Before the pandemic era headlines asked if downtown was dead, Steven Paynter was already thinking about, and building the tools to revitalise downtowns that had lost their pull as office hubs. Calgary was perhaps the canary in the coal mine, or more positively, the early adopter of office to residential conversion practices.
As the global leader of Building Transformation and Adaptive Reuse at Gensler, Steven spends less time dreaming up shiny new buildings and more time figuring out what to do with the ones we already have, especially the unloved, half vacant office complexes that define so many North American city cores.
That simple question led to a methodical, data-driven process where he and his team built a model that analyses the physical characteristics of a building … think ceiling heights, window placement, distance from core to perimeter etc. and compares them against successful residential projects. It’s not especially flashy, but it is, at least was then, novel. Better yet, it works.
“We’ve studied nearly 2,000 buildings across about 150 cities,” he says. “We’ve built projects, influenced federal and city policy, and the model is now helping us figure out what should be converted, and just as importantly, what shouldn’t.”
The result is some of those tired, unloved, ugly (to some) buildings get a new lease of life as desirable places people actually want to live, and thus work and play near.
From Data to Downtown
The real breakthrough isn’t just technical, but also cultural. Steven sees office conversions not just as a fix for vacant buildings, but as a lever to rethink the entire function of a city centre.
The contrast is stark. In cities like Calgary, where office vacancy had reached 36% even before COVID, leaders acted quickly. With Gensler’s help, they identified buildings that could be converted and concentrated incentives around key intersections. The result is seventeen active conversions, nearly 10% of the entire office stock.
The new downtown residents bring the demand for the new restaurants, street life and a long overdue, first downtown grocery store. At the same time, the remaining office tenants get consolidated into less empty buildings, and because downtown becomes more desirable for other things, people want to work there again.
Meanwhile, Toronto, a city that claims to support mixed-use development has remained oddly resistant. While all new developments need to be mixed use, there’s a reticence to applying the same philosophy in reverse to turn existing commercial space that is becoming less in demand, to something else that is.
“We get so worried about protecting what we have that we forget cities are supposed to evolve. The second you try to freeze a city in time, it starts to break.”
A New Kind of Beauty
Conversions aren’t just practical either. Done right, they can be beautiful. I think the Rivermark Centre in example in Baton Rouge is a great, perhaps lesser known example. One of those brutalist towers that can be ugly to some, but also provide amazing bones and character when given a glow up, and used for more than attending meetings or sitting behind a desk. Same structure, but now seemingly full of more life, texture, energy and life.
“It still looks like this concrete 1960s building from the outside. But step inside and you’ve got this gorgeous exposed waffle slab, high ceilings, big windows. The contrast is what makes it special.”
The same applies to Pearl House in New York’s Financial District, another tricky building in a narrow, often-overlooked corner of the city. “We had to get creative with the layouts, but the result is incredible,” he says. “The rooftop view alone, both rivers, the Statue of Liberty in the distance, it’s unreal.”
These projects don’t just fill spaces, but spark something bigger. When one previously underutilised building turns into attractive housing, the coffee shop follows, then the grocery store, restaurants, bookstore … maybe it attracts more families, so you get schools and parks. These developments are the reinvigorating force for vibrancy, and resilience.
The Detroit Lesson
Our conversation gets into our shared soft spot for second tier cities. Places like Detroit, Fort Worth or Baton Rouge, which can be overlooked by urbanist types, but are now where some of the most exciting urban reinventions are happening. But the path isn’t always upward.
Some cities are shrinking. In parts of the U.S. where both office demand and residential population are in decline, conversions aren’t always viable. That’s a harder challenge that Steven is becoming obsessed with.
“If an office building doesn’t work as an office and doesn’t work as housing, then what do you do? That’s the next problem I want to solve.”
Detroit looms large in that conversation. When the city declared bankruptcy in 2013, it had just 14% downtown vacancy. This is actually half what some cities face today, remember Calgary was experiencing far more significant vacancy rates too. Detroit bottomed out, then it got to work. That should be a warning sign, as well as a source of inspiration.
“Part of it was that everything got so cheap, you could do anything. And part of it was that a few people bought up the whole city and focused their efforts. But you don’t need billionaires to do that. Cities can take that role if they choose to.”
It requires discipline. It means focusing on a few blocks instead of spreading investment “like butter”. It means choosing visible change over political balance. We talk about this in the case of a city that we won’t name, where the original idea was to spend significant millions on new street furniture across the city. While this is nice, who cares about a pretty garbage bin when the whole city is sliding? Instead, take that money, and inject it into a focused area and do something with a greater signature.
Don’t Wait for Perfect
I really appreciate Steven’s perspective of progress over perfection, which can be a little challenging sometimes in the context of municipal politics and development, in a way that we are better off making a decision, and moving forward, even if we’re not able to make things perfect. Cities are often a bit scared of being wrong, or ruffling the feathers of a vocal minority, and while we absolutely should be conscious and consultative, sometimes urgency is a better policy.
We touched on this in the context of the units themselves, where getting more housing downtown is better than not having enough. In cities that desperately need more housing, he’s watched viable projects stall under the weight of idealism. “We can kind of debate it forever,” he says. “Yes, cities should have space for everyone in them. But in a lot of places, we see that actually getting in the way of producing any housing at all.”
It can be frustrating when the buildings are there, the demand can be there and tools exist, but the impulse to hold out for the perfect unit mix or the ideal floorplan means opportunities slip away. This appears to be intensified when when converting existing structures, where constraints are real and compromise is necessary.
“Let’s not stop a project from happening because we want these large units. Build the housing. Someone’s going to live there. And if we get that right and the cities start to work, then we can build the schools and we can build the family housing. But like, let’s stop letting perfect get in the way of like actually achieving anything.”
It's a call to have a bias for developing and then refining, to treat housing less like a finished product, but as part of a living system that only functions when people are present to bring the area to life, in a way that the reports and models only go so far on.
From Misfit Idea to Movement
The office-to-residential conversion boom wasn’t inevitable. It started, as many good ideas do, as more of a strategic bet. One of five speculative concepts Steven sketched out while building his studio’s strategic plan. It happened to be the one that got the most traction. But at first, interest was pretty limited, then the pandemic catalysed the change. Downtowns emptied out, work changed, office vacancies soared, the housing crises intensified.
Suddenly, the “crazy” idea of turning outdated office towers into apartments began to sound pragmatic, even obvious. “I’ve been talking about this for five years and people didn’t want to hear it,” Paynter recalls. “Then two years ago, everyone wanted to know about it.”
Today, conversions are gaining ground in dozens of cities. In five years, he predicts they’ll be ubiquitous. In ten, no one will even talk about them. They’ll just be happening like any other part of city building.
Still, he’s not done. The next frontier is more complex, asking what to do with cities where even conversion isn’t viable, where the population is shrinking, demand has vanished and the original purpose of the place has disappeared. He doesn’t yet know the answer, but he knows it’s the right question.
Alongside that, he’s dusting off ideas that are ready for a bit of a second wind in prefabricated, mass timber, net-zero communities, originally developed during Gensler’s work with Sidewalk Labs. It faded partly with COVID, partly with the other challenging contexts of that specific project, but interest is returning, especially as local manufacturing and sustainability re-enter the political spotlight.
“We were like nearly there when COVID happened and the stuff happened with Dan Doctoroff. And the movement now is going back towards that... For the right or wrong reasons, in some cases, there is a movement back towards doing that... And I think that in two years’ time, five years’ time, that is going to really have legs and you’ll start to see really high quality projects delivered in that way, in a way they haven’t been before.”
I really admire the understated confidence that comes through across our whole conversation, Steven’s desire to move before the market is really quite ready. This is probably pretty key for an architect but it still feels refreshing, as does his comfort with uncertainty and belief that even the most complex city challenges can be solved.
We come to the magic wand question, and rather than reaching for a technical fix or regulatory shortcut, he aims at something more powerful in the realm of psychology.
“What we need, if I could change one thing… is this move towards all of us being excited by the new again. And I think we’ve all lost that a little bit. But what is it that we can do that gets everyone excited for the next generation of our downtown, for the next generation of design and building? So if I could wave a magic wand, I’d have everyone wake up tomorrow and be like, you know what’s really cool? Is this thing. Wouldn’t it be great if our downtown was completely different and better, rather than being a little conservative about it?”
It’s less a wish than a provocation. One that challenges cities not to preserve what they were, but to imagine what they could become, if they let themselves. The best cities aren’t the ones that get everything right from the start. They’re the ones that make space for change, and then commit to making it meaningful.
To being Challengers.
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