This time six years ago, just before the pandemic hit, office buildings were fuller than they are today. With many companies calling workers back to the office, vacancy rates have rebounded, but they’re still not back to pre-pandemic levels.

That has pushed lawmakers in New York and elsewhere to make changes to encourage office-to-housing conversions.

In New York City, more than 12,000 apartments are currently in the works in buildings that used to be offices. About 3,000 of those will be designated as affordable.

“New York took big steps to make it a lot easier for office-to-residential conversions over the last 18 months,” said Dan Garodnick, director of the Department of City Planning and chair of the City Planning Commission in New York.

Officials spent about a year studying what was making it hard for developers to do office-to-housing conversions, he said. “And what we came up with was the regulatory limitations — that's the zoning rules — and the financial limitations, and that's where the tax incentive came to be.”

The city changed zoning laws to make it easier for more office buildings to be converted, and the state approved those tax breaks to make the math work for developers and require them to build at least some affordable units.

“And we are already seeing the results,” Garodnick said.

New York is leading the way when it comes to turning old, vacant office buildings into apartments, according to Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“I think that speaks to the fact that New York is a really unique market, in the sense that there's a huge concentration of an enormous amount of office inventory in this extremely central, very desirable location, where there is also very, very strong demand for housing,” she said.

But there are initiatives to encourage more of these projects in other cities, too.

“Chicago has one, Boston has one, LA has one,” said Vincent Reina, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the faculty director of the Housing Initiative at Penn.

Cities that want more office space turned into housing need to be proactive about making policy changes like New York has been, he said. “We need zoning that allows it to happen. We often need financing tools that allows it to happen, and often political will for these things to kind of move forward.”

Reina said he is seeing more of that around the country. “Just the other week, the city of Philadelphia announced that they received approval from the state to try to create a tax abatement program for these kinds of conversions.”

In New York, Dan Garodnick with the planning commission, said office-to-housing conversions can help solve several problems: “They create an opportunity for us to give life to a struggling office building, create some housing in the process, and also create vibrant neighborhoods where, in some cases, they are getting less vibrant as a result of vacancies.”

But in a city where the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about $4,500 a month and the vacancy rate is under 1.5%, he said that converting office buildings to housing is just one piece of the puzzle.