Housing Crisis: Office Conversions Surge But NY State Policies Lag Nation

"It's happening: Public incentives and private angst are combining to drive dozens of projects past the planning stages. Post-pandemic, the great hope for office-to-residential conversions in New York City was that they would be able to at least put a dent in two of the major crises facing commercial real estate: the slew of available office space given new hybrid/work-from-home standards that hardened post-COVID, and the affordable housing crisis permeating the five boroughs," reported The Commercial Observer. "It is now generally believed that this hope didn’t completely pan out for a number of reasons, including the physical inappropriateness of older office building windows and floor plates for residential, and various zoning obstacles."

But in a memo surveying state legislative policy nationwide, George Mason University's Mercatus Center found that New York stood out for all the wrong reasons: "This year, the divisions between cheaper and more expensive regions of the country were apparent in state legislatures. In many states, housing supply is firmly on the policy agenda: governors highlight it, legislators debate it, advocacy groups promote it, and journalists report on it. Such states often have legislative committees with 'housing' in the name. This is no guarantee of success. In New York, a vigorous public debate has yielded a firm 'no' so far. But in New York and in some 20 other states, the debate will continue. By our judgment, housing supply is on the agenda in most of the East Coast, West Coast, and Mountain West states... (Of New York, the less said the better)."