Imagining a Second Life for Midtown Manhattan’s Empty Offices
As workers stay home and office buildings sit vacant, some see a new role for New York City’s business district — as a site for affordable housing.
The streets of Midtown Manhattan, seen here at the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown in March, have yet to come back to life, as most office workers remain remote.
Photographer: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Midtown Manhattan, a dense grid of office towers normally pulsing with activity, has been called a “ghost town” so many times that you’d expect to see tumbleweeds rolling through Bryant Park. Back in July, the New York Times declared that the commercial district was in a “purgatorial phase zero” of reopening, painting an evocative scene of a food cart vendor scanning empty streets for signs of life. Months later, things have not improved much. Occupancy rates on city hotels, like those in Midtown South tied to tourism and corporate travel, have plunged below 10%. And most significantly, the workers who once crowded sidewalks on their way to the office have stayed away. Commercial broker CBRE found that just 10% of Manhattan workers have returned as of Sept. 18.
Similar scenes of silenced streets are playing out in downtown business districts across the U.S. and beyond as the fall pandemic inches towards record infection levels. But perhaps nowhere does the mass abandonment of the office seem so viscerally real as the heart of Manhattan, where an entire ecosystem of businesses that rely on white-collar workers is threatened with extinction. It’s a situation with no clear short-term fix. In the longer run, however, some see an opportunity for the city to rethink the role of this workspace-laden swath of the city by converting idled office space into new residential projects, especially affordable housing.