Montreal City Weblog

Kate 17:22 on 2024-01-19 Permalink Reply  

• Tim S. 18:10 on 2024-01-19 Permalink

  I lived opposite an office building that was converted into condos, and they basically gutted it down to the concrete frame and then rebuilt from there. Took three years, which may be partly because of the incompetence of the developers but still, a big job.

• DeWolf 18:49 on 2024-01-19 Permalink

  It’s extremely difficult and expensive to convert most office towers to residential. The only way to make it work on a large scale is to offer generous subsidies, which Calgary has been doing since 2021. That has managed to convert 2.3 million square feet of office space into residential (if you include pending projects that haven’t yet started construction) but that’s still a long way off from the city’s goal of converting 6 million square feet.

  Montreal would benefit from doing something similar, but there’s still a need for office space – so maybe there should also be incentives for building owners to rent out vacant space to community groups, NGOs and other organizations like that.

• Ian 19:02 on 2024-01-19 Permalink

  I know some companies that do this very thing. The biggest issue? Outdated HVAC, yes, but even more … Toilets. Most office buildings only have a few toilets per floor but crazy as it sounds, people want one in every single apartment. On the other hand, they mostly have EXCELLENT internet infrastructure.

  That said, old office buildings barely need anything to be used for homeless shelters …open concept spaces and a few toilets per floor isn’t a detriment for that use.

  Some conversions are easier than others. Hotels make great resdiences for students. Old convents, orphanages, and hospitals make great old age homes. Old ground-level malls make great accessible community spaces.

  I remember when the old CBC building in Toronto was abandoned – the problem was that all the spaces were simply too small to be retrofitted and yeah, it had to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt wihtin the shell – it’s much cheaper to just build new (especially as we don’t have mandatory parking rules) but nobody would grant a demo permit for a heritage building even in Toronto. At first, anyhow.

  In any case this has been a calanity waiting to happen for a while. Most of the office space for rent downtown is considered too old & run down to be really desirable, and all the property management companies specializing in that like Canderel, Ivanhoe and Fairview are saddled with these white elephants they were having problems renting out even before covid. That’s why they were trying to build condo projects as much as they could, it’s an easier sell and not their problem 30 years later.

• Nicholas 20:13 on 2024-01-19 Permalink

  One big issue is you’re not allowed (art 51) to have a closed bedroom without a window or other natural light (like a skylight or light well, and you can use shared light from another room with restrictions). Having a large square building footprint with a large interior space with no windows is fine for an open concept office, or even when exterior offices have glass walls, but that doesn’t work for residential. You then have to put the bedrooms on the exterior walls/windows, meaning the shared living space mostly doesn’t have access to natural light or you have this interior space you can’t use. It just makes building floor plans really tricky. Residential buildings tend to be much more rectangular (larger footprints are often in an L or U shape), but it’s hard to retrofit a square.

  Also this law is not for safety (egress), but for mental health. That’s arguable, but it’s still the law, and shady landlords may get around it, but massive buildings downtown won’t.

• Kevin 21:23 on 2024-01-19 Permalink

  Nicholas
  This is a problem that can be fixed by altering the access points to a building.

  If a place has multiple stairwells, it should have multiple entrances, and we have to be creative with room placement.

• Michael 23:27 on 2024-01-19 Permalink

  Calgary subsidized 75$/sq ft. Thats a lot of money. Thats probably what it would take to get them converted here.

• Mark 09:12 on 2024-01-20 Permalink

  These folks have done an assessment of over a thousand potential conversions. They came up with a conversion score to see if it makes sense to flip commercial to residential, and I think the average in North America is around 25% that are suitable….so not enough to rely on that as the only option but that’s still a lot of square footage.

  Big variations by city, Boston scored very low (10%), due to the age and heterogeneity of their office stock. Calgary was high, as a lot of their office space was built at the same time (70s) with similar specs, so once you figure out the formula to convert one building, it can be applied to many others.

  https://www.gensler.com/blog/what-we-learned-assessing-office-to-residential-conversions

• jeather 11:28 on 2024-01-20 Permalink

  99% invisible did an episode about the issues converting office space to residential space in NYC that I found very informative.

• Mozai 11:47 on 2024-01-20 Permalink

  “People want a toilet in their apartment…” I was told the ½ of “this apartment is a 3½” was an ensuite toilet. Which suggested to me one could rent in Montreal a “3 room” or “2 room” apartment that doesn’t have its own ensuite toilet but something shared with other units. Futhermore, I’ve seen basement apartments that have only one room in the entire unit with a window. So, maybe the office buildings could be turned into terrible apartments. It’s not impossible just awful.

• MarcG 13:03 on 2024-01-20 Permalink

  Ian’s post inspired me to suggest that the solution is for everyone to become homeless but I thought better of saying it out loud… but then Mozai kind of said it anyway.

• Ian 14:00 on 2024-01-20 Permalink

  Well TBH I didn’t mean it as a solution …

  @Mozai I have seen places listed as a “6” becasue it was a 51/2 with a separate “water closet” and “bathroom”. I’m actually sad that’s not more standard, it makes shared living space much better.