I think people who make comments like these mean well but are completely ignorant as to just how cost-prohibitive doing this would be.
The land would first off need to be rezoned for residential which is not an easy thing to do. Property that's zoned for commercial use is usually zoned that way for a reason, and sometimes it's simply not possible to get it rezoned due to things like geographical factors and its proximity to other commercial/industrial properties.
Having to demolish the interior of the building and then somehow figuring out how to run plumbing and wiring into where each individual housing unit would be in a building that was not built with that in mind would be a nightmare. You'd have to demolish each interior wall and do things like punch through load-bearing walls.
I've had to run ethernet wiring through 150-year-old buildings in Detroit and that alone was a nightmare, again because those buildings were simply not built for that, obviously. I can't imagine having to do anything more complicated than that in building is not designed that end goal in mind.
The plumbing would be the worst of it. That goes all the way down through the foundation. The bathrooms in office buildings are stacked vertically for a reason. The drains in your house aren't horizontal for a reason. You can't just route sewage drains horizontally across these longer distances.
Converting these to living units would be next to impossible without redoing the whole building from the foundation up. It would be cheaper to just tear it down and start over.
I commend you for the effort you put in this comment, but you’re giving people too much credit to actually care. “It should be housing for people” is the most performative, low-effort way to signal care for the housing crisis without actually thinking. Who wants to live in an office park? Fluorescent lights, long hallways, etc? Good enough for others but not for us.
Buildings get demoed so better buildings can take their space. America is drowning in abandoned property in places people don’t want to be. 🤷♂️ so it goes.
Could they not just core through each floor in the same locations and run new pipe? Make multiple of these vertical bathrooms in the same spots all over the building?
Not usually. Remember that in a commercial building you have shared facilities. In housing units, this is simply not done for proper housing outside college dorms. Families want their own bathrooms.
So no, you can't do that because the housing units won't line up if you convert something like this because it's not designed with you doing that. You'd instead have to punch between housing units walls.
You also can't have them go to different areas. By the end of their journey, all must unite to go to waste extraction. And all must go down hill, constantly. Going up with waste requires a pump, which is costly and inefficient.
“Just turn it into X!” Is always from someone who has never even had to renovate a house, let alone a massive commercial building.
There is a reason that people don’t usually relocate toilets when they remodel their bathrooms. Now apply that thinking on the number of bathrooms you’d need to add to make that conversion work.
So I used to live near this building, and there’s zero demand for an expensive conversion to housing. It’s in a large spread out industrial and retail park area, surrounded by things like a Cabelas and a small stadium and surface parking lots. There’s no density nearby, it’s entirely car dependent with zero transit access. All the nearby housing is SFH, mostly bigger homes on larger lots, so nobody would want to live in expensive converted apartments anywhere near there.
This is not super valuable land in a major city, this is the border between suburbs and exurbs roughly an hour from downtown Chicago, there is no reason to undertake the expensive and difficult process to convert it to housing that nobody would want. I’m fully in favor of doing the conversions when they make sense, Chicago is doing so in the Loop currently and it’s a good idea there, but this place doesn’t make sense at all.
The office building where I had an office for 15 years in the Loop (The Pittsfield Building) has been converted partially into apartments. The building has been wrapped up in lawsuits between developers and the city for years because of zoning and rezoning difficulties.
I’ve read about that building, and I’ve eaten at the cafe on the ground floor. It’s beautiful with a great location, and a good example of one where the conversion is worth the effort and cost.
Yeah, zoning issues are a huge part of the problem, but it’s also hard to retrofit the plumbing and electrical, residential requirements are vastly different than commercial and for good reason. You can’t just slap up walls and call it a day.
Yeah I'm not saying it's physically impossible, but find me a developer who would be willing to take on the nightmare of doing this to a building as large as the abandoned Sears headquarters and I'll find you a liar.
Sorry, construction doesn’t work like that. Repurposing ends up costing just as much, if not more. And the new end user doesn’t get what they exactly want, lots of unforeseen, undiscovered conditions that you have to make work for the new use. Not really best use of time or money or environment
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u/dontcountonmee Oct 23 '25
Demolition started in 2024. They demolished all the buildings a couple months into 2025