RentCafe.com, which bills itself as “a nationwide apartment search website,” is out with a fawning report on the number of buildings – hotels, offices, industrial buildings and schools, among others – being converted for residential use.
“The wave of adaptive reuse projects” – that’s apparently the new fancy-schmancy nomenclature for such repurposing – “is accelerating at a record pace.
“After moderate gains and even some decreases in the years following the pandemic, the number of apartments resulting from converted buildings was close to 25,000 in 2024,” RentCafe says. It notes how that’s “a whopping 50 percent more than the units delivered the year before and double the figures in 2022.”
Among the website’s “key takeaways,” quoted verbatim below:
- Close to 25,000 apartments were completed in 2024 from adaptive reuse projects across the U.S., up a staggering 50 percent compared to 2023.
- Hotels were, once again, the top category for adaptive reuse projects last year while office conversions accounted for nearly one quarter of all new units.
- Chicago replaced Manhattan as the top city for apartments from repurposed buildings but the New York City borough leads in office conversions.
- A record-breaking 181,000 apartments are now in various stages of development across the nation, mostly from office spaces — up 19 percent compared to last year.
Pittsburgh did not show up in any of the respective conversion classes’ Top 10. We would deem good news, given the gross amount of taxpayer dollars (as in “sickening”) typically funneled into such “adaptive reuses.”
And to that point, conspicuously missing from the RentCafe reportage is any mention of the dollar amount of public subsidies that are being poured — and which never should be poured — into these much ballyhooed deals that generally are not economically efficient.
An email to Maurie Irimia, RentCafe’s communications specialist, asking for the dollar amount of the taxapayer subsidies that were involved in the gushed-over conversions, was not answered by early Wednesday morning.
Our exact question was this:
“But, Maurie, how many taxpayer dollars are being spent – improperly, we would contend – on such conversions whose conversion costs should be borne solely be developers?”
The bottom line remains that shaking down taxpayers to supposedly make building conversions to residential more “economically viable and/or prudent” does nothing of the sort.
The only increased “economic viability” is accrued by the developers whose exposure is offloaded onto snookered taxpayers who, yet again, class, have no business being turned into venture capitalists.
Oh, indeed, the practice is “prudent” for the developers — if they can get away with it. But it is a public policy imprudence writ large, practiced with impudence, if not a sense of entitlement.
For shame. Such subsidies never should be extended.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
