Highlights:
- In the last 70 years, almost 2,000 old buildings were converted into apartments, including around 800 in the last decade alone — an all-time high.
- Chicago tops the list with the most adaptive reuse apartment buildings, while New York City leads with the most apartments.
- Factories are the all-time most popular building type to be converted into rentals, but office-to-apartment conversions were the most common in the 2010s.
In the heart of quaint Simpsonville, SC lies an old cotton mill built at the turn of the last century. The mill now goes by the telling name of Cotton Mill Apartments and it’s one of the many vintage factories in the U.S. that has been given a new life through adaptive reuse. Going beyond renovation and stepping into adaptive reuse territory, residential conversions like Cotton Mill have become increasingly popular.
The U.S. has its fair share of beautiful old buildings — many of them historical — that are often underused or even abandoned. But, through adaptive reuse, they can be repurposed and converted to residential use. This trend took off in the last decade, when 778 old buildings were transitioned into apartment communities. In total, 1,876 such buildings have been converted into apartments since the 1950s. From abandoned dispensaries to vintage gramophone factories, we dug into Yardi Matrix data to uncover where these projects are most common and what they were in their past lives.
Surge in apartment conversions reaches all-time high in the 2010s
Compared to the 1950s, when adapted apartment buildings were extremely rare, the 2010s saw 55 times more old buildings converted to apartment communities. That’s a leap from just 14 projects in the ’50s to 778 conversions last decade — a number that has been increasing rapidly, especially since the 1990s. The same upward trend is confirmed by the number of apartments in repurposed buildings — from about 2,000 rental units in the ’50s to almost 97,000 units opened in converted structures last decade. In total, there are now more than 240,000 apartments for rent in large converted buildings in the U.S.
Along with changing economic needs and trends, the types of buildings turned into apartments have also changed over time. For instance, from the ’50s through the ’90s, hotels were the most common type of building to be converted into apartments. Then, in the 2000s, it was mostly factories that became apartments. Finally, in the 2010s, offices were the most common structures to be turned into rentals.
