Portland’s central city’s office vacancy rate reached 30.2% by the end of 2023.

"According to Colliers, more than 1.4 million square feet of office space in downtown Portland was available for sublease at the end of 2023. The total available amount of space available for lease downtown was more than 32%. Collier expects that figure to reach 40% over the next year.

“We’re predicting vacancies to continue climbing into 2025,” Shields said. “Unlike other markets that are starting to see a turnaround, Portland hasn’t hit the bottom yet.”"

  • corsicanguppyEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    However our immediate response of “it just can’t be done” is always so disheartening.

    We label many unfeasible or inordinately expensive things as Impossible . It shortens a conversation that ends the same anyway.

    In the same way that a surgeon can’t typically perform mechanical work on a 2024 Jeep Cherokee, most office space is in purpose-built highly-specialized construction that would take incredible amounts of cash and time to remediate into another specialized format.

    I’d like to see building code require the potential to be converted into apartments, so that rez towers or office space is built to the most inclusive of building code to permit transvesting it back and forth as required over the 100-year lifespan, but that’s gonna add cost based on how completely it can swing to either direction (ie 100% residential conversion will require different infrastructure than a well-executed 50-50 mix), and it’s not something that will have been done to ensure the particulars of this building has space to hold the guts of both kinds of use.