Developer proposes turning old Boston Medical Center office and lab building into residences

may be much easier to gut and replace mechanicals.

I would think it would be based on assessing each building individually whether it's worth converting from industrial into residential.

Old office buildings that don't rely on enormous amounts of HVAC and artificial lights to be habitable are much, MUCH easier to convert to residential. It's not one-size-fits-all.

There's broadly two classes of commercial - there's buildings like the one above, built in 1899, gross area under 20k feet, under 10 floors, and then there's modern office buildings, generally anything built post-war, that are 10 times the size and have massive internal floor footprints.

The feasibility of converting one into housing is VERY different from the other. As usual, there's nuance to the idea of converting office space and online commenters on both sides have completely lost that.

The above project is great and exactly the kind of project this tax incentive should be encouraging - converting commercial space which probably wasn't particularly suited to modern commercial needs into housing. Space with ample windows and a human scale, where there's probably two bathrooms a floor already, where you only need one or two elevators, etc.

Trying to convert the monstrous office blocks of the 1970s-2000s is an entirely different story and is going to be really, really difficult to make work. You're talking about buildings with thousands of square feet PER FLOOR, most of which has no access to light, where all the plumbing and electrical and HVAC was built around a central column with no ability to bring it further out, where you need to put in hundreds of units just to break even on the cost but no way to get all those units laid out in a way that they can all have a window. Nobody wants to live in something like that.

I also want more residential construction and I am all for converting older office buildings to residences where practical. But the cost of converting big box office buildings, especially ones constructed after about 1970, into residences really would be prohibitive because of their shape and lack of natural light to their interiors. I did see a proposal to tear out the middle third of one big box office building, to create more livable apartment space, but the millions of dollars in costs would be better spent on new affordable units elsewhere. Those details matter. This is not some media conspiracy by your so called "Commentariat".