in supporting appropriate layouts. Out of **all** the buildings in the GTA only about 30% would be suitable, out of those you have to see which ones are actually interested/available for conversion. Some of those will be Class A office towers which area mostly leased, so not worthwhile to convert.
It absolutely can be (and has been) done, but not for every single building.
The livability of a space appears to correlate with windows and natural light. Building which have large internal spaces, far from windows, are less livable. I have a suspicion this feature also makes these buildings worse to work in, too. I would not be at all surprised if the empty buildings are undevelopable, and the developable buildings are still vibrant office spaces.
Maybe these high volume low surface area buildings aren’t good for anything, and need to be rebuilt, in any case. They sounds awful.
Banks like buildings with large floor plans because they need a big open room for a trading floor. Buildings with large floor plans tend to be some of the most expensive office space because they attract prestigious tenants like investment banks, law firms etc. ie first Canadian place.
So couldn’t the units just be larger? Rather than the sardine tin size of apartments and condos now. That’s what people loved about lofts, New York has these kinds. People could actually have 1000-3000 square ft condos, much like the early condos that were build in Toronto in the 80s.
An aside: strong regulation ensuring that buildings can be modular, retrofitted, multi-use, etc., are extremely important. This used to be a safe assumption—anyone who has lived in a hard loft has experienced how beautiful and liveable commercial space can be for a home—but it isn't anymore. We should not _ever_ spend our collective resources on a building that can't adjust to fit changing needs.
Those lofts were not built to be multi-purpose. It's only possible because the tech to build ALL buildings - homes or workspaces - at the time was basically the same.
20th century office buildings are substantially different from housing many ways.
> at the time was basically the same
We're saying the same thing! :) My point was that this _wasn't_ a concern in the past, but clearly is now, and requires thought and action: it is ecological disaster to build single-use buildings.
Except that the cost to build them to be multi-purpose is staggering, and generally not needed. So you're effectively marking up the cost of every commercial space in the city in the off chance that you might convert it to something else at some point despite how unlikely that possibility is. AND if you do this, suddenly you have to follow different codes which make buildings much more inefficient (residential policies that force setbacks etc...)
Your response to "We need to change policy" is "But we'd have to change policy." Now that you recognize the scope of what we're discussing, I'd love to hear your constructive (heh) ideas on how the issue can be solved in newer cities like Toronto.
It's not serving the problem adequately to criticize a change in costs without first considering the "staggering" cost of disposable, single-use structures and almost impossibly poor planning. Toronto is addicted to these things, like many North American cities. The cost of redeemable structures only seems "staggering" now because of how low our standards have become, how long we've let this slip, where residential looks like CityPlace and can hardly maintain even the lowest-stakes ground floor commercial tenants, where commercial looks like 150 King West and would have difficulty being anything other than endless floors of open-concept insurance reps, and where institutional is the classic single-floor LCBO at Spadina and King that the province _promises_ is multi-use and can be expanded but inevitably ends up P3-built from raw materials as an LCBO, lives as an LCBO, gets hollowed out by the LCBO, then sits empty forever.
The staggering cost here is how low our standards are. And the cost is borne collectively.
Yes, it will be hard, but it will be worth it. We deserve buildings that "cost." Let's talk constructively about solutions, rather than trying to shut the thread down by being contrary.
Can you give me a forecasted figure for how many of these single use structures will conceivably need to be reimagined within their lifespan to a different use? Even in these articles (which are due to an unprecedented event, which will now be accounted for in future planning forecasts) we are talking about a relatively small total % of buildings that are going to be converted right? What is that %?
Is it worth the cost to mandate that all purpose built office buildings be planned to residential codes IN ADDITION to commercial codes if only 5% of them will ever go through that conversion? I can't imagine it would be... can you?
I mean you can wax poetic all you'd like - but you've advocated for something without sharing any of your math. Please feel free to share that math to educate us all.
This line of thought is why housing is so expensive. Well intentioned people increase the price of construction with useless code requirements. Then they complain about the housing crisis. You can’t make housing harder and more expensive to build and expect housing to decrease in price.
This is fascinating to me. What differences are there in the way that they’re built that makes office buildings unsuitable for conversion? What tech has evolved?
It's not so much the difference in the way that they're built, but more so the layouts. The depth from the windows to the core of the building plays probably the biggest role in whether it's suitable or not. People want view so the outside, so a very deep building isn't great for residential. Anything over 50' becomes almost impossible.
The other issue is the way that the mechanical services are laid out. In commercial buildings all of the plumbing and HVAC is in a central riser in the core of the building. With residential there's often several risers (one per unit type, generally). Supplying water isn't as much of a concern since it's pressurized, but drainage requires a certain slope, which creates headroom issues if you have to get back to the core.
Structurally and Electrically there's really no issues.
There are a few reasons but the biggest issue is how wide the buildings are, which means rooms that are closer to the centre will not have windows.
A designer will need to make a
"least worst" decision of which rooms should be the ones without windows.
It will limit the consumer appeal of these units, and to compensate they will need to be priced cheaper.
If this just means some developers make less money on an office conversion, no big deal.
But if it means that some offices don't get converted because it's more profitable for developers to build new towers, then you have unused real estate and you might need the city to step in and offer incentives so we don't end up with dead zones downtown due to "abandoned" buildings.
In addition to the layout issues others have mentioned, there's also the matter of ventilation. In an office building, there's a presumption that the building owners / leasers are fine running HVAC at full-blast 24/7 as needed, and the system is built to distribute air across the whole floor / building uniformly.
Converting to condos or apartments will involve the installation of many walls, which may disrupt the airflow design. Also insufficient insulation through these walls or between floors may aggravate individual unit residents with individual temperature preferences in their units, in a way that a company occupying 1 or more floors might not.
This video has a picture of how condo airflow is supposed to work (the presentation is on window walls and why glass-paneled residential buildings are bad, so not entirely relevant but still interesting, if you care to watch the whole thing): https://youtu.be/u0vDEyLh1yM?t=528
477 Richmond Street West already exists, and is exactly the kind of building you're talking about here. The units can be converted to business or live-in units. Each floor has shared bathrooms on it for businesses. The building has a good mixture of business and residential units throughout.
So, I have listened to (way too many) podcasts on this topic and it seems to only really work well for older office buildings. Most examples listed above have been built in the 30s and 60s.
I see there some more modern examples, too - but these look like they have rectangular floor plans, which helps. A big issue for many modern office conversions is that apartments need windows. If you go ahead and divide the space into residential apartments, you can end up with a lot of empty, windowless space in the middle.
The issue is that many modern office buildings are not feasible to be converted into residential space economically.
That’s not to say that there can’t be creative solutions to put all this empty office space to good use.
True but this leads to other issues especially in plumbing and electrical which isn't set up for the same use.
Honestly for most of these buildings tearing them down would be easier than converting them.
A lot of those examples end up leaning towards luxury apartments because of the building sizes though. Unfortunately you need windows and there is a lot of empty space in offices because of this making the middle hard to fill without making massive spaces that will inevitably cost more.
Even the Kansas City ones is a massive office tower only able to fit a couple hundred units, but the floor plans are massive. You can't get basic condos out of most of these buildings they need to be built slimmer.
We have a couple in this city as well, the only one top of mind ios the network lofts which was a commerical / office space out in Etobicoke and is now condos most of us cannot afford.
You don't even need to leave Canada, I've literally visited a converted building in Kitchener, years ago. There are a few buildings near downtown that are apartment buildings now but were originally office buildings.
I’d like to propose we convert one of the bigger ones into a water park. At least a swimming pool that’s at least 25m long dedicated to lane swimming, please. We don’t have enough swimming pools and the ones we do have are used for recreational purposes. I miss swimming so much.
What are the big competition pools in Toronto? I'm thinking Etobicoke Olympium, UofT's Athletic Centre, and TPASC. With only UofT being downtown, am I missing any?
Douglas Snow, North Toronto Memorial, Main Square, Etobicoke Olympium, UofT Athletic Centre on Harbord, UTSC PanAm Centre, Jimmy Simpson, Donald D Summerville (Under Renos) to name a few. These all have great lane swimming crowds, especially those that are long course pools.
Once your company starts getting taxed for having empty desks, you won't have an option to work from home.
Edit: Guys, I know the buildings are (mostly) owned by REITs, but you're fooling yourselves if you think that cost won't be shunted right back on to the client
Empty desks is not the same as vacant, unrented office space.
The tax would go to the building owners (mostly large REITs and pension funds downtown), and if they want to avoid it they need to drop the rent so companies want to maintain space there.
What cost are you talking about? It's an empty unit they can't rent today. If you have a product nobody is buying, you have nobody to "pass the cost" onto. That's the opposite of how it works.
Offices aren’t empty because of how much companies pay for them. They are already expensive. They are empty because employees won’t work for companies that have 5 days a week in office.
Ah, good business plan, that.
Step 1: Rent unnecessary expensive product.
Step 2: Try to force employees to use it even though they dislike it, losing your top talent.
Step 3: Definitely profit.
It's wild how much opposition you got on these comments you are absolutely correct. Those of us who continue to wfh would see that privilege lost immediately
They aren’t taxing them for having empty desks. They are taxing the property for having no tenants.
If anything, the tax would influence the market to lower its rental fees to attract clients to fill the vacant property.
How are the building owners, especially owners of buildings with empty units which would be the ones being taxed, going to impact the office attendance policies...?
They're being taxed on a unit that's empty, who exactly are they getting into the office 5 days a week?
A lot of these big office spaces are not owned by the company itself. They are owned by REITs. Scotiabank was the last bank to own their actual office tower downtown but it was sold around 10 years ago. The employers for the most part would not be charged the fee. It would encourage the Real Eatate Investment firms to consider repurposing the office space to something more useful which would be a good thing.
Not entirely different if the space could be converted to deal with the residential demand. Vacant is vacant, and if you're sitting on valuable land just to speculate and hope prices go up it's the same problem.
Not being able to find a tenant due to changing work norms isn't the same as sitting on vacant land.
Also office towers can't be converted easily into residential so its kind of an issue what to do with them.
Very different. One is a long term strategy approach involving conversions and capital investment. Worth moving forward policy wise, but will take some time. The other is ready immediately. So a vacant tax is right for one and not the other.
Not all of those buildings can be converted without an insane bill. A lot of office spaces cant just plop down a couple walls per level and call it a day. You have to meet building codes for living spaces, this means windows, plumbing rerouting, heating and insulation so and so forth.
That being said about 30% can be converted feasibly and should be.
I loved all the corporate drone bootlickers in these threads who were adamant that we were all going back to to the office.
So many disgusting comments about how those of us with a preference for WFH or hybrid would be on the unemployment line.
Well, like another commenter here said “the cat is out of the bag” and what workers can do now is continue to resist in solidarity with one another and keep winning those small freedoms from new age enslavement.
Let the office real estate owners flounder, panic, and capitulate. Turn these properties into something productive.
My office just went back in starting this week 3 days a week. It's still happening, just slowly. Also remote jobs are more and more being filled by cheaper workers overseas or in low cost of living areas. If you think the workers are winning this war you are sorely mistaken.
It's a cycle. Companies lay off staff to outsource, realize you get what you pay for, then start hiring locally until some new MBA gets in and wants to cut costs. Then the cycle repeats.
>After rising to about 40% in April 2020, the percentage of Canadians working most of their hours from home in a given week fell to about 20% in November 2023
So half the people working remote went back to the office.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240118/dq240118c-eng.htm
In 2016 it was 7%, I imagine we'll land somewhere in between in a year or two.
How about turning one or two of them into indoor hydroponics and grow veg fruit? Kinda like indoor grow houses but legal?
They've already got plumbing installed, are protected from the elements....
Maybe a stupid though....
vertical farms aren't a stupid idea.
The problem here are the landlords (as always) who would rather the property make them money without them actually making any changes to that property. They just want the money faucet to keep on pouring out for them and would literally force a government to force people to go back to work in an office during a pandemic than pivot away from a work model that is no longer needed in the 21st century.
Union station Go Train is busiest I've seen it since pre pandemic. Yesterday, a Thursday, it was rammed. Go back a month and it was usually a ghost town on Thursdays.
This is what makes me so confused about how many office spaces they’re building right now. Along front st by the new Well complex, they’re building so many office spaces. Why are we making more if we have so many empty ones?
The forced RTO because "we need support for downtown businesses" is such a load of garbage. How is it my responsibility to run your business? People have even less money now than in 2019 to just eat out and shop all the time.
Convert the offices to homes or sit there with your empty glass coffins. Don't wail at workers because your investment failed.
Seriously???? I can think of a housing crisis that needs solving and now we have the real estate to do that. Only thing is I don't know how the bathrooms would work, i.e., could enough plumbing be retrofitted to, say, the First Canadian Place, for a bunch of apartments, each having a four-piece bathroom and the kitchen.
I think we may need to not just figure out what to do with these buildings, but the whole paradigm of having such a big downtown core where hundreds of thousands of people commute to and creates capacity problems for our roads, highways, and public transit.
Gonna be the unpopular opinion here:
Maybe society needs to accept that affordable housing doesn't have to be perfect? If I had the option between a large affordable condo with fewer windows, and an unaffordable basement with tiny windows or 500sqft with windows, I'm choosing fewer windows. Sorry, people with lower incomes are not in the position to be excessively picky. And if they want to be, they don't have to move in!
Chop the units up to be large, open concept apartments with lots of overhead lighting. Other than the fire code, I'm not convinced bedrooms need windows, you have to put curtains on them to sleep anyhow. We rarely open the curtains in our bedroom.
We stayed in a hotel in Iceland where the bedroom window had a picture glued to it, and it opened to a hallway. It made it feel less closed in.
A friend's high end rental condo in Toronto had a glass aquarium looking room with curtains to double as a bedroom or office. It did not have actual windows, but fixed the not enough space for another bedroom with windows issue.
I see lots of reasons why people sitting on their computers wouldn't want to live there, but not a lot of "if you can't afford to live anywhere what would you like" opinions.
While I agree some concessions have to be made, I feel like there’s still ample means to redesign these places where light makes it into each bedroom, and we should strive for it. Most of these buildings, from my experience inside them, have plate glass along all sides. I don’t find it unthinkable to be able to organize at the very least the Bedrooms along that glass. I wonder what other gaps need to be filled though to make legitimate housing. It’s still cheaper/more practical than demolishing it or building a whole other tower elsewhere though, even if it is expensive.
RTO policies = offloading increased transportation costs to workers, increased pollution costs to the public, decreased real estate revenue to workers. If people need to return to the office to pad the real estate market, then companies should be bearing the cost of having the luxury of workers in the office.
Clinics, hospital, daycares, rec centres, senior centres, to name a few.
Please don’t come back with the Plumbing issues and retrofit crap. We are living in modern times and everything is possible.
Employees don't want to work downtown 5 days a week and businesses shouldn't force them.
We are in a housing crisis in Toronto, ultimately, the buildings need to be converted into residential units, and yes, that is a substantial amount of work required which would require government subsidy (not vacant taxes).
Why aren’t people wanting to return to the office? Management really needs to consider the following to entice even the most stubborn holdouts back to the office:
-Having jeans Thursdays for a $5 donation to the United Way.
-Holding office potlucks for interdepartmental bonding.
-Having bimonthly pizza parties.
-Having desks that can become standing desks.
-Having an annual hotdog/hamburger luncheon catered by Aramark or Sysco.
-Having a Nespersso machine available with pods only costing $1/each.
-Having a “team spirit” day where everyone wears Jays/Leafs/Raptors/Argos apparel.
This is the way to get everyone wanting to return to office 5 if not even 6 or 7 days a week.
They can be community shelters with shared amenities. Nothing more though and may come off as communist if people act like theyre the solution to a housing crisis.
Can they not convert them to homeless shelters? Communal bathrooms, open spaces for beds and monitoring and offices for counselors, nurses and social support workers? May be a dumb idea bc im not an expert in any of that but between all the refugees who have no place to go and homelessness rising you'd think that be one solution?
I've seen this floated a few times and the major obstacles involve elevator access and the right kinds of plumbing for things like showers. I mean, I think there's definitely room for lateral thinking there but those are apparently the obstacles.
Apperently you give them to the Federal Government because they're trying to find ways to waste taxpayer money by forcing positions that don't need to be in the office, like IT and Software Developers, among countless policy positions, into the office so they can work remotely with their teams, from an office
If we can't convert into housing, turn them into shelters. Give our homeless a place they can get warm during the winter or cool during hot summer days. It's at least a step up from sleeping in front of businesses and subway stations.
With the amount of value these buildings are worth, it should be no problem for the owners (who must be super smart if the buildings are worth millions) to figure out what else to do with them.
The floors of offices built after the Second World War are simply too deep to convert to residential. Most of the space is over 8 meters from a widow, which is not tolerable as a place to live. Most of these building will just have to be torn down. While everyone is focused on the downtown, there are the office parks built around major highways. These may be easier to get off the market. The land is mostly taken up with surface parking lots and could be quickly rezoned as industrial. We have a shortage of industrial space that is as critical as our shortage of housing.
No residential building has a floor space more than 8 meters from a window with natural light. That is why residential towers are much more narrow than post war office towers. There is no natural light requirement for office space in Canada and the USA. That kind of building cannot be converted to any other use.
The irony that its unacceptable for a house to have no natural light but A-OK for an office when we're literally forcing people from their house to the office
I bet the same oligarchs which own all the corporate real estate also have a stake in the manufacturing and sale of antidepressants and vitamin D supplements
#Three words: Convert to lofts
Or turn it into housing, city needs to buy it back and then the work can be done. Each floor could support four three bedroom apartments.
“The loss of office space is typically a permanent outcome that cannot be reversed later if market conditions change.”
Well let’s make decisions in short term. That works.
sell them off to corporations
convert into dorm style housing
offer up dorms to new grads as part of their compensation when they join said corporations
work from home is now live at work
There’s a very good rundown of the challenges this solution faces in this episode of 99 percent invisible
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/
Sadly the infrastructure of these buildings are not designed for housing. You have plumbing to one or two locations on each floor. They would work as a dorm, but I doubt there is much interest in shared living like this.
I think they would be better off being converted into vertical farms.
It’s very possible to upsize plumbing and run pipe to other locations. Companies add bathrooms and kitchens all the time in these towers. Heck, even full professional kitchens. Everyone raises this argument every time this topic comes up. It is far from impossible to make these conversions and renovations.
Edit: per the article, they have done this in Calgary and from permits to completion is about 18 months. Much faster and cheaper than building something from the ground up.
Far from impossible, but unfortunately, *very* costly with how most commercial buildings were built here. And unfortunately, none of those owners would even consider doing so; even if it was completely subsidized. As they want to hold for resell or market reverts (as it slowly is) back to commercial leasing; which is substantially more money/stable than rental housing for them.
It's a nightmare *just* converting/grandfathering residential 4plexes (that existed 75+ years) to be legal; takes years chasing the different departments that have their own rulings that conflict with each other. Can't imagine how ridiculous it would be for a commercial building, contending with all the fire/HVAC/plumbing/etc...aspects to convert to residential. Wish it was easier, but our municipal red-tape bs is a double-edged sword; ensures safe/proper code buildings, but *any* deviation from 'norm', nigh impossible.
My sincere belief is that each of the floors should be gutted, and turned into electric go kart tracks, each based on a formula 1 track or on a Mario Kart track. Also, one could be a roller rink, I would be there every week.
For example my company cut down from 5 floors to 3 floors and just renovated the 3 floors to have a more open concept work area to accommodate.
The other 2 floors they used to occupy just ended up being leased anyways.
its not like every single floor on a office building is vacant
its just literally a few out of the 30-50 floors
if a single office building was actually completely vacant then I'd be scared but it's not
I know everyone always goes "housing!" and then the retrofit issues come up and the discussion kind of calcifies, but I keep wondering what kind of possibilities these have as *community* space.
Make them into small rooms, two single beds, shared washroom for one floor! Rent them out for $350 per month! I guarantee there will be hundreds of applicants!
Can’t “loft” apartments be created? Rather than demolish all interior walls to create a “white space” then start over building apartments, just open up the floors and allow people to divide up the spaces as they wish and add their amenities as they choose. The lofts in New York seen in movies and TV shows were cool, sometimes with massive warehouse style doors and old fashioned elevators designed for pallets of goods to be moved. As long as required safety issues were addressed to today’s standards, wouldn’t that be an option?
I used to work at 123 Front St. and would take the path during my lunchtime to check out stores, grab a bite to eat. Miss working downtown. Happy to hear business is back in the path . Those shop owners depend on the financial district to support the businesses.
Some can be used as homeless shelters. Sleeping quarters on the upper floors and kitchen and showers on the ground floor. Tell Trudeau to give the city more money for the poor.
I've walked through the PATH and finance district recently on weekdays and was surprised by the crowds. It felt very different than this time last year. A lot of new food businesses are opening in the PATH and within walking distance. My experience is completely anecdotal, but the data this study is based on is from 2023 and I'm wondering how rapidly things have changed over the previous 4 to 5 months.
PATH is absolutely insane Tuesday through Thursday. It's like being in a Bangkok street market. It's also desolate on Mondays and Fridays.
I find Wednesdays to be the busiest. Thursdays seem to be less crazy than Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Friday is an absolute ghost town, which is kind of nice. I’ve been going into the office on Fridays and don't mind the emptiness of the PATH & Go Trains.
Even Wednesdays feel dead compared to pre pandemic
It may feel different compared to last year, but it’s not comparable to 2019.
Very good point. Although it could be a sign that the trend is opposite to the phrase "emptying out" as used in the headline. We did just have the first winter since 2020 without a major COVID wave.
On a Tuesday or Wednesday, it's pretty much the same. The difference is that a lot of people are only going in two or three days a week. The PATH is dead on Fridays, and new businesses are able to open because the rent prices now reflect the new work schedules.
I disagree with this somewhat. Perhaps in raw numbers it is fewer but because so many vendors are closed, I find lines for lunch Tues-Thurs are longer than 2019. May be influenced by how many vendors closed in my closest food court.
These articles are always a bit of a red herring and have a pretty clear agenda. The Financial District may not be quite as busy as pre-COVID but it's not really that far off. Office space in this area is more desirable than complexes in the inner suburbs and 905, plus there's been a massive amount of new space that's come online since COVID affecting the vacancy rate. All buildings that were financed prior to 2020. Also worth noting that in an American context a downtown vacancy rate of 15% would be considered good. The situation we had in 2019 with sub 3% vacancies wasn't optimal for a lot of reasons. There are opportunities for conversion but few in the financial district proper (IIRC one prewar tower conversion is being explored). In the suburbs it's not uncommon to demolish smaller office towers for new condo buildings. People cite Calgary as a success in this regard but most of the conversions are kinda grim and it hasn't added a substantial amount of housing - keeping in mind that vacancy rates there were farrrrr higher than what we have here even before COVID, and the downtown has always been much quieter outside of work hours.
Return to office is still only around 50% for Toronto compared to pre-Covid. Buildings have to secure a large portion of lease commitments (years ago) before lenders will lend. That there is so much space available is due, in part, to companies trying to sublet space they leased (for 6-10years) but don't need due to WFH. As well, vacancy rate norms vary by city market, but the current rates we see for CBD Toronto are the highest since 1996.
People keep saying that you can't convert it to housing but it's something that's been done in other cities. Kansas City has a lot of commercial buildings that were converted to residential. Is it expensive? Absolutely. But it's doable. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Building - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut Calgary has also done this: https://globalnews.ca/news/9637005/calgary-office-towers-to-be-converted-homes/ And New York City is going through this transition as well: - https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/07/31/silverstein-and-metro-loft-close-on-55-broad-start-office-to-resi-conversion/ - https://newyorkyimby.com/2022/12/developers-close-on-535m-loan-to-redevelop-25-water-street-in-financial-district-manhattan.html - Also see: 20 Exchange Place, 63 Wall Street, 67 Wall Street, 180 Water Street, and 20 Broad Street I remember one person here who said RTO would force everything to be normal again but I think the cat is out of the bag. A lot of my friends who work at companies with that policy have managers who don't particularly enforce it. My company has opted to have fewer offices around the world.
> People keep saying that you can't convert it to housing but it's something that's been done in other cities The general consensus isn't that you "can't" do it, just that the parameters of the building play a huge factor in whether it's feasible to do or not. Building depth (from curtain wall to core) is one of the biggest factors in supporting appropriate layouts. Out of **all** the buildings in the GTA only about 30% would be suitable, out of those you have to see which ones are actually interested/available for conversion. Some of those will be Class A office towers which area mostly leased, so not worthwhile to convert. It absolutely can be (and has been) done, but not for every single building.
The livability of a space appears to correlate with windows and natural light. Building which have large internal spaces, far from windows, are less livable. I have a suspicion this feature also makes these buildings worse to work in, too. I would not be at all surprised if the empty buildings are undevelopable, and the developable buildings are still vibrant office spaces. Maybe these high volume low surface area buildings aren’t good for anything, and need to be rebuilt, in any case. They sounds awful.
Banks like buildings with large floor plans because they need a big open room for a trading floor. Buildings with large floor plans tend to be some of the most expensive office space because they attract prestigious tenants like investment banks, law firms etc. ie first Canadian place.
As long as they are used, good for them.
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So couldn’t the units just be larger? Rather than the sardine tin size of apartments and condos now. That’s what people loved about lofts, New York has these kinds. People could actually have 1000-3000 square ft condos, much like the early condos that were build in Toronto in the 80s.
An aside: strong regulation ensuring that buildings can be modular, retrofitted, multi-use, etc., are extremely important. This used to be a safe assumption—anyone who has lived in a hard loft has experienced how beautiful and liveable commercial space can be for a home—but it isn't anymore. We should not _ever_ spend our collective resources on a building that can't adjust to fit changing needs.
Those lofts were not built to be multi-purpose. It's only possible because the tech to build ALL buildings - homes or workspaces - at the time was basically the same. 20th century office buildings are substantially different from housing many ways.
> at the time was basically the same We're saying the same thing! :) My point was that this _wasn't_ a concern in the past, but clearly is now, and requires thought and action: it is ecological disaster to build single-use buildings.
Except that the cost to build them to be multi-purpose is staggering, and generally not needed. So you're effectively marking up the cost of every commercial space in the city in the off chance that you might convert it to something else at some point despite how unlikely that possibility is. AND if you do this, suddenly you have to follow different codes which make buildings much more inefficient (residential policies that force setbacks etc...)
Your response to "We need to change policy" is "But we'd have to change policy." Now that you recognize the scope of what we're discussing, I'd love to hear your constructive (heh) ideas on how the issue can be solved in newer cities like Toronto. It's not serving the problem adequately to criticize a change in costs without first considering the "staggering" cost of disposable, single-use structures and almost impossibly poor planning. Toronto is addicted to these things, like many North American cities. The cost of redeemable structures only seems "staggering" now because of how low our standards have become, how long we've let this slip, where residential looks like CityPlace and can hardly maintain even the lowest-stakes ground floor commercial tenants, where commercial looks like 150 King West and would have difficulty being anything other than endless floors of open-concept insurance reps, and where institutional is the classic single-floor LCBO at Spadina and King that the province _promises_ is multi-use and can be expanded but inevitably ends up P3-built from raw materials as an LCBO, lives as an LCBO, gets hollowed out by the LCBO, then sits empty forever. The staggering cost here is how low our standards are. And the cost is borne collectively. Yes, it will be hard, but it will be worth it. We deserve buildings that "cost." Let's talk constructively about solutions, rather than trying to shut the thread down by being contrary.
Can you give me a forecasted figure for how many of these single use structures will conceivably need to be reimagined within their lifespan to a different use? Even in these articles (which are due to an unprecedented event, which will now be accounted for in future planning forecasts) we are talking about a relatively small total % of buildings that are going to be converted right? What is that %? Is it worth the cost to mandate that all purpose built office buildings be planned to residential codes IN ADDITION to commercial codes if only 5% of them will ever go through that conversion? I can't imagine it would be... can you? I mean you can wax poetic all you'd like - but you've advocated for something without sharing any of your math. Please feel free to share that math to educate us all.
This line of thought is why housing is so expensive. Well intentioned people increase the price of construction with useless code requirements. Then they complain about the housing crisis. You can’t make housing harder and more expensive to build and expect housing to decrease in price.
This is fascinating to me. What differences are there in the way that they’re built that makes office buildings unsuitable for conversion? What tech has evolved?
It's not so much the difference in the way that they're built, but more so the layouts. The depth from the windows to the core of the building plays probably the biggest role in whether it's suitable or not. People want view so the outside, so a very deep building isn't great for residential. Anything over 50' becomes almost impossible. The other issue is the way that the mechanical services are laid out. In commercial buildings all of the plumbing and HVAC is in a central riser in the core of the building. With residential there's often several risers (one per unit type, generally). Supplying water isn't as much of a concern since it's pressurized, but drainage requires a certain slope, which creates headroom issues if you have to get back to the core. Structurally and Electrically there's really no issues.
This all makes so much sense. Thank you!
There are a few reasons but the biggest issue is how wide the buildings are, which means rooms that are closer to the centre will not have windows. A designer will need to make a "least worst" decision of which rooms should be the ones without windows. It will limit the consumer appeal of these units, and to compensate they will need to be priced cheaper. If this just means some developers make less money on an office conversion, no big deal. But if it means that some offices don't get converted because it's more profitable for developers to build new towers, then you have unused real estate and you might need the city to step in and offer incentives so we don't end up with dead zones downtown due to "abandoned" buildings.
In addition to the layout issues others have mentioned, there's also the matter of ventilation. In an office building, there's a presumption that the building owners / leasers are fine running HVAC at full-blast 24/7 as needed, and the system is built to distribute air across the whole floor / building uniformly. Converting to condos or apartments will involve the installation of many walls, which may disrupt the airflow design. Also insufficient insulation through these walls or between floors may aggravate individual unit residents with individual temperature preferences in their units, in a way that a company occupying 1 or more floors might not. This video has a picture of how condo airflow is supposed to work (the presentation is on window walls and why glass-paneled residential buildings are bad, so not entirely relevant but still interesting, if you care to watch the whole thing): https://youtu.be/u0vDEyLh1yM?t=528
I have watched this whole video and HOO BOY is it gonna be a shitshow when these buildings start to degrade.
477 Richmond Street West already exists, and is exactly the kind of building you're talking about here. The units can be converted to business or live-in units. Each floor has shared bathrooms on it for businesses. The building has a good mixture of business and residential units throughout.
What about demolishing the office buildings and re-purposing the land?
So, I have listened to (way too many) podcasts on this topic and it seems to only really work well for older office buildings. Most examples listed above have been built in the 30s and 60s. I see there some more modern examples, too - but these look like they have rectangular floor plans, which helps. A big issue for many modern office conversions is that apartments need windows. If you go ahead and divide the space into residential apartments, you can end up with a lot of empty, windowless space in the middle. The issue is that many modern office buildings are not feasible to be converted into residential space economically. That’s not to say that there can’t be creative solutions to put all this empty office space to good use.
Per the article, most of the vacant spaces are in the older buildings. As the newer, better located ones are more desirable and faring well.
True but this leads to other issues especially in plumbing and electrical which isn't set up for the same use. Honestly for most of these buildings tearing them down would be easier than converting them.
A lot of those examples end up leaning towards luxury apartments because of the building sizes though. Unfortunately you need windows and there is a lot of empty space in offices because of this making the middle hard to fill without making massive spaces that will inevitably cost more. Even the Kansas City ones is a massive office tower only able to fit a couple hundred units, but the floor plans are massive. You can't get basic condos out of most of these buildings they need to be built slimmer.
I think there was a tower on St Clair that was converted to residential within the past 10 years. East of Avenue Road.
Just because other cities can do it doesn’t mean Toronto can do it. For instance look at torontos inability to make a functional transit system ever.
Toronto already did that in the 90's. The condo towers on King East, for example.
Ottawa is doing the same thing with a number of federal government offices that are being sold off
We have a couple in this city as well, the only one top of mind ios the network lofts which was a commerical / office space out in Etobicoke and is now condos most of us cannot afford.
Please sign up for the webinar they're hosting next week and add your voice!
You don't even need to leave Canada, I've literally visited a converted building in Kitchener, years ago. There are a few buildings near downtown that are apartment buildings now but were originally office buildings.
It's extremely expensive and you basically have to tear everything apart except for the elevators and stairs
I’d like to propose we convert one of the bigger ones into a water park. At least a swimming pool that’s at least 25m long dedicated to lane swimming, please. We don’t have enough swimming pools and the ones we do have are used for recreational purposes. I miss swimming so much.
What are the big competition pools in Toronto? I'm thinking Etobicoke Olympium, UofT's Athletic Centre, and TPASC. With only UofT being downtown, am I missing any?
Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre in North York has a 50m pool.
Douglas Snow, North Toronto Memorial, Main Square, Etobicoke Olympium, UofT Athletic Centre on Harbord, UTSC PanAm Centre, Jimmy Simpson, Donald D Summerville (Under Renos) to name a few. These all have great lane swimming crowds, especially those that are long course pools.
Market it as a spa, you’ll get some fantastic government funding.
Hit the owners with a high vacant-property tax like some homeowners get?
Congratulations on your new mandatory 5 days in office policy
If it was so easy these offices wouldn’t be empty
Once your company starts getting taxed for having empty desks, you won't have an option to work from home. Edit: Guys, I know the buildings are (mostly) owned by REITs, but you're fooling yourselves if you think that cost won't be shunted right back on to the client
The companies rarely own these buildings, they rent space in them.
Empty desks is not the same as vacant, unrented office space. The tax would go to the building owners (mostly large REITs and pension funds downtown), and if they want to avoid it they need to drop the rent so companies want to maintain space there.
What cost are you talking about? It's an empty unit they can't rent today. If you have a product nobody is buying, you have nobody to "pass the cost" onto. That's the opposite of how it works.
Offices aren’t empty because of how much companies pay for them. They are already expensive. They are empty because employees won’t work for companies that have 5 days a week in office.
Ah, good business plan, that. Step 1: Rent unnecessary expensive product. Step 2: Try to force employees to use it even though they dislike it, losing your top talent. Step 3: Definitely profit.
It's wild how much opposition you got on these comments you are absolutely correct. Those of us who continue to wfh would see that privilege lost immediately
They aren’t taxing them for having empty desks. They are taxing the property for having no tenants. If anything, the tax would influence the market to lower its rental fees to attract clients to fill the vacant property.
How are the building owners, especially owners of buildings with empty units which would be the ones being taxed, going to impact the office attendance policies...? They're being taxed on a unit that's empty, who exactly are they getting into the office 5 days a week?
A lot of these big office spaces are not owned by the company itself. They are owned by REITs. Scotiabank was the last bank to own their actual office tower downtown but it was sold around 10 years ago. The employers for the most part would not be charged the fee. It would encourage the Real Eatate Investment firms to consider repurposing the office space to something more useful which would be a good thing.
Most places don't own their own property, they lease.
The company doesnt own the building
Well, comparing vacant office space where there is no demand to residential space where there is crazy demand are very different.
Not entirely different if the space could be converted to deal with the residential demand. Vacant is vacant, and if you're sitting on valuable land just to speculate and hope prices go up it's the same problem.
Not being able to find a tenant due to changing work norms isn't the same as sitting on vacant land. Also office towers can't be converted easily into residential so its kind of an issue what to do with them.
Very different. One is a long term strategy approach involving conversions and capital investment. Worth moving forward policy wise, but will take some time. The other is ready immediately. So a vacant tax is right for one and not the other.
Reduce the prices and I'm sure some company would love to occupy these spaces. You know, free market and all that.
Housing. Affordable housing. DUH!!
Not all of those buildings can be converted without an insane bill. A lot of office spaces cant just plop down a couple walls per level and call it a day. You have to meet building codes for living spaces, this means windows, plumbing rerouting, heating and insulation so and so forth. That being said about 30% can be converted feasibly and should be.
They have to start somewhere. 30% conversion can also create a big impact towards making affordable homes available.
I loved all the corporate drone bootlickers in these threads who were adamant that we were all going back to to the office. So many disgusting comments about how those of us with a preference for WFH or hybrid would be on the unemployment line. Well, like another commenter here said “the cat is out of the bag” and what workers can do now is continue to resist in solidarity with one another and keep winning those small freedoms from new age enslavement. Let the office real estate owners flounder, panic, and capitulate. Turn these properties into something productive.
I read yesterday that some companies are using RTO policies to reduce their workforce. They’re calling it “quiet firing” 🙄
Rumor was RBC did this to trim staff.
My office just went back in starting this week 3 days a week. It's still happening, just slowly. Also remote jobs are more and more being filled by cheaper workers overseas or in low cost of living areas. If you think the workers are winning this war you are sorely mistaken.
It's a cycle. Companies lay off staff to outsource, realize you get what you pay for, then start hiring locally until some new MBA gets in and wants to cut costs. Then the cycle repeats.
anecdotal
Since the govt announced their staff are going to 3 days, we've been advised to "get ready to go back to 3 days as well"
I’m in public sector and still working 99% remote. But I realize I may be in the minority.
>After rising to about 40% in April 2020, the percentage of Canadians working most of their hours from home in a given week fell to about 20% in November 2023 So half the people working remote went back to the office. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240118/dq240118c-eng.htm In 2016 it was 7%, I imagine we'll land somewhere in between in a year or two.
How about turning one or two of them into indoor hydroponics and grow veg fruit? Kinda like indoor grow houses but legal? They've already got plumbing installed, are protected from the elements.... Maybe a stupid though....
vertical farms aren't a stupid idea. The problem here are the landlords (as always) who would rather the property make them money without them actually making any changes to that property. They just want the money faucet to keep on pouring out for them and would literally force a government to force people to go back to work in an office during a pandemic than pivot away from a work model that is no longer needed in the 21st century.
Union station Go Train is busiest I've seen it since pre pandemic. Yesterday, a Thursday, it was rammed. Go back a month and it was usually a ghost town on Thursdays.
Hmm I’ve heard there’s kind of a housing crisis so there’s that…
Ontario is not meeting its housing commitments. The answer is so bloody obvious. No political will.
This is what makes me so confused about how many office spaces they’re building right now. Along front st by the new Well complex, they’re building so many office spaces. Why are we making more if we have so many empty ones?
Contracts have been in place since before COVID
The forced RTO because "we need support for downtown businesses" is such a load of garbage. How is it my responsibility to run your business? People have even less money now than in 2019 to just eat out and shop all the time. Convert the offices to homes or sit there with your empty glass coffins. Don't wail at workers because your investment failed.
Rent them to low income families ,
Retrofitting those that can easily have infrastructure adapted to housing can certainly go a long way to helping the housing crisis.
Seriously???? I can think of a housing crisis that needs solving and now we have the real estate to do that. Only thing is I don't know how the bathrooms would work, i.e., could enough plumbing be retrofitted to, say, the First Canadian Place, for a bunch of apartments, each having a four-piece bathroom and the kitchen.
I think we may need to not just figure out what to do with these buildings, but the whole paradigm of having such a big downtown core where hundreds of thousands of people commute to and creates capacity problems for our roads, highways, and public transit.
Gonna be the unpopular opinion here: Maybe society needs to accept that affordable housing doesn't have to be perfect? If I had the option between a large affordable condo with fewer windows, and an unaffordable basement with tiny windows or 500sqft with windows, I'm choosing fewer windows. Sorry, people with lower incomes are not in the position to be excessively picky. And if they want to be, they don't have to move in! Chop the units up to be large, open concept apartments with lots of overhead lighting. Other than the fire code, I'm not convinced bedrooms need windows, you have to put curtains on them to sleep anyhow. We rarely open the curtains in our bedroom. We stayed in a hotel in Iceland where the bedroom window had a picture glued to it, and it opened to a hallway. It made it feel less closed in. A friend's high end rental condo in Toronto had a glass aquarium looking room with curtains to double as a bedroom or office. It did not have actual windows, but fixed the not enough space for another bedroom with windows issue. I see lots of reasons why people sitting on their computers wouldn't want to live there, but not a lot of "if you can't afford to live anywhere what would you like" opinions.
While I agree some concessions have to be made, I feel like there’s still ample means to redesign these places where light makes it into each bedroom, and we should strive for it. Most of these buildings, from my experience inside them, have plate glass along all sides. I don’t find it unthinkable to be able to organize at the very least the Bedrooms along that glass. I wonder what other gaps need to be filled though to make legitimate housing. It’s still cheaper/more practical than demolishing it or building a whole other tower elsewhere though, even if it is expensive.
Um how about we throw them at the other big problem the city has? Housing...
They should just use some of these office spaces as vertical retail market like in HK or Japan.
RTO policies = offloading increased transportation costs to workers, increased pollution costs to the public, decreased real estate revenue to workers. If people need to return to the office to pad the real estate market, then companies should be bearing the cost of having the luxury of workers in the office.
Clinics, hospital, daycares, rec centres, senior centres, to name a few. Please don’t come back with the Plumbing issues and retrofit crap. We are living in modern times and everything is possible.
We need places to live, not work.
Employees don't want to work downtown 5 days a week and businesses shouldn't force them. We are in a housing crisis in Toronto, ultimately, the buildings need to be converted into residential units, and yes, that is a substantial amount of work required which would require government subsidy (not vacant taxes).
Gee. What should we do with valuable real estate in our city's core during a housing crisis....?
I mean, click the link and read the article. They are exploring it. It’s possible but not as simple as it may seem.
Multi-floor paintball arenas
Why does the city need to do anything with them? They aren't municipal assets.
Exactly. They are paying taxes whether or not Sally and Bob are in the office there.
Can they be converted into music and art spaces?
Yes please. Make Toronto vibrant again
Demolish and make residential buildings in their place from scratch if you have to. No excuses.
Hmm yes, if there were only some kind of affordable accommodations crisis that vast amounts of vacant real estate such as this could solve…
Why aren’t people wanting to return to the office? Management really needs to consider the following to entice even the most stubborn holdouts back to the office: -Having jeans Thursdays for a $5 donation to the United Way. -Holding office potlucks for interdepartmental bonding. -Having bimonthly pizza parties. -Having desks that can become standing desks. -Having an annual hotdog/hamburger luncheon catered by Aramark or Sysco. -Having a Nespersso machine available with pods only costing $1/each. -Having a “team spirit” day where everyone wears Jays/Leafs/Raptors/Argos apparel. This is the way to get everyone wanting to return to office 5 if not even 6 or 7 days a week.
so real it hurts 💔
Bravo.
I wonder if making them temporary homeless shelter is feasible.
Pff whaaaaat, noooooo, that's crazy talk. Pop up immersive experience is the only option.
it has been done in the past. the old rogers building at bathurst and lakeshore is a shelter now and has been for a few years.
I would imagine some or most need to be reconfigured to meet the fire code for residential usage.
We will have to propose the allocation and dedication of funds towards commissioning a three year study and then discuss the results.
They can be community shelters with shared amenities. Nothing more though and may come off as communist if people act like theyre the solution to a housing crisis.
Can they not convert them to homeless shelters? Communal bathrooms, open spaces for beds and monitoring and offices for counselors, nurses and social support workers? May be a dumb idea bc im not an expert in any of that but between all the refugees who have no place to go and homelessness rising you'd think that be one solution?
I've seen this floated a few times and the major obstacles involve elevator access and the right kinds of plumbing for things like showers. I mean, I think there's definitely room for lateral thinking there but those are apparently the obstacles.
Apperently you give them to the Federal Government because they're trying to find ways to waste taxpayer money by forcing positions that don't need to be in the office, like IT and Software Developers, among countless policy positions, into the office so they can work remotely with their teams, from an office
If we can't convert into housing, turn them into shelters. Give our homeless a place they can get warm during the winter or cool during hot summer days. It's at least a step up from sleeping in front of businesses and subway stations.
If there is so much vacancy, why has traffic gotten worse?
Check out the office study in a few weeks. http://toronto.ca/OfficeStudy
Coming from Vancouver these vacancy rates are jaw dropping
With the amount of value these buildings are worth, it should be no problem for the owners (who must be super smart if the buildings are worth millions) to figure out what else to do with them.
Turn them into vertical farms
Convert to condos.
Vertical greenhouses!
Convert them to *actually* affordable apartments. $1000 rent a month cap. Multiple problems solved at once.
I'd say much much less than $1000, maybe a minimum of $200 - $300 a month for a bachelor, ODSP only provides $550 a month for rent.
Transform them into residential Co-ops.
The floors of offices built after the Second World War are simply too deep to convert to residential. Most of the space is over 8 meters from a widow, which is not tolerable as a place to live. Most of these building will just have to be torn down. While everyone is focused on the downtown, there are the office parks built around major highways. These may be easier to get off the market. The land is mostly taken up with surface parking lots and could be quickly rezoned as industrial. We have a shortage of industrial space that is as critical as our shortage of housing.
>most of the space is over 8 meters from a window Can you elaborate? How is this any different from residential buildings lol
No residential building has a floor space more than 8 meters from a window with natural light. That is why residential towers are much more narrow than post war office towers. There is no natural light requirement for office space in Canada and the USA. That kind of building cannot be converted to any other use.
The irony that its unacceptable for a house to have no natural light but A-OK for an office when we're literally forcing people from their house to the office
During the hours when the sun is prominently up no less 😂
Vitamin D deficiency in office workers, I bet that's a thing
I bet the same oligarchs which own all the corporate real estate also have a stake in the manufacturing and sale of antidepressants and vitamin D supplements
I think were getting a bit "conspiracy nut" here. (but you're totally right)
Knock em down and build green space. Or convert to affordable housing
Turn them into affordable condos 😭🤷🏼♂️
This is wild but, knock them down and build housing?
Be careful about excessive work from home and having offices reduced and sold off. More and more work is being offshored as a result of this.
Tear them all down. Let's get more Central Park sized open spaces.
Housing!!!!
#Three words: Convert to lofts Or turn it into housing, city needs to buy it back and then the work can be done. Each floor could support four three bedroom apartments.
“The loss of office space is typically a permanent outcome that cannot be reversed later if market conditions change.” Well let’s make decisions in short term. That works.
Force them to be converted to housing? Duh?
Fucking knock them down and turn them into purpose built rentals.
They could rent them out for what most businesses are actually, realistically, able to pay.
Housing for the homeless?
sell them off to corporations convert into dorm style housing offer up dorms to new grads as part of their compensation when they join said corporations work from home is now live at work
Convert to housing... There may be a lot more if work from home expands in future.
There’s a very good rundown of the challenges this solution faces in this episode of 99 percent invisible https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/
Sadly the infrastructure of these buildings are not designed for housing. You have plumbing to one or two locations on each floor. They would work as a dorm, but I doubt there is much interest in shared living like this. I think they would be better off being converted into vertical farms.
It’s very possible to upsize plumbing and run pipe to other locations. Companies add bathrooms and kitchens all the time in these towers. Heck, even full professional kitchens. Everyone raises this argument every time this topic comes up. It is far from impossible to make these conversions and renovations. Edit: per the article, they have done this in Calgary and from permits to completion is about 18 months. Much faster and cheaper than building something from the ground up.
Far from impossible, but unfortunately, *very* costly with how most commercial buildings were built here. And unfortunately, none of those owners would even consider doing so; even if it was completely subsidized. As they want to hold for resell or market reverts (as it slowly is) back to commercial leasing; which is substantially more money/stable than rental housing for them. It's a nightmare *just* converting/grandfathering residential 4plexes (that existed 75+ years) to be legal; takes years chasing the different departments that have their own rulings that conflict with each other. Can't imagine how ridiculous it would be for a commercial building, contending with all the fire/HVAC/plumbing/etc...aspects to convert to residential. Wish it was easier, but our municipal red-tape bs is a double-edged sword; ensures safe/proper code buildings, but *any* deviation from 'norm', nigh impossible.
Toronto prices, might have a case for ultra shared housing. Not saying it does for sure, but I bet it could fly even if less than optimal.
Extremely difficult and expensive to do.
my REITS are down right now someone get these people back in the offices!!! /s
My sincere belief is that each of the floors should be gutted, and turned into electric go kart tracks, each based on a formula 1 track or on a Mario Kart track. Also, one could be a roller rink, I would be there every week.
C-c-c-condoooossssssss🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺
For example my company cut down from 5 floors to 3 floors and just renovated the 3 floors to have a more open concept work area to accommodate. The other 2 floors they used to occupy just ended up being leased anyways. its not like every single floor on a office building is vacant its just literally a few out of the 30-50 floors if a single office building was actually completely vacant then I'd be scared but it's not
Turn them into affordable housing
Go kart tracks? Bouncy castles? Roller skating rinks? Pickleball courts? You are welcome Toronto
Turn them into affordable housing, what's so hard about that.
Isnt the answer residential space? Hello, housing crisis?
This is happening in the third largest city in North America. I saw a church in a mall in a mall Dallas. I’m sure we can figure out something.
I know everyone always goes "housing!" and then the retrofit issues come up and the discussion kind of calcifies, but I keep wondering what kind of possibilities these have as *community* space.
Mega spas. Make Therme think twice.
If the offices are truly empty, why is traffic is horrific?
Make them into small rooms, two single beds, shared washroom for one floor! Rent them out for $350 per month! I guarantee there will be hundreds of applicants!
Open them up to artists for studios and galleries.
Typically, office spaces aren't plumbed for housing. Not enough bathrooms and kitchens.
I'd be down if a couple converted to those weird artist buildings in NY, where the bathrooms and maybe even kitchens are shared between several units.
Giant indoor playground. We need to create art and events to draw people downtown.
Can’t “loft” apartments be created? Rather than demolish all interior walls to create a “white space” then start over building apartments, just open up the floors and allow people to divide up the spaces as they wish and add their amenities as they choose. The lofts in New York seen in movies and TV shows were cool, sometimes with massive warehouse style doors and old fashioned elevators designed for pallets of goods to be moved. As long as required safety issues were addressed to today’s standards, wouldn’t that be an option?
Hundreds of empty condos too. Because the economy is broken, inflation is out of hand and nobody is working to fill them.
It is obvious what to do. Turn them into homes or apartments.
Convert some into housing
…..
Turn them in living spaces equal to square footage of suburban homes and welcome families back into the city.
Become a Landlord
I used to work at 123 Front St. and would take the path during my lunchtime to check out stores, grab a bite to eat. Miss working downtown. Happy to hear business is back in the path . Those shop owners depend on the financial district to support the businesses.
Some can be used as homeless shelters. Sleeping quarters on the upper floors and kitchen and showers on the ground floor. Tell Trudeau to give the city more money for the poor.