In the grip of an affordability crisis that’s displacing low-income Washingtonians—many of them lifelong residents—the District of Columbia government floated one possible tactic for increasing the amount of affordable housing in the city: turning vacant office buildings into housing.

But a new report from the Office-to-Affordable Housing Task Force suggests such a strategy isn’t likely to make a real dent in the crisis, given the lower profitability of residences compared to office space and the scattered nature of vacancies, which rarely afflict whole buildings at once. Curbed was the first to report on the task force’s findings.

The vacancy rate for office buildings in the city is relatively high, at 11 percent, per a 2018 report from JLL Research and CoStar (the rate is more than 15 percent for the whole region). That amounts to between 13.4 to 16.9 million square feet of privately-owned vacant office space. Most of that vacant space is contained within D.C.’s downtown core, per the task force report.

As data about this vacant space emerged, the D.C. Council established a task force to assess the viability of converting this empty space to residences. It’s called the Office-to-Affordable Housing Task Force, and it’s made up of nine members, including a low-income renter, a representative for an apartment building or office building owner, a residential architect, and a structural engineer. Task force members began meeting in October 2018, and have spent the last several months preparing a report that doesn’t paint a terribly hopeful picture about the usefulness of vacant office space conversions.

Despite all the empty space, conversions from office space to residences remain rare. Since 2002, the District has only created 393 affordable housing units from vacant office space (out of 3,800 total housing units, so about 10 percent), the report says.

This is likely due to a number of causes, including the fact that office space tends to be more valuable for building owners than housing. Vacancies also tend to be spread among various buildings, meaning that there aren’t very many entirely or almost entirely empty office buildings, presenting a logistical hurdle for conversion. The difference in building codes for office space and residences is yet another logistical problem, as is a general lack of experience from developers and property owners in converting offices to housing, per the report.

Conversions from office space to housing are particularly unlikely to occur in the downtown core, where there is a high density of office buildings, according to the task force. This is partially because “the downtown core area has higher acquisition costs and a higher density of jobs,” the report reads. It’s likelier that vacant office space in a residential neighborhood will be converted to residences, because residences can actually be just as financially viable (if not even better moneymakers) than office space in these areas.

The most viable candidates for conversion, per the task force, are “Class C” office buildings, which are older buildings generally in need of renovation work. A number of these buildings in the city are between 50 and 100 percent vacant, per the report. Still, given the state of affairs described above (lower profitability for residences, namely) even these aren’t likely to be converted, the report says.

At the end of the day, the report concludes, “office-to-residential conversions are not the most efficient way to address the city’s pressing housing needs.” The city might choose to spend some resources incentivizing the owners of some Class C office buildings outside the downtown core to convert to residences, and this might well lead to some marginal increased in the housing stock, per the report. But “the Task Force believes that the District’s affordable housing resources would generally be better spent on other affordable housing production and preservation.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser has set a goal of creating 36,000 housing units by 2025, 12,000 of those affordable.