How to Fill Empty Offices With Co-Living Residents

Housing experts and advocates convened at Pew to discuss the promise and challenge of converting office space to small co-living units

In most of the United States, individuals who work full time for minimum wage can’t afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment. And buying a condo or house is out of the question even for many higher on the income scale.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of square feet of building space sit vacant and unused in the heart of our cities—prime real estate, near jobs, highways, and public transportation.

Office buildings.

That paradox animated an October gathering of housing experts and policymakers at the Washington offices of The Pew Charitable Trusts called “Reimagining America’s Empty Offices.” The meeting built on a series of reports from Pew and the global architecture and design firm Gensler that explored a novel way to transform vacant office space into housing...

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Leo`s notes: Converting office buildings into low-cost, co-living housing isn’t a radical idea. With construction costs far lower than traditional conversions and rents that working people can actually afford, office-to-housing reuse offers cities a chance to revive downtowns while meeting urgent human needs. The real barriers aren’t demand or design — they’re outdated zoning rules, financing hesitation, and political caution. If we are serious about affordability, we must stop treating empty offices as symbols of past prosperity and start treating them as the housing opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Ken Notes: We are not sure if this is a winning solution, but we are sure that what we are doing now is not working. We need smaller, shared amenities, co-branded with existing or new projects, adaptive reuse, access to health resources, safe living environments, and other outside the box thinking.