In too many American cities, numerous downtown office buildings sit barely used, their absence of workers gutting nearby businesses. Meanwhile, hundreds of residents, too poor to afford shelter, sleep on the streets. Addressing these problems is within our grasp.
We can start by getting rid of local rules that require that apartment windows can be opened.
Think about it. When was the last time you opened a window in an office high-rise? Or in a big city hotel room? This rule, made before the invention of air-conditioning and mechanical ventilation, serves little practical purpose today. An open window may be pleasant in the right weather, yet it is also one of the biggest barriers to addressing some of our nation’s most serious problems: housing affordability, homelessness and struggling city downtowns.
I recently co-wrote research at the Pew Charitable Trusts in conjunction with the global architectural firm Gensler that found that dispensing with this rule makes it financially feasible in some cities to build a new form of affordable housing: college-dorm-style single-room units, each with its own window, closet, fridge and microwave, with shared spaces within the center of each floor for cooking, bathrooms, laundry and socializing.
This model, which reflects the fact that office buildings tend to have plumbing buried within their cores, can fit about three times as many apartments on each floor as a conventional design and shaves 25 percent to 35 percent off construction costs. Most importantly, developers could charge $750 a month in Minneapolis, $850 in Denver and $1,000 in Seattle — rents that are about half those for median-priced apartments in typical buildings in those cities, and thus within reach for residents earning 30 percent to 50 percent of the median income in those areas. And for those in need of subsidized housing, this model makes far better use of government money: The $300,000 subsidy that builds a single low-income Denver studio could instead create 13 of these units there.
The benefits for cities and for society at large would be substantial: fewer people living on the streets, revitalized downtowns, walkable access to jobs and transit and a sense of community for residents. Each floor of the building would be secured with key-card access and become a small neighborhood. Institutions such as hospitals, universities and cities looking for supportive housing could rent an entire floor.
By supporting a variety of residents of differing ages and income levels — new arrivals to a city, seniors, young professionals, people who need affordable housing — these developments could avoid the problems that previously plagued public housing. Usually built far from job centers, prior developments concentrated poverty by only allowing residents with very low incomes — problems that factored into today’s housing woes.
In the years before the 1970s, homelessness was rare. That’s largely because low-cost urban housing was widely available in the form of single-room occupancies — buildings comprising small rooms with shared bathrooms that were managed more like a hotel, dorm or hostel. In 1950, there were more than 200,000 units in New York City alone, which was one-tenth of the entire rental stock. New arrivals to a city from elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad were especially likely to live in S.R.O.s.
But starting in the 1970s and through the next decade, the dilapidated state of many S.R.O. buildings and neighbors’ complaints led cities to clamp down on these homes with restrictive zoning and building codes. As a result, at least one million S.R.O.s were lost from the 1970s to the 1990s, helping fuel a surge in homelessness that has only accelerated since.
The U.S. recorded its highest ever homelessness count of 653,000 in 2023 and is on track to break that record this year. Though there are other factors, researchers have consistently found housing costs are the biggest driver, explaining why the homelessness rate is 17 times higher in New York than Mississippi or 19 times higher in San Francisco than Houston, with the lack of low-cost housing being particularly important.
In the meantime, the post-pandemic office vacancy rate has reached a record 20 percent nationwide. Replacing windows and extending plumbing to each apartment pushes the cost to convert modern office buildings to more than $400 per square foot, often making these conversions infeasible even for high-end units.
In our above scenario, we chose Minneapolis, Denver and Seattle intentionally, because they are among the few U.S. cities that have recently removed other decades-old regulatory barriers to spur more housing. For most other cities, killing the operable window requirement is just the start, as they still require large minimum or average unit sizes; restrict the sharing of bathrooms or kitchens; set high parking space minimums; or limit the number of units allowed in a building. Unsurprisingly, affordable housing supply has fallen far behind demand as the cost to build has soared in these places, with some affordable developments in California exceeding $1 million per apartment.
Our housing shortage is so deep it will take many years to erase. Yet most cities are still stuck in the old way of doing things, keeping impractical zoning and building codes on their books while sometimes pushing the less effective and costlier approach of offering heavily subsidized housing to just a small share of low-income residents. The evidence is now clear. Making it easier to build is the surest path to affordability, and these kinds of office conversions can help. If cities let apartment windows stay closed, they can open the door to vast opportunities.
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