I've noticed there's a weird, somewhat smug attitude among some Rust Belters about office conversions. As if the rest of the country is just waking up to what they've been smartly doing for years. Yes, there have been a lot of office to residential conversions in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. But as Steely notes, this is hardly unique to those cities. They might have gotten into the game a hair earlier just due to the fact that their downtowns declined more and earlier than cities in other parts of the country, but just about every American city with historic skyscrapers has gotten into the residential conversion game, and not just since the pandemic.
Los Angeles passed its adaptive reuse ordinance in 1999 which led to the residential boom of the Historic Core. 12,000 units have been created in the Historic Core alone through that ordinance. Was Cleveland doing much residential conversion prior to 2000? I don't know the answer for sure, but I don't really think so. At least not on a level that would be significant. This idea that the Rust Belt could teach a thing or two to the rest of the country about residential conversions seems odd to me. What is there to teach? Unless the lesson is to totally blow up your economy so that skyscrapers are completely devalued and able to be sold to developers for peanuts. Cleveland's second tallest building (maybe third behind Terminal Tower, not sure), the 45 story, 600+ foot BP tower just
sold for $54 million despite having an assessed value of $137 million. Even with massive devaluation occurring in coastal cities, huge skyscrapers aren't going to be selling for $54 million.