Three years of the pandemic have had a huge impact on New York City, and in many ways the city is still not fully back to normal.
Crowds have returned, especially in holiday hotspots, but some office buildings remain empty. But now there’s a plan to fill those empty spaces – not with offices, but with living spaces.
Governor Kathy Hochul, while sharing a scene from lower Manhattan with Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday, acknowledged that the post-COVID recovery has stabilized.
“We really don’t live in the same New York as March 2020,” Hochul said. “We seem to have reached a plateau. Think about daily office occupancy, vacancy rates, subway ridership, foot traffic downtown.”
Subway ridership is only 62% of pre-pandemic levels, and only 40-50% of New Yorkers who used to go to their Manhattan offices still come there every day.
The solution? One proposal stems from a 160-page report released Wednesday titled Making New York Work For Everyone.
“How do we make them neighborhoods where people want to come back,” said former deputy mayor Richard Buery.
Buery and another former deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, authored the report which calls for turning empty offices into housing, faster commutes through better public transport and a more honest look at future work patterns. This includes continuing to work from home, with advantages… and disadvantages.
A developer in Westchester County, New York is turning unused office space into living space. Reporting by Linda Baquero.
“We’re going to have to have a real conversation about how this affects family businesses with the loss of foot traffic,” Adams said.
As for the main objective of the report, namely to transform offices into apartments, Doctoroff was asked if this was plausible, even possible.
“Yes, it is. It depends on the size of the building. Smaller buildings are possible,” Doctoroff said.
Housing advocates say Adams and Hochul will have to step up to get the job done. But the new plan has a recent example to build on: Lower Manhattan tripled its population after 9/11, in part because the city and state changed zoning laws.