From his office in downtown Washington, almost 1km from the White House, architect Michael Wiencek can see something most people cannot: vacancies.
“The 1970s building across the street, the four floors I see are all vacant,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I’m looking at another building across the street, which has been half-vacant since I’ve been in this office.”
While someone walking the streets of the US capital would be hard-pressed to recognize it, this region has over the past few years experienced the highest commercial vacancy rates in the country, the nonprofit Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments said.
In those empty blocks, Wiencek sees something many do not: opportunity — and a way to help alleviate Washington’s housing shortage.
A council report in September last year said that by 2045 the region would need to build 100,000 more homes than are planned.
Across the country, “no state has an adequate supply of affordable rental housing for the lowest income renters,” the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition said.
Over the past dozen years, Wiencek and his firm have been involved in numerous projects in and around Washington to convert empty office space to housing, particularly for low-income residents.
The economics can be surprisingly feasible — in part because apartment complexes have become so expensive to buy, but also because tearing down and constructing a new, large building is cost-prohibitive, Wiencek said.
Converting disused office space also brings residents back to what are often run-down parts of the city, he said.
Fifteen years ago, such conversions were a new idea; today there are more of them, although “not nearly as much as there could be,” he added.
Wiencek has noticed significant interest in conversions from developers across the country.
Policymakers are also paying attention: since October last year, an official task force in Washington has looked at how the city can encourage developers to convert vacant office space, with the explicit intention of addressing the lack of low-income housing.
Its recommendations are expected early this year.
Washington is something of a bubble, because it is a “federal town,” said David Whitehead, a housing activist with Greater Greater Washington, a nonprofit advocating walkable urban communities, and a member of the task force.
Commercial real-estate owners have for decades been able to charge high rents to government entities, contractors and nonprofits seeking high-class office space downtown, he said.
Yet, the past few years have seen major changes in the demand for office space, fueled by the rise of remote working and coworking, and because the federal government has decreased in size.
However, many commercial property owners had yet to accept this new reality, Whitehead said.
Meanwhile, city tax penalties for vacant commercial space remain low and hard to impose.
Whitehead said that helps explain Washington’s large surplus of office space, roughly equivalent to two Pentagons, or at least 1.2km2.
Meanwhile, an official count last year found that there were nearly 7,000 homeless people in the city. Most were living in emergency shelters. Nearly half that number were families.
“We have this sitting surplus of office vacancy and draining of affordable housing, so why can’t we figure that out?” he said, although he admitted that the task force faced big challenges.
“It’s not an easy thing to convert vacant commercial space to housing in general and, beyond that, we’re now also talking about converting and subsidizing,” he said.
The US had about 8,175km2 of commercial floorspace in 2016, the US Energy Information Administration said, adding that it expects that number to reach about 11,427km2 by 2050.
The national vacancy rate currently stands at about 13 percent, real-estate consultancy CBRE Group Inc said.
Which is why, even as Washington assesses its vacant office space, other states are looking at theirs — including fast-emptying commercial spaces such as grocery and “big box” stores that have been hit by the rise of the Internet.
A pilot project in St. Petersburg, Florida, aims to convert a former grocery store — which sat vacant for four years — into housing and a venue where low-income entrepreneurs could start a retail business.
Commercial property owners across Florida are finding it increasingly difficult to keep retailers in “large format” stores, the project’s organizers said.
That is particularly acute in low-income communities.
“The idea came through thinking about places I pass by quite a bit that stood vacant,” said Ashon Nesbitt of the nonprofit Florida Housing Coalition.
“In a lot of low-income communities there are these resources of buildings. Instead of looking at them as liabilities, we need to see them as resources that need to be redeployed in a different way,” he said.
In addition to a “severe lack” of affordable rental housing, Florida has experienced widespread closures of retail and grocery stores, Nesbitt said.
With a grant from the Federal National Mortgage Association, the coalition is drafting a blueprint that could be used by local governments, developers, housing finance authorities and others across the country for similar conversion projects, coalition technical adviser Ben Toro-Spears said.
The rising number of vacant commercial spaces — on which owners must still pay taxes, utility bills and other expenses — meant there was potential to scale up the project nationwide, he said.
“These are really large organizations, and if we can demonstrate early on that this can be successful, I think they’ll adopt it pretty quickly,” Toro-Spears said.
The two have already been inundated with interest from across the state, including from cities and civic groups.
“They continue to ask what’s going on: ‘We have a site. Can you look at this site?’” Nesbitt said. “It’s definitely something that caught folks’ attention and people want to see similar things happen in their communities.”
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six