I recently said the main reason a city exists is to match workers with jobs. I said a city is a big labour market.

That’s true as far as it goes. But it misses a lot. There’s more to a city than jobs. A city is also a good place to meet a husband or wife. The restaurants are better there.

That’s why space is more expensive in a city. There are more jobs, more potential spouses and more fancy things to do.

Now, working from home (WFH) has changed the deal. One doesn’t have to live in a city full-time to make city wages.

What happens when the money-making function of a city is separated from its spouse-search and fancy restaurant functions? Amenities are nice, but are they nice enough to justify paying city rents?

One would worry that cities might empty out. And there are – very very early – signs of this happening. Where greater Dublin used to mean Dublin, North Wicklow, Kildare and Meath, now thanks to WFH the whole province of Leinster is part of greater Dublin. And it’s in Leinster counties like Kilkenny, Laois and Wexford that house prices rose fastest after the pandemic. House price growth in central Dublin lagged that of Leinster and the rest of the country.

To be sure, there’s something perverse about worrying the city might die while market rents are unaffordable. After all, the reason rents in the city are high is because lots of people want to live there. It’s like Yogi Berra’s line, “Nobody goes to Coney Island any more — it’s too crowded.”

Cites are hard to kill off entirely. But they can get very sick. In cities like Gary, Indiana and Baltimore, Maryland the important industries left the city. Neither place was rich enough to maintain buildings or public services. So the cities decay around their residents.

Right now, Dublin is the opposite of a city like Baltimore. Baltimore has an excess of buildings relative to people; Dublin has an excess of people relative to buildings. Both places want to be a bit more like the other.

For Dublin, the worst of all worlds would be if it got a bit less rich (on account of some office workers leaving); but then didn’t get a bit cheaper to live in. This dread scenario might play out if new people weren’t allowed to come in and fill the space vacated by the people who are leaving.

The next act

I wrote about the permanent drop in demand for office space last week. In the US, 30 per cent of all work days are worked from home. That number is stable. In Ireland, in late 2022, 25 per cent of workers said they “usually” work from home; this number has risen more in Ireland than anywhere else in the EU.

Last week I also wrote about how this might affect the value of office blocks. One model by Gupta, Martinez and Nieuwerburgh found a generic New York office block would be worth 54 per cent less than before WFH, assuming that it eventually reaches a vacancy level of 27 per cent.

In Dublin, the value of offices fell about 15 per cent in the year to June. In the UK, London West End offices fell 13 per cent, whereas offices in the City and the southeast of England fell about 25 per cent.

What to do with the vacant office space? Cities like Dublin and New York could reinvent themselves. Central Dublin could be a hub, not for office workers, but for amenities and city living.

Converting the empty office space into housing would do two things at once. First and foremost, it would make housing cheaper and more plentiful. Second, it would invite more demand into the centre of Dublin: for restaurants, parks, galleries, pubs, and all the joys of life. It would give Dublin a fresh raison d’être.

The only things stopping this vision of abundant, well-located housing are some trifling practicalities. Offices are not designed to be lived in. Without major surgery, they are suboptimal living spaces. They have very few windows per square metre. They don’t have enough plumbed bathrooms. The existing windows don’t open. They get hot.

The plumbing and ventilation issues can be solved at a reasonable cost. But not the light. Getting more windows into tall buildings requires digging out new cores, which is major surgery, which is enough to make the entire conversion project unviable.

We have two options. We can stick to our existing regulations governing light and so on, and leave the offices empty. Perhaps another commercial use might be found for them, in time.

Or, we can change the regs and allow people to live in an apartment in which their bedroom has no window.

The benefit of not changing the regs is that our building regs stay consistent, and nobody has to sleep in a room without a window.

The benefit of changing the regs is that people who want to live in those apartments get to live there; housing costs for the whole system go down; emissions per person go down, and central Dublin gets a shot in the arm.

Compromises

A problem I have with the “don’t change building regs” people is that they presume to know what other people want. They tell other people they may not live in the centre of town — where the jobs and amenities are, where emissions are lowest — because the bedrooms don’t have windows.

What they don’t say out loud, but do imply, is that people should instead live somewhere farther away. They should live where commutes are longer and amenities are fewer, but where windows at least are plentiful.

Most people wouldn’t want to live in a city centre apartment with no bedroom window. I’m one of them. But lots of people would. Maybe young people who want to be near the craic. Or people who hate commuting. Or people who feel strongly about minimising CO2 emissions. And to be clear — an apartment like this would have big floor-to-ceiling windows in the living areas, presumably with nice views of the city.

You could make a similar argument for living a long way from the city. Long commutes are definitely not ideal. They’re bad for the body and the planet. Living far from work is suboptimal. Should we ban home building in the commuter belts?

How many homes?

How many offices might be suitable for conversion to homes, anyway? Gupta et al tried to come up with an estimate for the US. They got rid of office buildings outside the centre of the city; then got rid of new buildings, which are more in demand as offices; then got rid of the highest grade buildings for the same reason; then got rid of small buildings; then got rid of buildings with exceptionally deep floor plates which, as we’ve seen, are the hardest to convert.

Then the authors excluded buildings with long-term tenants in situ. Then, the authors excluded buildings with green credentials (since, in their exercise, they were looking to establish how many “brown” old buildings could be converted to “green” apartments).

“The selection algorithm leaves us with a final, national sample of 2,644 properties whose physical attributes, remaining office tenants, and greenhouse gas emissions make them ripe for conversion to green apartments. These properties represent 11 per cent of all office properties located in high-density commercial districts (2,644 out of 23,903).”

According to IPUT, there was a total of 3.9 million square metres of office space in Dublin in 2018. That’s the most recent figure I can find. About another million square metres of office space has been built since then. That would be 4.9 million square metres in Dublin and a further, say, 4 million in the rest of Ireland. 11 per cent of that number would be roughly 16,000 apartments nationally, or 5,300 in Dublin City. It’s about five per cent of our national shortfall in private rental accommodation, as calculated by Ronan Lyons.

5,300 new apartments in Dublin City would be a shot in the arm for the city centre. It would put people in houses. It would lower rents for the entire system. And it would lower emissions.

It would involve drawbacks. But that’s true of literally everything.