Downtown Columbus Tests Whether Empty Offices Can Become Apartments
Two aging office towers in downtown Columbus are being converted into apartments, part of a wager that the answer to a quieter downtown core is more residents rather than more desks. The projects are being watched closely by developers across the region weighing similar conversions.
Office-to-residential conversions are notoriously tricky. Floor plates designed for cubicles do not map neatly onto apartments, and plumbing a building for hundreds of kitchens and bathrooms is expensive. The economics only work when acquisition costs are low enough to absorb the retrofit.
City planners see conversions as a tool to keep downtown alive after work hours, seeding the foot traffic that shops and restaurants need. The developers, for their part, are betting that people will pay to live in a neighborhood still figuring out what it wants to be.
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