The pandemic highlighted the importance of industrial spaces because warehousing is crucial to support the demands of e-commerce. According to CNBC, Amazon alone has more than 110 active fulfillment centers in the United States and more than 185 globally (SOURCE). These facilities range from 600,000 to 1 million square feet in size.
City centers are hyper focused on the possibility of bringing new life to nearly abandoned spaces, whose daily influence fueled downtown businesses (from restaurants to dry cleaners). Part of the efforts to make this conversion happen are tedious, including the changing of building codes, eliminating fees, and possibly even creating tax relief programs for office conversions.
However, recent reporting has uncovered just how complex it is to bring these ideas to fruition. NPR followed the journey of a transformation in Washington, D.C. of a 1980s-style office building into an apartment complex to chronicle the change–spoiler alert, it was really difficult.
When it comes to adaptive reuse, the process of transforming an existing building for a purpose other than what it was built or designed for, motivations can range. Whether the goals are environmentally driven, resource preservation, or maintaining historic value, adaptive reuse has become a solution to some of our modern problems of the built environment.
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