Policy Play

Vacancy holds a paradoxical place in capitalist urban political economy. Real estate operators scramble to maximize profits, yet even in the tightest markets, buildings are left to sit empty.

In their 2016 book In Defense of Housing, the late urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden describe the “hyper-commodification” of housing, where “a structure’s function as real estate” comes to take “precedence over its usefulness as a place to live.” Vacancy could well be read as an extreme case of this wider “decoupling” of exchange values from use values in the neoliberal city. When real estate’s perverse logic prevails above all else, sometimes unused buildings result in higher profits. That’s true of Midtown’s ultrathin, super-prime towers, which more often park cash than house people, and it’s apparently true of the twenty thousand rent-stabilized units that a real-estate cabal is currently holding “hostage” (i.e., vacant) in protest of New York State’s 2019 tenant protections, as reported in The City this past October.

Similarly perverse logics drive the estimated 31.2 million square feet of Manhattan retail space that sat empty last year, argue the authors of Vacant Spaces NY. Written by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, principals of MOS Architects, with their staffers and students from the Princeton School of Architecture, the book sets out to document the proliferation of commercial vacancies and, to a lesser degree, proffer new uses for them.

Boarded-up and unoccupied storefronts have served as poignant markers of Covid’s urbanistic toll and the city’s slow recovery, but the pandemic only accelerated closures of small or owner-operated shops and restaurants. Weary observers have been sounding alarm bells for years, from Jeremiah Moss’s nostalgic antigentrification blog and book, Vanishing New York, to James and Karla Murray’s 2018 art installation Mom-and-Pops of the LES in Seward Park. Vacant Spaces NY emerges from similar observations, but it is not about retail nostalgia. With a tone that folds moral outrage into clinical detachment, the book is an indictment of the cruel irrationality of vacancy, set against the backdrop of dire need. “Vacancy has only increased. In the densest city in the United States. During a housing crisis. Through a pandemic,” Meredith and Sample write in the capsule-size introduction.

Some six-hundred pages long, Vacant Spaces NY is primarily a catalog of vacant Manhattan storefronts, as observed during the summer of 2020. It presents thumbnail photographs alongside maps and infographics that are disarmingly simple yet stubbornly resistant to visual comparison. Census and other, cartographic data, ordinarily displayed in choropleth maps, are instead shown as numeric labels, sometimes overlaid on parcel maps of vacant properties. Yet this, like the brutally repetitive format and relentless photo grids of storefronts, is part of the book’s effect. Each time I open it, I’m confounded by the sheer magnitude of retail vacancy, called upon to do the difficult work of sifting through the numbers, then overwhelmed again by the impossibility of giving each page the same level of attention. This is one of the authors’ central, if largely implicit, arguments: vacancy is plain to see, right in front of our eyes, but we are unable to muster the wherewithal to confront its intractable complexity.

In other words, Vacant Spaces NY reads as a conceptual art project playing with the visual conventions of a policy report. Meredith and Sample (along with their graphic designers, Studio Lin) have coaxed simple infographics to speak in a tone of outrage tinged with dry humor. My favorite is a pie chart on page 354 that displays the 0.17 percent chance of winning the city’s affordable housing lottery. The sliver, though printed in fluorescent ink, is barely visible.

You could also read Vacant Spaces NY as a policy report masquerading as a conceptual art project. Its central contention is that vacant storefronts should become affordable housing units (or, in some cases, social service hubs). The book’s final third plays this idea out in a series of case studies, showing conversions of twenty-six vacant storefronts across Manhattan. These design sketches suggest the spatial possibility of carving apartments out of ground-floor properties, with privacy buffers and courtyards to mitigate prying eyes and dark corners. But they operate within a delimited set of architectural challenges, free from economic constraints. They are not so much detailed proposals as they are provocations, as if to say: if these ideas are as simple and obvious as the authors (with a knowing wink) make them sound, then why is vacancy so rampant?

Meredith, Sample, and their collaborators are up-front about the project’s limited scope. “We are not policy experts or data analysts or urban planners,” they write, adding that the volume “is simply meant to show something we have taken for granted.” Still, the proviso leaves me wondering what Vacant Spaces NY might have become if MOS had partnered with a policy expert, a data analyst, or an urban planner—or how future interdisciplinary research teams might expand upon the book’s invitation to think about “vacancy as opportunity.”

Experts in adjacent disciplines have also been thinking about commercial vacancy and its relation to affordable housing, though attention is shifting from vacant storefronts to vacant offices. In the year since Vacant Spaces NY was published, restaurant life has come roaring back, while office vacancies have continued to climb. Commercial leases tend to be long—ten years is typical—so many prepandemic leases have yet to come up for renewal. What will happen when they do?

This summer a team of economists at New York University and Columbia developed a model estimating New York office vacancies in the coming years, based on a range of possible economic scenarios. According to their projections, the figure could climb above 35 percent by 2029, in the fringe case where current work-from-home trends continue. That’s not the machinations of some perverse real estate incentive. The city’s rentier class stands to lose big— somewhere in the neighborhood of $495 billion, even if the working paper’s less extreme projections are borne out.

Indeed, with real estate profits on the line, commercial-to-residential conversions have gained traction across the political spectrum. In his January 2021 State of the State address, then-governor Andrew Cuomo endorsed a proposal that sounds a lot like the thesis of Vacant Spaces NY:

The housing problem in our cities has gotten worse, but the crisis of growing vacancies in our commercial property provides an opportunity. We should convert vacant commercial space to supportive and affordable housing and we should do it now.

So far, the new real estate–friendly administrations in Albany and City Hall have been united in seeking to give legs to similar proposals. A report from the city’s Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force, set out by Local Law 43 “to study options and make recommendations for converting vacant or commercially unviable office space to other potential uses, including affordable housing,” is due to come out by the end of the year. The task force’s membership runs the gamut from a vice president at the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY, an industry lobbying group) to prominent housing activist Cea Weaver. Turning vacant commercial spaces into affordable housing, in the abstract, has a broad consensus.

Yet the realities are complicated. A 2021 New York State program for converting hotels and offices to affordable housing, called theHousing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act(which goes by the pithy label HONDA), doubled its budget to $200 million this summer, yet it has still not created a single unit. Pandemic-era reports by city agencies, REBNY, and the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council emphasize regulatory barriers to all manner of conversions, including those from one kind of commercial space to another. Writing in Slate in April 2021, journalist Henry Grabar took Cuomo to task for the naivete of trying to make offices into housing with a hand wave. The architects and real estate professionals Grabar interviewed for the piece emphasized the architectural difficulties of carving up office floor plates into apartments. Key are the challenges of introducing plumbing and residential-scale HVAC, as well as the thirty-foot maximum distance to a window that MOS’s case study designs subtly engage.

There are real opportunities here for design exploration, related if orthogonal to what Vacant Spaces NY has begun. Studies addressing large floor plate postwar office towers across multiple floors could be helpful. Taking a cue from MOS’s sketches, such studies would dispense with the typological expectations carried by real estate operators. While the resulting designs might well be illegal under current zoning and building codes, they could convincingly demonstrate the need to do away with certain legal obstacles. Or perhaps a deep floor plate invites new kinds of mixed-use programs, with residential spaces at the periphery and nonresidential uses at the core. Supportive housing with onsite services or live-work co-living could be interesting places to start. The politics of such proposals will depend on their pro formas as much as their architectural design; in this context, filling in vacancy alone is politically ambiguous.

Two additional questions about commercial vacancy, also beyond the scope of Vacant Spaces NY, invite further examination. First, what can fulfill the social role of storefront spaces in an urban economy where shopping and services increasingly take place at home and online rather than in public and in person? While MOS et al’s emphasis on converting storefronts to affordable housing emerges from its intertwined argument about vacancy, availability, and the housing crisis, a very different project would unfold from a discourse about the loss of restaurants, bodegas, and other small businesses that once served as centers of community and solidarity in their blocks or neighborhoods. Even if New York State extended protections to commercial tenants similar to the protections residential tenants won in 2019, it isn’t clear whether the economics of traditional “third places” continue to be feasible. To seriously address the issue demands thinking through the decommodification of ground-floor real estate (whether through subsidy, communal forms of tenure, or true public ownership) and engaging local residents as cocreators of postconsumerist templates for leisure and gathering.

Second, how would it change the study of commercial vacancy (whether retail or office) to consider differences across all five boroughs? US Department of Labor data published in the NYC comptroller’s weekly newsletter this July shows that since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of private establishments in Brooklyn has grown by more than twelve hundred, even as Manhattan’s numbers have plummeted by more than five thousand. Covid-related transformations have been layered onto earlier disequilibriums and inequalities, built on histories of racialized planning and (dis)investment. Different architectural strategies for addressing vacancy might make sense in different places—and might help to shape a more equitable redistribution of capital and economic activity across the city and region.

Such collaborative speculations would need to deftly position architectural expertise in relation to other forms of knowledge. In this respect, Vacant Spaces NY’s playful genre ambiguity refracts larger debates about audience and efficacy that the architectural discipline faces today: What modes of politics are available to an architectural research practice? And what trade-offs are implicit in taking cues from gallery artists, from activists, or from policy experts?

Vacant Spaces NY goes in for the kind of politics that art does best: it gets you thinking. I’m ready for what’s next, and a plain old policy report might be just fine.