Toronto asks whether empty offices can become homes
Conversion plans are moving from renderings to code reviews as downtowns search for a second life after the office rush.
1 min read
The conversion arithmetic is well understood and mostly unfavourable. What has changed is which buildings are being looked at, and why.
Why most towers do not convert
Floor plate depth. A residential unit needs a window; an office floor plate designed for open-plan work can be forty metres deep, leaving a core of space that cannot legally be a bedroom and is expensive to leave empty.
Then services. Office plumbing is concentrated in a core; residential plumbing has to reach every unit. Re-routing risers through an occupied structure is the single largest line in most conversion budgets.
The buildings that convert well are the ones nobody wanted to build offices in.
Older, narrower buildings — pre-war stock with shallow floor plates and operable windows — convert far more readily than the towers that are actually empty.
What the city changed
Two things, both procedural. A conversion stream in the approvals process that does not treat the building as new construction, and a set of relaxations on unit mix and amenity requirements for conversions specifically.
The second is contested. Relaxing amenity standards produces units that are cheaper to build and, critics argue, worse to live in, and the relaxations are permanent while the vacancy that justified them may not be.
The number that decides it
Conversion competes with two alternatives: holding the asset empty and waiting, or demolition and rebuild.
For most owners, holding is cheapest as long as the building is debt-light and the tax treatment is favourable. That is why policy attention has moved toward the holding cost rather than the conversion subsidy — several proposals now under discussion make sitting on a vacant tower more expensive rather than making conversion cheaper.
What to watch
Watch which vintage of building actually files for conversion, since that will confirm or refute the floor-plate thesis. Watch whether the amenity relaxations carry a sunset. And watch the vacancy-holding proposals, because they will move more buildings than any conversion grant.
