Your Share of Space Downtown May Soon Come to 403 Square Feet
As more conversions of obsolete office buildings in Lower Manhattan to residential use are announced, the number of new homes that may be coming to the community has significant implications for local demographics.
The most recently announced of these projects is 111 Wall Street, which is projected to bring approximately 1,500 new apartments to the Financial District in the next few years. This will make it the largest office-to-residential makeover anywhere in America, to date, topping the recent record of 25 Water Street (which is projected to open in November with 1,320 new units).
A recent analysis from PropertyShark, a real estate web site and search engine that tracks sales and price data, found that two Lower Manhattan neighborhoods contain at least 11 million square feet of office space that is “highly convertible” to residential use, with another 25 million square feet of space described as “convertible but challenging.” (A third category of “limited convertibility” contains approximately 45 million square feet of local office space.) The report documented that the Financial District is home to 7.9 million square feet of “highly convertible” office space spread across 36 buildings, while Tribeca hosts 2.4 million square feet in the same category.
Using as metrics the average size of a Manhattan apartment (approximately 750 square feet) and the architectural guideline that about 85 percent of an apartment building’s floor plate can be used as residential space (with the rest going to common areas like hallways, stairwells, elevator shafts, and utility cores, as well as laundry and trash rooms), this may indicate that Lower Manhattan could be in line for approximately 12,500 new households in the years ahead, using only the conservative baseline of space deemed as “highly convertible.” This upward leap would be almost 60 percent larger than the increase in the tally of apartments in Community District 1 (the zone south of a jagged line formed by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.) between 2010 and 2020, when the number of units jumped by 7,838 homes, according to the Department of City Planning (DCP).
Based on 2020 census data, which indicates that the typical size of a Lower Manhattan household is now 2.02 persons, this implies population growth of more than 25,000 new residents, an increase of more than 31 percent, over the current tally of 78,390 residents. A 2022 DCP analysis pegged Lower Manhattan’s population per acre at 81.4 people. As that tally jumps to 108 residents per acre as a result of office conversions, this will translate into each resident having 403 square feet in which to live, shop, commute, and perform every other function of daily urban existence.