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Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. AI could be key to unlocking more housing. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

A lot of cities have a serious shortage of housing, but thanks to pandemic remote work,

plenty of empty offices. Converting one into the other isn't always simple. That's where artificial

intelligence comes in, says Stephen Painter. He's a studio director for the design firm Gensler,

who created an algorithm to identify the best conversion prospects.

The big things that start to become issues are really elements like the quarter window depth.

So how far is from the elevators to the glazing? In an office building that can often be 50,

60 feet. Imagine walking through the front door of your apartment and the window is 60 feet away.

All of a sudden, it's not so great. You see that in a lot of buildings, especially 80s, 90s buildings,

a big quarter window depth really prevents them from becoming residential. It's just too far.

The units end up too big or too skinny. You end up with a unit that's 12 feet wide and 50 feet deep.

It's not very pleasant. You have to work pretty hard to identify the buildings that have the

right characteristics physically to actually work like a residential building.

And how much does your algorithm streamline that analysis?

Before we did this, so pre-COVID really, if you wanted to assess a building, you would

select the building, work with a developer, and you'd probably spend three, four months

doing a full analysis of it. Look at how it would plan out, do the design work, do your due diligence,

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