Early in my career, I represented Tony Goldman, an urban visionary who help transform industrial Soho into a residential neighborhood. Tony bought warehouse and small factory buildings and we converted the floors into lofts for residential use and for artists who used their lofts as homes and studios. Little did I imagine that I would continue advising clients on converting buildings from one use to another throughout my career and that, during the last decade, I would advise clients on converting approximately 1.2 million square feet of prime office space into residential, hospitality, educational and other uses, in a process called adaptive reuse.

Adaptive reuse has gone from gentrifying industrial areas and generating income for the redeveloper for under utilized buildings to playing a significant role in fighting climate change, preserving scarce resources, and fulfilling the changing needs of society. Recently, there have been numerous stories describing the need to convert office buildings to residential use in order to absorb excess office capacity and create needed homes for current and future New Yorkers, and this article examines the process.