IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/31530.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Converting Brown Offices to Green Apartments

Author

Listed:
  • Arpit Gupta
  • Candy Martinez
  • Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Abstract

The conversion of brown office buildings to green apartments can contribute towards a solution to three pressing issues: oversupply of office in a hybrid-and-remote-work world, shortage of housing, and excessive greenhouse gas emissions. We propose a set of criteria to identify commercial office properties that are are physically suitable for conversion, yielding about 11% of all office buildings across the U.S. We present a pro-forma real estate model that identifies parameters under which these conversions are financially viable. We highlight several policy levers available to federal, state, and local governments that could accelerate the conversion, and that may be necessary should policymakers desire the creation of affordable housing. We highlight the role that the Inflation Reduction Act could play.

Suggested Citation

  • Arpit Gupta & Candy Martinez & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 2023. "Converting Brown Offices to Green Apartments," NBER Working Papers 31530, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31530
    Note: AG AP EEE EFG PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w31530.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets
    • Q51 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Valuation of Environmental Effects
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy
    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population
    • R32 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Other Spatial Production and Pricing Analysis
    • R38 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31530. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.