Know-It-All: Why Can’t We Turn More Office Buildings into Apartments?

If you’ve ever gotten into a fistfight at an open house, you’ve probably also spent a Monday morning at the office, icing your black eye and joking-but-not-really about how the boardroom sure would make a great rental. Your boss always says your team is “like a family,” so would it be so crazy to move into the office? If you’re family, then she must be your mom, and your cubicle must be your bedroom, so why not hang up a Backstreet Boys poster and make yourself at home?

Vancouver’s office vacancy rate is actually lower than in other major cities (just 11.4 percent as of late 2024, compared to 17 percent in Montreal and 28 percent in Calgary), but that still means dozens of office suites sit empty here, their leases abandoned by companies who realized mid-pandemic that they didn’t really need 4,000 square feet in Yaletown for their staff to send “just circling back!” emails.

Despite how good I look in glasses, I’m not some nerd economist, and yet even I, an aspiring dumb hot person, grasp the concept of supply and demand. People want more housing. People want less office space. Let’s just take the spare square footage that Hootbuzz or Microzon or whatever aren’t using anymore and turn it into apartments. Then we can all move on to more important housing issues, like can I install a faucet in my kitchen that pours just hot chocolate?

It’s been done here in the past (like the old BC Hydro building) but the money it would take today to adapt an existing workspace into a built-to-code dwelling would be far more than building a new tower. Though it’s recently been done successfully elsewhere (like Toronto’s now-mixed-use Waterworks building, which won a CHBA National Award for Housing Excellence), here in Vancouver, current building codes and concerns about pesky things like “fire safety” make a transformation tougher. The layouts of commercial buildings translate into inefficient residential designs; mechanical and electrical systems need to be updated for residential requirements; the city of Vancouver requires that new residences have balconies; and on and on. Basically, the challenges that need to be overcome are so complex and expensive that even someone wearing two, even three pairs of glasses couldn’t figure it out easily. So while several applications are in with the city right now to convert old office buildings into hotels, there’s not a single developer here wanting to make another old law office into your dream penthouse anytime soon.

But my question is: what if we just stopped asking for permission to live in an office? With all the work that we put into trying to find a legitimate housing solution (e.g., writing heartfelt letters to express that you would love to sublet a bathroom that had been converted into a micro-micro bachelor), is it really that much more trouble to just lie and say that you’re running a respectable business? Then you just sneakily move into your supposed startup and live a life of hilarious, Three’s Company-style hijinks where you’re always hiding your secret from the building manager. Uh oh, they’re coming to collect rent! Put on a Patagonia half-zip and start talking loudly about submitting your quarterly SaaS team-building budget to your project success manager!

This delightful farce won’t need to go on forever, though: with the money you’ll make from your bestselling memoir about this experience, you’ll be able to afford a real place in no time. And if you ever miss the benefits of office living—e.g., all the printer paper you can eat—it’ll be waiting for you come 9 a.m. Monday.