On Tuesday, the city council unanimously approved Bruce Harrell’s big plan to encourage developers to convert empty office buildings into apartments. There are, of course, more rational ways to deal with Seattle’s housing crisis, which has less to do with supply, and more to do with what the urban geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” But a consistently rational approach to housing would undermine the market’s primary objective, which is to make life expensive. And the main objective of a pro-business City Hall is to turn its back on this fact and to form and push policies that move in the opposite direction of any reasonable solution that might result in actual affordability. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell believes “innovative ideas,” the purifying powers of “competition,” and the plain commonsense of “removing regulatory barriers” will end, once and for all, downtown’s real estate slump, which is nothing but a market failure. The animal spirits (in the Keynesian sense) that ignited the decade-long building boom are gone. What is to be done? The budget-strapped city must try to excite developers with the same devotion and ingenuity that zookeepers use to try to get reluctant rhinos to copulate.

Councilmember Tanya Woo’s two cents on KOMO:

I’ve converted a hotel into workforce housing and know how expensive it is. It’s about three times more expensive than building new… I believe it will help reactivate downtown. We desperately need housing. This will help with that.

Though KOMO might have misquoted Woo, the statement nevertheless perfectly captures the core incoherence of the office-to-residential plan. The councilmember leaps from a fact (converting even a hotel into housing is very expensive) into a fiction (the conversion of office buildings into housing will reactivate, will help with all of that) without rhyme or reason. There is no causal link between one and the other. This is housing policy as quantum mechanics. This jumping about (or leap of faith) is what bothered Erwin Schrödinger so much. He wanted consistency, continuity, local realism. Not City Hall. Causality be damned. What matters is that it looks good on paper and in the mainstream papers, and, most importantly, doesn’t rankle the rich.

To get a good sense of the absurdity of Harrell’s office-to-housing plan, one only has to read PBS News’ excellent and not long post, “Analysis: Here’s what it would take to turn empty office buildings into residential housing.” Here we see what developers are really up against. A lot of money must be spent for these conversions to happen. There’s no two ways about it without a major social (rather than just engineering) transformation (more about this in a moment). First of all, not all office buildings meet the bill. And those that do, need a good deal of restructuring, the most costly of which will involve plumbing. 

PBS News:

In office buildings, most plumbing is centralized, often in the building’s core. For instance, bathrooms tend to be grouped together and located in the same spot on each floor. However, in residential buildings, plumbing is distributed throughout. Each unit typically has its own bathroom and kitchen, and each requires drinking water and sanitary sewer.

Reworking the plumbing for water should be possible. However, reworking the sanitary sewer system would be much more difficult, especially on upper floors. Gravity makes things run downhill, and longer horizontal pipes need more vertical drop to keep things flowing in the right direction…. If the owner wanted to invest the money, it would be doable – but expensive.

This is just the half of it. This is why Harrell’s plan is nothing more than a distraction. He can’t fix the housing crisis, so he has to make some noise somewhere, and that somewhere is, in this case, conveniently of no real significance. But this doesn’t mean that the conversion program would not work. It could work if we were socially, rather than entrepreneurially, innovative.

For example, the plumbing in an office building is centralized. Why? Because an office is actually a communal space, a shared space. The difficulty, then, is transforming this centralized work-related structure into one that is individualized for the preservation of middle-class notions of respectability. This is what makes Harrell’s plan so worthless. The cost of the transition from shared space to severely divvied-up space will make the apartments unaffordable for most ordinary citizens. And this is why such proposals are so popular, so much in the news these days. As is, they will only reproduce the present affordability crisis by perpetuating dispossession in the form of market-rate rents.

Think about this for a moment, and the solution becomes clear. The office-to-housing program would really work for the working classes of Seattle if they switched from divided living to shared living. This entails, of course, a reorganization of social values. It means living more with others, doing more with others, being more with others. But this is doable (or, to borrow a fancy expression from the philosophy of physics, be-able). It takes a village to make office-to-housing make sense. 

If, say, much of the plumbing in office buildings remains, as with other key systems, centralized and therefore shared, the rest can be easily compartmentalized because, as the PBS News post points out, “most office buildings are designed so that the tenants can easily build out the space to suit their needs. This means they can put up walls, take power where they need, and select finishes like flooring, paint and lighting.”

If the communality of the workspace is preserved, then the conversion is reduced to being mostly cosmetic. This would considerably reduce reconstruction costs and attract those who are happy to forego vacuous middle-class values for a bargain. Finally, living communally in a residential building is, in the age of climate change, more principled than living in those bloated luxury boxes that developers can’t stop building.    

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

11 replies on “Mayor Harrell’s Plan to Convert Office Buildings into Apartments Is a Big Distraction”

  1. 100% in favor of communal living in the downtown towers. Leaving empty buildings on top of the best transportation infrastructure in the city is a crime against the environment. Same goes for tearing down SFH which can comfortably house 6-8 adults to…build 6 and 8-plex one-bedroom apartments. The excesses of the US construction industry are astounding.

  2. I’d need to see some data suggesting that even a tiny fraction of the population would be wiling to live long-term in these communal living scenarios.

  3. “Shared living space” is do-able.

    Like lots of other people, I lived a big chunk of my life in college dorms.

    Like many other people in my generation, I lived a big chunk of my life wearing green and living with Uncle Sam as my landlord.

    Like lots of other people in my generation, I spent lots of my time along the way living in what was euphemistically called “a commune”.

    I’ve often offered these examples as ways to deal with “the homelessness crisis”.

    Homeless “shelters” organized like college dorms.

    Homeless “shelters” organized like barracks.

    You’d think I was the only person in America who ever experienced living in a “shared living space” ?

  4. I’m not sure why it’s a zero sum equation (if a developer wants to take a crack at upscale dorms, more power to them). Ultimately we need to find a solution to a lot of buildings downtown that are unlikely to be filled as offices anytime in the foreseeable future (and I personally favor refactoring over demolition and rebuilding).

  5. The word “supposedly” is doing some work there, Mr Mudede. Call it what it is, a broke city with a lot of rich people treating it like a theme park (see also: Londongrad).

    Rather than wasting time on this exercise, work with SFD to eminent domain all the firetraps and abandoned/derelict buildings as well all the empty lots and put those out to development. Keep that land, lease it out like the UW’s metropolitan tract or the various disused school sites SPS rents out to commercial developers. Seattle could be a wealthy city if it didn’t persist in giving away its wealth. The old SPD HQ is still a hole in the ground because the developer doesn’t have to pay that much to hold it: if it had been put under a lease based on a completed development, it would be working, not lying fallow across from city hall.

  6. Some diners are paying big bucks for communal dining (Communion restaurant). Why not communal living? As @1 notes, the access to everything is very alluring.

  7. Nobody is stopping developers from building communal living now. The problem is that everyone prefers their own bathroom. Literally everyone. What’s being advocated for here isn’t a cultural change, it’s diminished standard of living.

    Let’s keep putting our resources for building housing into the kinds of housing desired by the citizenry. Building housing nobody wants doesn’t increase supply and doesn’t bring down prices

  8. Everyone, please keep in mind, the “communal living” scenario was purely Charles’ invention. He simply didn’t make it all of the way to the end of the “not long” blog post he used as a source. It concludes:

    “But office buildings that are due for a remodel or upgrade anyway could be great candidates for this type of reinvention. If the building systems – HVAC, plumbing, electrical – are due for replacement, the project becomes more cost effective. With demand for rental units outpacing growth in new supply, and many cities like San Francisco and Boston offering incentives to convert, there is potential here. For someone with a creative vision and a building in the right location, this could be a successful and innovative project.”

    The Stranger screams “housing crisis,” to further its own failed ideology, not to house anyone. The Stranger’s ideology includes destruction of Seattle’s SFH neighborhoods, whose residents the Stranger’s writers jealously loathe; demanding subsidized housing, which the Stranger’s writers want for themselves; and degrading the definition of housing to include tiny houses, and other expensive non-solutions to homelessness. Creatively building actual new housing, in a neighborhood with a high walk score and extensive public transit, serves none of these goals. Therefore, they oppose it. (In addition, here Charles avails himself of the opportunity to slag on two of the Stranger’s favorite hate-objects, Mayor Harrell and CM Woo.)

  9. local curmudgeon dear, that old Public Safety Building has certainly (and quietly) changed hands over the last few years, hasn’t it? I thought the city still owned it, but according to the county records, they sold it in December of 2019.

    From there, it went to something called BOSA Development US llc, but somehow ended up in the Convention Center’s name, and they sold it to King County in 2023, and then it went to the Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority (Sound Transit?), then it ended up with BOSA Development (California) and now it’s owned by BOSA Development (Civic) as of May of this year.

    Property taxes are about 800k/year.

    Curiouser and Curiouser…..

  11. Mud Baby dear, we lost most of the SRO hotels because of the Ozark Hotel disaster. That understandably tightened the fire codes, but many landlords either couldn’t afford the new requirements, or decided to close down rather than comply.

    A great example of the law of unintended consequences…..

    https://www.historylink.org/File/698

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