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We’re in the middle of a real estate crisis. Offices are standing vacant, hollowing out urban cores, and at the same time, we urgently need to build about 3.8 million new housing units.
Of course, we’re also facing the climate crisis. That means that while construction rates need to double by 2030 to build all the housing we need, we also need to drastically reduce carbon emissions from the carbon-heavy construction industry. In order to meet both our housing goals and our climate goals, per-project emissions need to fall by 70%.
Converting unused office space into housing could solve several problems at once—revitalizing urban cores, providing much-needed new housing, and reducing carbon emissions, both by avoiding the emissions required to build new housing from scratch, and by bringing more people to live in city centers, where their transportation-related emissions will be lower.
The problem is, it’s tough to make the math work out on office conversions. They’re cheaper than new construction, but they don’t earn as much revenue, and typically face more regulatory hurdles. Our co-founder Miles Haladay recently took a look at one way to make the math work out: by pricing in carbon.
Read more on the Commercial Real Estate Development Association’s site here.
