How one Utah city is helping to turn empty offices into much-needed apartments

Since 2020, cities across the United States have been working to solve a particularly thorny math problem:

There are not enough places for people to live, but there are plenty of places for people to work — especially in towering downtown offices.

The same holds true for Salt Lake City, where the downtown office vacancy rate hovers around 20%.

This past July, the city took its first step toward solving the problem by passing new zoning reforms that encourage developers to consider adaptive reuse and preservation of older buildings.

But even with new incentives, the logistics of transforming offices into apartments can get in the way.

“I would say 95% of [office] buildings just don’t work efficiently to turn into apartments,” explained FFKR architect Preston Dean.

For starters, many office buildings have large floor plans without windows near the center. That makes it tricky to avoid creating dead-end corridors and pockets of empty space that also meet building codes. The conversions often require upgrading fire suppression systems. Not to mention, offices have centralized restrooms and plumbing, while apartments require private bathrooms with plumbing to each unit.

“All of those things combined,” added architect Larry Curtis, Dean’s FFKR colleague, “just end up costing owners too much money.”

Buildings constructed before air conditioning seem to work best. They tend to be narrower or shaped in ways to take advantage of natural ventilation from windows.

These seven downtown Salt Lake City buildings seem to fill the bill and are now undergoing this metamorphosis from workplace to home space.

Seraph

136 E. South Temple

Texas-based developer Hines is converting this high-rise once known as the University Club Tower into 217 high-end apartments with luxury amenities — and plans to rename the 25-story residential building “Seraph” upon completion in 2025.

The 59-year-old tower’s floor plan, higher ceilings and ample parking made it suited to a residential conversion, according to Dusty Harris, Hines’ senior managing director.

With Big-D Construction as the main contractor, Hines is proceeding with the $70 million conversion while its well-publicized pursuit of a new residential skyscraper at the Main Street site of the demolished Utah Theater remains in limbo.

Demand for new high-end housing downtown and the fact that the South Temple project is an adaptive reuse have, according to Harris, made the Seraph conversion viable.

South Temple Apartments

348 E. South Temple

The midcentury three-story structure was originally built for IBM in 1962. The building features arches in the front that stretch all the way through the building and serve as its supports. The archways and building design were “a reaction to the perceived austerity of pure modernism,” according to Preservation Utah.

FFKR Architects is restoring and converting the building into apartments with rolling, wavelike, ceilings and plenty of natural light.

“We really wanted to showcase the structure and the history of the building,” Dean said, “so all the units have the exposed concrete arches on the inside.”

The original IBM structure will have 20 rentals and a new apartment building is going directly behind it.

A midcentury modern bowling alley is planned for the IBM building’s basement and the windows are being restored with anodized steel that will glow at night. It would be cheaper to tear down the building, but Dean and Curtis say the developer wanted to save the original structure.

Maye House Apartments

508 E. South Temple

The four-story brick and concrete Doxey-Layton Medical Dental Building is slated to open in October as the Maye House Apartments.

The project came before the Salt Lake City planning commission in 2017 and, according to the staff report at the time, will bring some 112 new apartments on line.

“It’s one of the most complex developments we’ve ever done,” Scott Laneri, the project’s construction manager, told Building Salt Lake last year.

Victory Heights

1060 E. 100 South

The Victory Heights project will turn a multistory medical complex into 66 studio apartments, along with 18 three-bedroom and a handful of four-bedroom units. All will be priced for families and individuals making no more than 50% of the area’s median income.

The Central City project received funding from the state’s Olene Walker Housing Loan Fund, a city low-interest loan and tax credits.

Under the developer’s plan, surface parking will be converted into an “open outdoor amenity space,” including vegetable gardens and sports courts.

The Grove

315 E. 200 South

The remake of the architecturally iconic Northwest Pipeline Building, which served for decades as the city’s public safety complex, is another case of adaptive reuse put toward creating more affordable homes.

The 66-year-old, eight-story building will be rehabilitated into mostly two- and three-bedroom units by the development arm of the Housing Authority of Salt Lake City. It will offer 244 dwellings, many of them tailored in price and bedrooms for working families and available on a rent-to-own basis.

Up to 16,000 square feet of ground-floor space in The Grove will host community services: child care, a medical clinic, sources of healthy food, car- and bike-sharing facilities and small locally owned shops, with walkable green spaces and public art in the block’s interior.

The estimated total price tag is at least $165 million.

AP1 Lofts

77 W. 200 South

This project converted four levels of a 1980s office building into 74 apartment units. The structure’s shape was the biggest challenge, Kent Nelson, CEO of Workhorse Partners, explained.

Apartments are generally long and narrow rectangles. Offices are square. The strange configuration of the AP1 office building resulted in six studios without windows. Workhorse Partners decided to charge $150 less for those units.

“Five out of the six of those interior units are leased,” Nelson said. “So that was not as big of a problem as we expected it to be.”

Electrical upgrades ended up costing half a million dollars instead of the expected $40,000, and new windows had to be installed. Ultimately, though, Nelson expects the premium on downtown living to offset the costs.

Zoning can be a big barrier for office-to-apartment conversions.

“We have all this shortage of housing, and we could add literally thousands of units,” Nelson said, “but [officials] won’t allow the zone change.”

HK Tower

515 E. 100 South

HK Tower will serve moderate and low-income families according to its application for federal funds. It will have eight apartments with three or more bedrooms and 12 one-bedroom units.

Built in the 1980s, the former 14-story office tower’s brick and steel exterior will be preserved.

The apartments “will offer 12-foot, exposed concrete ceilings with expansive views of the Salt Lake Valley and the nearby foothills,” the application states. Most of the interior will be gutted and updated with “modern finishes.”

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