Hello! We'll be right back. Welcome to Money Talks. We'll take a quick break and be back in a second.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios and today I want to talk about my favorite subject in the world, which office residential conversions and I have the perfect person to talk about it with Grace Rao

Grace welcome who are you

Felix thank you for having me.

I'm Grace Rao.

I am the executive director of an organization

called the Five Borough Institute.

And we are a New York City public policy think tank that launched in 2022 to advance

innovative public policy ideas and solutions to tackle big challenges facing New York City.

So we're going to talk about this whole subject more generally, but it does seem that the natural

place to start if you are into this whole concept of converting

offices to homes would be New York and New York has been doing this for a long time

right?

Right, we, on the one hand, have a ton of experience with Office to Residential

Conversions and on the other, we actually have all sorts of limitations in place that prevent us as a city right now

from actually doing this on a really broad scale. Give me a little bit of

history and context here. When did this start and why did it start? Conversions generally.

I mean our best example really is in lower Manhattan.

So pre-9-11, go back to the early 1990s, a recession that hit New York, really the whole country,

starting in the late 80s. A ton of people lost their jobs and we saw a big spike in office vacancies in lower Manhattan.

And basically the city of New York said we need to do something about it.

It started under Mayor Dinkins, it was continued under Mayor Giuliani, but essentially there was a huge effort underway to take all of this empty office space.

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