San Francisco is facing its highest office vacancy rates in nearly 30 years, while also dealing with a housing crisis. Here's how it can address both issues.
San Francisco is facing its highest office vacancy rate since 1993. Commercial real estate firm CBRE said in a recent report that 27.1 million square feet of a total of 90 million square feet is currently vacant.
To combat the rising number of office vacancies, one local legislator is pushing to convert empty office buildings into residential buildings. Matt Haney, a Democratic state Assembly member, says tackling the empty office problem could help the city take the much-needed steps it needs to address the housing crisis.
The latest CBRE report published in early December said that office vacancies reached a nearly 30-year high in the third quarter with a vacancy rate of 25.5%. And those rising vacancy rates are having a major impact on the city's economy. "The rents that you can get for a life sciences lab space are much higher than office space. So it makes that conversion financially viable," said Yasukochi. "We have high demand for residential still, but not at the price that would be required for a developer to be able to do that from a financial perspective."
"The most important thing from a developer standpoint is what makes the most financial sense," said Marc Babsin, president of Emerald Fund, a real estate development company that completed one of the largest office-to-residential conversions in the city at 100 Van Ness Ave.
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