REAL ESTATE
Cheap AI could be good for real estate
To some real estate developers, DeepSeek’s release of a new AI model — far less costly than what’s produced by publicly traded, U.S.-based big tech firms — could turbocharge already strong demand for data storage facilities in the years to come. That demand could bring a new round of challenges and opportunities. Data centers developers are already in a race to line up enough power to support new projects as availability of storage capacity nears zero in top-tier markets, property professionals say.
https://www.costar.com/article/1828444666/cheap-ai-could-be-good-for-real-estate
Deal volume in 1031 property exchanges falls to 12-year low
These transactions, named for the corresponding 1031 section of the U.S. tax code, fell to $11.9 billion last year, according to CoStar data. That’s the lowest annual volume since 2012 when $9.4 billion traded hands. The exchanges had gained in popularity as the country began to recover from the Great Recession in 2008-2009 with an average annual volume of $33.7 billion over the next 10 years.
https://www.costar.com/article/1742122317/deal-volume-in-1031-property-exchanges-falls-to-12-year-low
How urban designers came full circle
Urban design grew out of architecture and landscape architecture and originally promoted traditional neighborhoods like those associated with “streetcar suburbs,” walkable neighborhoods connected to turn-of-the-century transit. These ideas shaped American cities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But they were soundly rejected—even ridiculed—by urban theorists and practitioners during the “modern period” from the 1920s through the 1980s. Radical modernist ideas were embedded in 20th Century zoning codes, real estate finance, and development practice to such a degree that most people forgot they were radical ideas and that alternative methods and techniques were possible. Modernist planning imposed a rigid separation of uses. To make a long story short, a cohort of architects became fed up, stopped believing what they were taught at schools, and launched the counter-movement New Urbanism in the 1990s.
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2025/01/23/how-urban-designers-came-full-circle
These Homes Withstood the LA Fires. Architects Explain Why
Along the side of the house there are no eaves or overhangs, which can form eddies or trap embers blown by high winds. The house doesn’t have any attic vents to allow sparks to get inside the roof, which is metal, with a fire-resistant underlayment. And the house is simple: front-gabled without multiple roof lines, dormers or other pop-outs, which are vulnerable intersections in a fire. Still other elements are invisible — yet critical. The walls of the house have a one-hour fire rating. The deck is Class A wood, as resistant to ignition as concrete or steel, Chasen says. Tempered glass protects the interiors. And the front of the house was built with heat-treated wood, shielded from flying sparks and embers by the extruding walls and roof line.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-13/los-angeles-wildfires-why-these-homes-didn-t-burn
The Future of Energy: How Small Modular Reactors Are Changing the Game
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are emerging as a key player in the race to meet this need with clean, efficient power. In recent months, news surrounding SMRs has captured the attention of tech companies and governments alike, with investments in nuclear energy on the rise and plans to build these innovative reactors taking shape. SMRs promise smaller, more versatile, and decentralized versions of traditional nuclear reactors, offering the potential to generate low-carbon electricity while addressing many of the challenges associated with larger nuclear plants. Their potential is vast, and they are already being recognized as one of the most promising technologies in the future of energy production. SMRs differ from conventional nuclear reactors in a few key ways. First, they are physically much smaller — producing up to 300 megawatts of electricity (MWe), about a third of the capacity of a traditional reactor. This smaller size allows SMRs to be modular, meaning that their components can be factory-assembled and transported to a site for installation. This could offer flexibility in where and how SMRs are deployed.
https://www.gensler.com/blog/future-of-energy-small-modular-reactors?utm_source=dialogue-now-email_2025_jan09&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dialogue-now&utm_content=master-list
The baby boomer effect is hitting the housing market hard
About 43% of baby boomers say they will never sell their home, the highest of any generational group, according to a survey of U.S. residents ages 18 to 65 by real estate firm Redfin Corp. (Nasdaq: RDFN). The biggest single reason cited for staying in place is that their home is almost or completely paid off, while others say they like where they live. About 30% say they are staying in their current home because prices are too high and 18% said they are staying because they don’t want to give up their low mortgage interest rate.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2025/01/09/housing-market-2025-baby-boomer-gen-z-divide.html
Soaring homeowners insurance costs aren’t likely to abate anytime soon
Digital-insurance marketplace Matic found average premiums for new customers increased by 17.4% from 2023 to the first half of 2024, the latest hike in a trend of premium increases over the past five years. At policy renewal, homeowners saw an average increase of about 25% between 2023 and the first half of 2024, after a 17% increase the year before. Meanwhile, about 63% of lenders reported at least one borrower they worked with recently had problems securing home insurance. The biggest driver behind the rising cost of homeowners insurance is property catastrophe reinsurance prices. The cost of reinsurance, or secondary insurance that insurers obtain to hedge their own risks, has doubled over the past five years. Those increases are responsible for about two-thirds of the increase in premiums.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2025/01/16/homeowners-insurance-2025-problem-climate-rates.html
Where the Wildfire Ends
Densely populated areas may not be able to clear-cut the 100-foot radius around the home that comprises the “home ignition zone,” but they can invest in better home design and ensure their neighbors do the same. According to a report last year from Headwaters Economics, the cost of adapting a single-family home ranges from $23,000 to $100,000, but many of the most effective interventions cost far less. Those include cleaning gutters, storing firewood far from the house, installing metal flashing, and using noncombustible fencing and decking. Some of the architectural changes have been par for the course for decades; in Paradise, almost 40 percent of buildings built after 1996 survived, compared to 11 percent built before.
https://slate.com/business/2025/01/los-angeles-fires-palisades-eaton-altadena-how-to-rebuild.html
The Eternal, Essential Apartment
One example of a multi-residence building from the ancient world was the Roman insula, or “apartment block.” While not as grand or luxurious as the domus (a private, single-family townhouse), multi-story insulae were important structures in crowded Roman cities. In a time before elevators, ground-floor and lower-level apartments were the most desirable. But while the idea that a Roman insula could rise as many as ten-to-twelve stories high may have taken hold in popular culture, anthropologist Glenn R. Storey points out that historical evidence doesn’t back up this assumption. He explains that this view “comes mostly from anecdotal written descriptions about Rome and other Roman cities” and that the “archaeological evidence for tall buildings in the Roman world is in reality very sparse.” Most material evidence places insulae at around four-to-five stories tall. The ruins of Case a Giardino in Ostia, Italy, supports this, as do the remains of other structures, such the Insula dell’Ara Coeli, within Rome itself.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-eternal-essential-apartment/
How federal real estate could shift under Trump
The federal government currently leases 149.39 million square feet of office space across the nation, with rent payments totaling $5.23 billion annually, according to a recent analysis by commercial real estate data firm Trepp. In total, the GSA owns and leases more than 363 million square feet of space in 8,397 buildings nationally, according to the agency. To be sure, the federal government has been reducing its real estate holdings in recent years, dating back to even before the Covid-19 pandemic. In December, the GSA said it was beginning a disposition of 1.5 million square feet across eight properties. The GSA also estimated at the time it had removed almost 11 million square feet of federally owned space and cut almost 18 million square feet of leased space in the past decade. With Trump back in the White House, it’s possible — and even likely — the GSA’s space reductions will accelerate.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2025/01/23/federal-real-estate-data-centers-office-vacancy.html
Get the crowd back together: office conversions won’t be enough to rebuild downtowns’ population density
Yet just converting existing office buildings to residences won’t be enough to stop the “urban doom loop,” because apartment buildings contain many fewer people than similarly sized office buildings do. Fewer people means fewer services, which after all, serve people. Maintaining those services with a population of residents will require much higher population densities – and many new buildings – rather than just conversions.
https://ggwash.org/view/98189/get-the-crowd-back-together-office-conversions-wont-be-enough-to-rebuild-downtowns-population-density
REAL ESTATE AND MOBILITY
Meet the firm rebranding the heart of Denver’s downtown
Dually headquartered in London and New York City, DNCO has worked with communities worldwide to revitalize urban spaces with place branding and identity. The firm has completed projects for museums, residential projects, markets and public spaces in cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, according to its website. While 16th Street has its challenges, a few things are working in its favor, said Simon Yewdall, strategy director at DNCO who has been working on the Denver project. “One thing that I was really enamored with about the story of 16th Street Mall from the very beginning was the fact that it was created at a time when other American cities were investing in literal out-of-town shopping malls,” Yewdall said. The original creation of 16th Street as a pedestrian mall downtown was a major investment in the city’s core, much like the construction that’s going on now — it was aspirational, he said.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2025/01/27/denver-16th-street-mall-rebrand-dnco-london.html
The other reasons companies are ramping up office returns
A Resume.org survey of 900 business leaders found 73% of those surveyed said they will require employees to come to the office at least three days per week in 2025. Sixty-nine percent of respondents, which had the option to pick multiple reasons, cited improving collaboration and teamwork — more than any other listed reason. Other reasons selected included improving communication, strengthening company culture and boosting productivity. But 40% also said they wanted to maximize the use of their existing office space, according to the survey. About two-thirds of leaders surveyed said they currently lease space, with half of those indicating they have leases that expire in 2028 or later. And about 16% of business leaders said their current lease terms had a “major impact” on their return-to-office policies while 38% said they had “some impact.” Twenty-three percent of those surveyed said they plan to decrease their real estate when their lease expires. Of those, about 32% said they will subsequently reduce their number of days in the office while 8% said they will stop requiring office attendance in general.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2024/12/31/remote-work-rto-amazon-trump-musk-2025-cre-lease.html
Here’s how some large employers are stepping up return-to-office mandates this year
The number of CEOs who expected their companies to adopt a full return to a five-day workweek climbed to about 85% from the 64% reported last year, according to a recent KPMG survey. “This is a sign of things to come,” Kilroy Realty CEO Angela Aman recently told analysts. “We’re seeing tenants who had reduced space or were actively planning on reducing space in 2025, come back and sort of begin conversations with us because they believe they’ve overshot those reductions.” Even so, more workers regularly commuting to an office may take some time to result in any corresponding spike in demand that landlords and developers have been hopeful about. “For the most part, we haven’t seen return-to-office mandates translate in to leasing demand,” said Phil Mobley, CoStar’s national director of office analytics. “There may be fewer move-outs now, but there hasn’t been much of an increase in leasing activity to drive any meaningful growth. The sheer force of math suggests that we’re going to be looking at high vacancy for a long time, and it will probably keep rising over the next 12 to 18 months.”
https://www.costar.com/article/102840689/heres-how-some-large-employers-are-stepping-up-return-to-office-mandates-this-year
San Francisco’s newest neighborhood offers a glimpse of life without cars
The installations—called “street rooms”—are miniature parklike features of the streetscape that are cementing Mission Rock’s case for being one of the most pedestrian-friendly urban spaces in America. Built on former industrial land, the project was developed through a partnership between the San Francisco Giants, the Port of San Francisco, and developer Tishman Speyer. Uniquely, the neighborhood has been designed with pedestrian-first streets that do not allow on-street parking. The new street rooms are designed to give pedestrians more spaces to use along its two main corridors.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91250284/san-francisco-mission-rock-neighborhoood-pedestrian-streets
Modernizing Parking Requirements
Denver is pursuing the Modernizing Parking Requirements project in an effort to:
• reduce city time reviewing development applications
• promote the development of more housing
• give building projects the flexibility to build the number of parking spaces they deem necessary, based on market conditions.
The proposed rule changes would remove minimum parking requirements from development regulations, which now require a minimum number of parking spaces based on the proposed use and zone district of each project. Currently, minimum parking ratios don’t apply to single-unit homes, accessory dwelling units, or certain neighborhoods downtown. Some affordable housing developments already have reduced parking requirements.
https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Community-Planning-and-Development/Denver-Zoning-Code/Text-Amendments/Modernizing-Parking-Requirements
What Happens When There Are Fewer Spaces to Park?
In New York, Seattle and Buffalo, for example, reducing or eliminating minimums has encouraged housing development that would not have been possible under the former mandates. But like most policy changes that affect the everyday lives of a wide swath of people, changing the parking rules have received backlash from residents who are concerned that reducing requirements will lead to less parking overall and, as a result, an influx of traffic from drivers hunting for on-street spaces.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/business/city-parking-rules.html
18-story apartment building proposed on RTD parking lot
The proposal, drawn up by Minneapolis architect Urban Works, calls for a mix of units ranging from 350 to 1,300 square feet inside a 380,000-square-foot building. The 411 parking spots would start below ground, mixing with some amenity and residential space on the above-grade floors. A rooftop pool deck would be included. The project is proposed for a 1.5-acre lot at 3894 N. Unita St. It currently holds parking for the RTD station that serves the A-line, which brings people to and from Union Station and Denver International Airport.
https://businessden.com/2025/01/16/18-story-apartment-building-proposed-on-rtd-parking-lot/
Unlocking the Mysteries of Zoning
Why do streets in cities and towns so often fall short of being memorable, much less functional? It turns out that no one in particular is responsible for their overall design. City engineers and public work departments make design decisions for the publicly owned parts of the street: roadways, buffer areas between the street and sidewalk, and all or part of the pedestrian realm. Meanwhile, planning and zoning establish codes for the privately owned portions: the buildings, sometimes all or part of the pedestrian realm, but typically not much of the buffer. The results are often a mismatch of pieces and parts: gigantic cobra streetlights in front of low-scale housing, for example, or narrow sidewalks in a commercial zone because of road widening.
https://commonedge.org/unlocking-the-mysteries-of-zoning/
What Happens When There Are Fewer Spaces to Park?
Hundreds of cities and municipalities have rolled back or completely thrown out requirements on real estate projects since the nonprofit organization Strong Towns began keeping track a decade ago. In 2022 alone, 15 of them, including San Jose, Calif., Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky., repealed their parking rules. In late 2023, Austin became the largest U.S. city to eliminate parking minimums. And in December, New York City lawmakers put policies in place that reduced or eliminated parking requirements for new housing in some parts of the city. What has happened in those places? Many of these cities have only recently put the changes in place so the evidence is limited, but some studies show that more housing has been built as a result of the repealed rules.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/business/city-parking-rules.html
MOBILITY
Will 16th Street Mall Construction End in 2025? Plus Four More Projects Set for Completion This Year
In late December, the city said completion of construction will occur in the fall of 2025, estimating that the project was 78 percent finished. The project was originally slated to cost $149 million; the dashboard now projects a $175.4 million final cost, with $141.5 million spent thus far.
https://www.westword.com/news/5-denver-construction-projects-to-be-completed-in-2025-22948812
https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Department-of-Transportation-and-Infrastructure/Programs-Services/Projects/16th-Street-Mall
Denver mayor says 16th Street Mall will fully reopen this summer as he details goals on affordability, safety
Johnston also said that the 16th Street Mall would fully reopen this summer after years of construction. That’s a few months earlier than the city had projected on the project website, though officials long have expressed hope for an earlier completion.
https://www.denverpost.com/2025/01/29/denver-mike-johnston-climate-homelessness-affordability-2025-goals/#:~:text=Johnston%20also%20said%20that%20the,hope%20for%20an%20earlier%20completion.
NYC Congestion Pricing May Be Saving Lives
New York City’s new congestion pricing program is reducing congestion and also making streets safer, with data gathered by Streetsblog NYC indicating a 51 percent drop in crash-related injuries in the program’s first 12 days compared to the same time period the prior year. “According to just-updated city statistics, in the first 12 days of congestion pricing — Jan. 6 through Jan. 17, which includes 10 business days and one weekend — 37 people were injured in 90 total reported crashes, down from 76 injuries in 199 crashes over the same 12-day period in 2024.”
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2025/01/133978-nyc-congestion-pricing-may-be-saving-lives
Waymo to test in 10 new cities in 2025, starting with Las Vegas and San Diego
Waymo has said it plans on launching robotaxi operations in Austin, Atlanta, and Miami in the near future. Last year, Waymo sent vehicles to a variety of locations, including Truckee, California, upstate New York, and Michigan, in search of winter weather conditions in which to stress test its robot cars. This year, the theme is “generalizability”: how well the vehicles adapt to new cities after having driven tens of millions of miles in its core markets of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
https://www.theverge.com/news/600542/waymo-test-cities-las-vegas-san-diego-2025
Can American Drivers Learn to Love Roundabouts?
By just about all measures, the modern style of roundabout — where cars are meant to seamlessly yield in a circular pattern — are an easy win: They save lives, reduce traffic delays and cut emissions. But foes of free-flowing circular intersections seem to find something viscerally upsetting about the concept, as proposals to replace traffic lights with roundabouts in US cities are routinely met with community opposition. Part of the American roundabout resistance may be simple unfamiliarity: The US lags far behind roundabout-crazy countries like France, the Netherlands and the UK, which launched a national roundabout-building campaign in the 1960s.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-01-06/can-american-drivers-learn-to-love-roundabouts
Transit Expansion in the United States: A 2024 Roundup and a Look Ahead to 2025
Cities throughout the United States opened very little transit in 2024, adding just 29 kilometers (18 miles) of light rail and no new metro rail service. Though Seattle added some notable new expansions—including an extension north to Lynnwood of its successful light rail route and the first phase of a second line to Bellevue—the only other US light rail expansions were short additions in Los Angeles and Phoenix. Lynnwood City Center station, north of Seattle, open in 2024, and along the region’s Line 1 light rail line. Photo: Sound Transit. That slow completion rate reflected a broad shift to other types of investments, with a notably increase in investment in bus rapid transit (BRT) lines, including new corridors that opened in Indianapolis, Madison, and Seattle.
https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2025/01/06/transit-expansion-in-the-united-states-a-2024-roundup-and-a-look-ahead-to-2025/
Less Traffic, Faster Buses: Congestion Pricing’s First Week
Early data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suggests that traffic has dropped around Manhattan’s core. – The average weekday entries into the zone and the highways that surround it fell by 7.5 percent compared with an estimate of an average workday in January before the program, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. On Sunday, entries fell by about 18.5 percent, when compared with the same base line. “There’s so much evidence that people are experiencing a much less traffic-congested environment,” said Janno Lieber, the chairman and chief executive of the M.T.A., which is overseeing the program. “They’re seeing streets that are moving more efficiently, and they’re hearing less noise, and they’re feeling a less tense environment around tunnels and bridges.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/nyregion/congestion-pricing-nyc.html
As rural bus routes thrive, Colorado builds on what is working
Over the past six years, ridership on CDOT’s nine rural Bustang Outrider routes increased by 63% from 27,240 to 44,438, state records show. The overall annual ridership on the state’s broadening family of Bustangs — including high-volume dozen-a-day service along I-70 between Denver and Grand Junction and I-25 between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs, along with “Pegasus” and “Snowstang” minbuses — exceeds 390,000, up from 238,000 in 2019. CDOT planners project Bustang ridership in 2025 at 325,000. In contrast, urban RTD ridership decreased from 106 million in 2019 to around 65 million.
https://www.denverpost.com/2025/01/18/rural-transit-buses-colorado-bustang/
UK’s 20mph speed limits ‘are cutting car insurance costs’
They have proved hugely controversial, but 20mph speed limits appear to be making car insurance cheaper. This week a leading price comparison website reported the biggest annual drop in UK car insurance prices in more than 10 years, with the average cost of cover falling by £161 – or 16% – in the past 12 months. After a turbulent couple of years during which many drivers were hit with record premium hikes and some saw their costs double, that represents some much-needed good news. But car insurance still typically costs a lot more than it did: the average UK premium is 33% higher than it was two years ago, just before the huge rises that took effect in 2023.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/18/uk-20mph-speed-limits-car-insurance-costs-premiums
Why Americans Don’t Walk: A Forgotten Centennial
On Saturday, Jan. 24, 1925, Los Angeles introduced a law that gave motorists priority in the city’s streets. It went into effect just after midnight. Disobedient pedestrians were suddenly “jaywalkers.” It was not the first jaywalking law in the United States, and not even the first one in LA. But it’s the one that worked, as far as drivers were concerned. And it is the ancestor of such laws nationwide. The first arrest – with a $5 fine – came at 2 a.m. The president of the Automobile Club of Southern California, however, considered the policeman’s shrill whistle, pointed finger, and barked command more persuasive than any fine, because in front of witnesses the experience was humiliating. “The ridicule of their fellow citizens,” E.B. Lefferts contended, “is far more effective than any other means which might be adopted.”
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/01/21/why-americans-dont-walk-a-forgotten-centennial
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
How a New Vision for Flexible Co-Living Conversions Can Support Housing Affordability
Utilizing the plumbing from kitchens and restrooms that are typical in office buildings, rather than adding new elements to individual units, reduced construction costs by 25% to 35% compared to conventional office-to-residential conversions on a cost per sq. ft. basis. The units offer private, secured dwelling rooms and large windows for every resident and can accommodate space for three times as many apartments as a traditional residential building. We also found a sizable potential market for this concept. In each of the cities studied, more than half of all renters are single-occupant households, and the concept can deliver units that are significantly more affordable than the average market-rate studio in each city’s downtown.
https://www.gensler.com/blog/pew-study-flexible-office-to-co-living-conversions
Is Living on Top of a Costco the Answer to Affordable-Housing Crisis?
Big-box retailers are known primarily for their suburban locations, where the stores are the size of a couple of football fields and surrounded by hundreds of parking spaces. In recent years they have been pushing more into cities with smaller stores and new designs. Target and Whole Foods have anchored apartment buildings to gain access to urban populations. Costco has been exploring different urban strategies for more than two decades and today owns dozens of downtown stores.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/is-living-on-top-of-a-costco-the-answer-to-the-affordable-housing-crisis-ed3e8bf3?st=fgExbA
6 standout housing policy ideas from 2024
Affordable dorm-style living using empty downtown office space – One reason we haven’t seen more office-to-residential conversions — despite a post-pandemic office vacancy rate approaching 20 percent nationwide — is because the economics of those projects often aren’t financially feasible. This kind of adult dorm project, however, addresses a lot of those economic concerns.
https://www.vox.com/policy/391613/housing-crisis-rent-yimby-yigby-landlord-developer
Single-staircase buildings appear on the horizon as a potential weapon for housing reform
Efforts currently underway to amend existing building and construction codes in order to create more affordable housing could soon be boosted via the removal of a long-held and potentially outdated requirement—the need for two egress routes in multifamily buildings with heights up to six stories. At least ten states and a number of other larger cities are considering such reforms as we enter the new year, armed with the confidence that better fire safety technology and building materials can eliminate the sometimes costly code requirement at a crucial time.
https://archinect.com/news/article/150459611/single-staircase-buildings-appear-on-the-horizon-as-a-potential-weapon-for-housing-reform
The Next Big Thing in Low-Cost Housing
ADUs have been a key element of adding “gentle density” in neighborhoods across the state, but their costs can still prove prohibitive. Enter: MDUs, or “mobile dwelling units”—a much less expensive, more flexible, and faster-built option that could be another integral tool in the toolbox for bringing much-needed homes online fast for Washingtonians. (We’re using the term “MDU” in this article to align with a legislative proposal concerning this housing type in Cascadia. Elsewhere, they’re known by terms including “tiny homes on wheels,” “movable tiny homes,” and “vehicular residential facilities.” Same general idea, though.)
https://www.sightline.org/2025/01/17/the-next-big-thing-in-low-cost-housing/
States Embrace Diverse Strategies to Ease Housing Supply Constraints
In 2024, states passed 50 bills aimed at increasing housing production, according to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center—20 more than over the same period in 2023. Lawmakers in a diverse set of states sought to address barriers to housing development by streamlining lengthy and costly permitting requirements and revising restrictive zoning laws, among other efforts. Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, and Maryland passed legislation in 2024 to allow apartments in some or all areas near commerce or transit, such as urban downtowns. Arizona and Hawaii’s bills also required that municipalities allow vacant offices and other underused commercial space to be turned into housing.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/01/17/states-embrace-diverse-strategies-to-ease-housing-supply-constraints