A push to convert vacant or unused commercial office space into residential housing is gaining rapid support, including from three Bronx community boards, and proponents of the plan hope it can lead to momentum that changes decades-old laws that restrict these conversions.
The Five Borough Housing Movement, a non-profit hoping to address the city’s growing housing crisis – both availability and affordability – and to combat gentrification, often a side-effect of new, high-scale development.
Last week, Community Boards 5, 6 and 9 threw their support behind the plan, with Bola Omotosho, the CB5 chair, calling the plan a “worthwhile goal” to address the city’s housing crisis.
John Sanchez, executive director of the Five Borough Housing Movement, says changes are needed at the state level to help streamline the commercial-to-residential turnover, including a change to state law that allows such conversions, lifting a floor area ratio cap that limits the density of NYC-based construction and providing a tax incentive to encourage converted buildings to include affordable housing units.
“I think the largest constraint that New York State and New York City has are 60 year old laws that prevent housing from being built in the first place,” said Sanchez.”If we return to the New York that built a lot of housing, whether public housing or both market-rate housing, we would not be in the housing crisis we face.”
More than half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened and rents in the city have risen 30% since 2015, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office. Hochul is hoping to construct 800,000 new housing units over the next decade.
The New York metropolitan area needed more than 340,000 additional homes in 2019, according to a 2022 estimate from Up for Growth, a Washington policy and research group. The vacancy rate for apartments renting below the citywide median of $1,500 is less than 1%.
Sanchez told the Bronx Times that most of the large-scale…
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