In late August, Emily Kim hovered over open moving boxes with clothes and kitchenware, as she decided how to lay out her new studio apartment. Just over a year and a half earlier, her Franklin Street apartment was an empty office in Boston’s Financial District.
Over the past year and a half, GBH News followed developer Adam Burns and his team, to chronicle the step-by-step transformation of the building where Kim now lives from a six-story office building built in the late 1800s into 15 new apartments. It was the first project completed under the city’s Office to Residential Conversion program.
“This conversion is a great and creative solution that the city has done for converting something that was once vacant to something I can live in. So this is a great answer for someone like me — a young, urban professional,” said Kim.
Citing its success, the city extended the office conversion program until the end of this year. Under the program, developers get a 75% tax abatement that lasts for 29 years, along with fast-tracked permitting. While the program is no longer limited to downtown buildings, the city also recently approved zoning changes that allow more mixed-use development, including coffee shops, fitness studios and entertainment venues to support residential neighborhoods.
Since it launched in 2023, the program is on track to create 1,500 new apartments in Boston, and based on developer interest, the city estimates the extended program will add another 1,000 apartments. It’s not a lot when measured against the estimated need for Greater Boston — more than 120,000 homes over the next decade according to a state estimate. But as Mayor Michelle Wu described it at the launch of a new project in July, “every little bit makes a difference.”
Across Boston, the office vacancy rate remains high, but not every building can be transformed. While many might look at massive glass towers and think ‘ideal,’ experts say the best candidates are more like a collection of what might be called “unicorn buildings” that meet specific criteria including design and financing.
The idea of rezoning Boston’s downtown to encourage residential development has been in the works for years, but the collapse of the office market following the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated action. The state also has its own commercial-to-residential program and over the past few years the number of office buildings converted to residential have jumped. Nationwide, more than triple the number of conversions were done last year than in 2022, according to CBRE.
Watch to see how an empty 19th century Boston office building is transformed into modern housing and becomes a place to live — step by step.
