Image by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Office-to-residential conversions in Boston just something of a milestone: a big step change in the size of proposed projects.
Two projects proposed at the end of January, the 171-unit 50 Congress St. and the 255-unit 249 Washington St., are half again as big and nearly two-an-a-half times as big as the largest conversion projects proposed to date.
The city’s top official in charge of shepherding these conversions thinks they could get even bigger.
“What we’ve now shown, with building permits at 10 Milk St. is that larger office-to-residential conversions are possible,” said John Weil, head of office-to-residential conversions at the Boston Planning Department. “Hopefully, we’ll now see 1980s high-rises and even 500,000-square-foot buildings coming into the program because we feel that, as we’ve digested the smaller buildings, this is possible at a larger scale and the city’s proven its able to deliver on its expedited permitting. The bullet train works well, even with larger projects.”
The conversions proposed to date have nearly universally been in pre-World War Two buildings with small floorplates that mean not a lot of space is too far away from windows to be used for housing.
One of the top office-to-residential conversion experts in Boston, the national head of law firm Nixon Peabody’s permitting and land use practice, says it’s not as far-fetched a notion as some might think.
“Conversions of newer buildings absolutely can work. It really does comes down to the math,” Jenn Schultz said.
Whether a building’s HVAC and other systems are so old they need replacing to meet the city’s carbon emissions rules, whether its facade needs to be renovated and whether a building is 50 years or older, qualifying it for historic preservation tax credits are all key factors, Schultz said, on top of whether there’s enough vacant office space in the right places.
Post-war towers currently being converted in New York City have typically seen much more drastic renovations, including the removal of floor slabs to create light wells into towers’ hearts.
