For the past couple of years or so, Nick Ferderer has heard lots about how unaffordable housing is in downtown Seattle, and he’s thought quite a bit about how to make it more affordable for the city’s artists.
But Ferderer, a Pacific Northwest native and founder of the local arts nonprofit Base Camp, really got the ball rolling about a year ago, when he homed in on the 1910-built Gibraltar Tower at 1518 Third Ave., as a possible office-to-housing conversion.
While the ground floor is to remain retail, the second floor is intended as a community amenity space and the third through sixth floors are to be converted into for-sale, deed-restricted affordable residences for artists making up to 80% of the area median income, with a target of 65%.
“We’ve had a lot of really positive conversations with local officials and have had tremendous support in the community from downtown residents, supporters of the arts, and others really excited to see where it goes,” Ferderer told CoStar News.
The effort spotlights how transforming office properties into housing has been picking up steam in metropolitan areas across the United States in recent years. After the onset of the pandemic saw employers and landlords rethinking the future of their office properties, conversion projects received more interest.
New York City saw office-to-residential conversion starts double between 2023 and 2024, according to a report from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. And Seattle is no stranger to the push: The city government launched an Office to Residential Conversion program as a piece of its Downtown Activation Plan, offering tax deferrals to qualifying projects.
More multifamily
Those projects could be numerous; a 2024 survey from analytics firm Moody’s found that 15% of Seattle’s office properties could be converted into multifamily properties. That could offer a balm to the city’s beleaguered office market, which faces historic vacancy highs and slowing office-using job growth, according to CoStar.
The vacant Seattle office building was in foreclosure when Base Camp went under contract, formally closing on the 41,705-square-foot building in April for $2.75 million, or just shy of $66 per square foot. In 2005, the building sold for $6 million. The eight-story building is across the street from the city's public Westlake Park, Ferderer said, and there’s a Link Light Rail station directly below the building.
For this project, Base Camp is working with development partner Conlin Columbia and has “done a lot of due diligence,” Ferderer said. Base Camp also engaged Fathom, a locally based architecture firm, to envision different futures for the building.
While the nonprofit is exploring possibilities for both one- and two-bedroom options, with as many as 12 units, Ferderer expects that Habitat for Humanity will act as the property’s long-term affordability steward.
Based on current plans, the earmarked-affordable floors will also have studio space for artists at work. The seventh and eight floors of the building will also have additional workspace alongside market-rate housing.
Seattle home prices and office vacancy are rising
If completed as planned, the project will complete units as the Seattle housing market faces residents with stubborn affordability challenges. As of February, Seattle’s median home price hit a cooler $725,000, per Homes.com, but it was still up nearly $100,000 from the median home price a decade ago.
The nonprofit modeled the initiative after Hiawatha Lofts, a 61-unit housing project aimed at those in the arts in Seattle’s Jackson Place neighborhood, Ferderer said. There’s also the Tashiro Kaplan Artist's Lofts conversion project Pioneer Square, also in Seattle, that gave the founder more insight into what it takes to transform historic, if vacant, office properties into live-work housing.
“I feel comfortable with it,” Ferderer said. The project also builds on two other properties that Base Camp owns and operates as studio and community space for the roughly 100 artists the nonprofit works with each month.
While Base Camp secures construction financing and permitting approval on a tower conversion — a process projected to take one year to permit and another to build, with residences available in April 2028 — the nonprofit plans to keep the office building open as studio space for artists for “affordable rates,” Ferderer said. “The goal is to infuse it with creativity immediately, providing great positive activity to the surrounding areas.”
In the meantime, he sees the project as a key example of why artists should be involved in a city’s redevelopment sphere, Ferderer said. Artists naturally observe their surroundings and translate that into art, he added, making them the “eyes on the street” that downtown Seattle needs.
“I think artists are an excellent bringer of life and joy to an urban environment,” he said. Plus, the project already has a name, Ferderer pointed out.
It’s called Parnassus, as in Greece’s Mount Parnassus. “That’s where all the muses hung out on Mount Olympus,” he said.