NEW YORK — Three years of the pandemic have hit New York City hard, and in many ways, the city is still not quite back on track.
Crowds are back, particularly in hot holiday spots, but some office buildings remain empty. But now there’s a plan to fill those empty spaces, not with offices, but with living spaces.
Governor Kathy Hochul, while sharing a stage in Lower Manhattan with Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday, acknowledged that the post-COVID recovery has leveled off.
“We really don’t live in the same New York as March 2020,” Hochul said. “We seem to have stood still. Think of daily office occupancy, vacancy rates, subway riders, downtown foot traffic.”
The subway ridership is just 62 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and just 40 to 50 percent of New Yorkers who used to commute to their Manhattan offices still come every day.
The solution? One proposition stems from a 160-page report released Wednesday titled Making New York Work For Everyone.
“How do we create those neighborhoods that people want to go back to?” said former Deputy Mayor Richard Buery.
Buery and another former deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, wrote the report calling for turning empty offices into housing, faster commutes through better transportation, and a more honest look at future work patterns. This includes continuing to work from home, with pros… and cons.
“We’re going to have to have a real conversation about how that impacts family businesses with the loss of foot traffic,” Adams said.
As for the report’s main goal of turning offices into apartments, Doctoroff was asked if that was plausible, or even possible.
“Yes, it is. It depends on the size of the building. Smaller buildings are possible,” Doctoroff said.
Housing advocates say Adams and Hochul will have to take the walk to get the job done. But the new plan has a recent example to build on: Lower Manhattan tripled in population after 9/11, in part because the city and state changed zoning laws.
