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Your article was right on [Dr. Know, WW, Oct. 7]. I live downtown. As I walk by all the “for lease” signs and empty storefronts, I think about how we complain of a housing shortage, yet we have all this empty commercial space. Everyone talks about how expensive it is to turn offices into housing, but there’s got to be a way to use all these empty buildings. —Linda K.
It’s rare that I successfully bait a reader into asking a question I didn’t have room to cover in a previous column, Linda, so please accept my undying gratitude (which, along with six bucks, will get you a cup of coffee).
You raise a fair point: Downtown needs people, Portland needs housing—what’s the problem? Maybe an office isn’t the ideal living space, but plenty of congressmen have slept in theirs to save money. If it’s good enough for Paul Ryan, it’s good enough for me, especially if my only other option is a drainage culvert.
There are some challenges, however. Office-to-residential conversions tend to be expensive because the building codes are different. For instance, bedrooms need windows, offices don’t. This can lead to bonkers ideas like cutting a ventilation shaft all the way down through the center of the building (at predictably ruinous expense).
An estimated 6,100 Portland offices are suitable for conversion; for the rest the cost of getting up to code is daunting, if not prohibitive. The obvious solution? Change the building codes, duh! A windowless bedroom is a little cheerless, but in a housing emergency maybe the soul-searing agony of using a lamp isn’t the end of the world.
Of course, that window also provides egress in a fire. You may argue (I did) that if a room is safe enough to work in, it should be safe enough to sleep in. But then I was reminded that (a) sleeping people are much slower to respond in emergencies, and (b) people do a lot more cooking (and drinking) at home than they do at the office.
As someone who has, more than once, passed out on the kitchen floor with a Totino’s Party Pizza in the oven, I was forced to acknowledge that the rules for home and office are probably different for a reason. We can’t overcome the difficulties of office-to-residential conversion simply by taking a chain saw, Elon-style, to fire and safety regulations. (Can we do it by taking a chain saw to Elon himself? It’s a long shot, but I think we have to try.)
Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
