Nationwide, office spaces sit vacant. Some of these vacancies are tied to the trend of employers permitting hybrid and remote work. Other vacant offices are the result of tenants moving to more modern, amenity-loaded Class A buildings and abandoning older, unrenovated office structures (a movement that some in the industry have dubbed a “flight to quality”).
For example, at the close of the second quarter of 2025, downtown Denver office vacancy rate was nearly 37%, with some parts of Denver’s downtown showing 50% office vacancy (for comparison, pre-COVID, the office vacancy rate in Denver was 11%). Reports of landlords abandoning older Denver office buildings to foreclosure and/or demolition are increasing. And Denver is not the only city seeing its business district sidewalks emptier than in years past.
As more office space becomes vacant across America, and as the nation’s housing crisis worsens, some commercial real estate developers envision repurposing vacant or underutilized office buildings into residential units (or mixed-use developments). Urban planning scholars and architects describe older Class B and C buildings as the best potential office-to-residential conversions—particularly those structures built in the mid-Twentieth-Century with more windows (natural light) and smaller building footprints.
However, even buildings that may be the best financial and architectural candidates for such conversion can face administrative hurdles of building codes, parking allocations, environmental requirements, and local zoning restrictions.
Over the past five years (or so), in recognition of what could be prohibitions against these creative ideas, several cities have passed adaptive re-use ordinances and/or revised their planning requirements to facilitate and streamline the transition from office to residential and/or to mixed-use spaces; Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle are just a few of those locales. In 2023, Denver launched an “Upper Downtown” adaptive re-use pilot program with the goal of helping developers of these types of projects obtain city approval faster and easier.
Even Colorado Springs is getting into this office-to-residential trend, with recent reporting revealing that one abandoned office building near downtown will be converted into thirty-two “micro-apartments,” while another will be converted into 78 one- and two-bedroom units.
While many laud these office-to-residential ideas as ways for cities to both repurpose eyesores and revitalize downtown areas, the movement is not without controversy. Many raise concerns for projects that convert office buildings to smaller affordable housing layouts: dormitory-style living, studio apartments, or “micro-apartments.” These concerns include worries for the psychological health and well-being of those living within small, confined spaces; concerns over the potential to spread illnesses through the use of community living and kitchen spaces; and perceptions that that dormitory, studio, and micro-apartment layouts may help child-free, single individuals afford housing, but not families.
As this office-to-residential trend develops, it will be important to weigh these valid psychological and societal concerns with the financial profits. That is, it will be important not only to consider financially revitalizing downtown business districts and increasing landlords’ profits, but also to consider the ways in which American cities can offer affordable housing options that are physically spacious (for various family sizes) and also psychologically supportive of those who will live in downtown, business-laden, concrete environments.