Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Why can't vacant office buildings be turned into apartments and condos?
|
They can be. Calgary's pilot project is being looked at carefully by planners and developers around North America and the world (since we have such a disproportionate amount of office space for a city of our size, it's natural for us to be in a position to look at this first on any kind of scale).
Right now a big barrier is that it just isn't something a lot of people have experience with, which drives costs up. As more happen that aspect should at least improve but they still aren't cheap. You save on the actual bones of the building, but there's a lot of plumbing and HVAC work that goes into it to make it suitable for residential. The size of the floorplate of the building means you have undesirable floorplans (long and narrow with few windows per unit). There is a building in Calgary that had a pretty innovative way to add patios to the building, but that wasn't cheap.
So you're basically left with units that still aren't that cheap, but also aren't particularly desirable, which isn't attractive to private developers. So it's a program that requires heavy government subsidization. But with the lack of experience in the conversions, even with all that subsidization available, it still isn't in a place where it can be tackled en masse yet.