As much as I think commercial real estate is minimally linked to the rest of the economy, it’s been well established that you can’t just convert office buildings to apartments.

Floor plates aren’t cut to manage the changes to the floor plans in some cases not even being designed to carry the weight as modern office buildings often utilize floating plates so adding more walls actually would cause all kinds of issues with the walls as the building wobbles around. The plumbing doesn’t have the capacity and also is centralized in the buildings despite apartments each needing it, requiring more alterations to the floor plate. The windows requirements for bedrooms leaves most of the central space of the building unusable or everyone has kitchens and living rooms with no windows…. It’s often cheaper to demolish the building and start over than it would be to modify it.

To get a real idea of this look at apartment buildings in manhattan. They are either long and skinny towers or they are the size of a block, but have a massive quartyard running down the middle where office buildings are solid all the way through.