Shaping the NYC Skyline

David: Welcome to the show. We're super excited. Today we had Toby Snyder from FX Collaborative.

Brenda: I really enjoyed his caring about the end user. It really felt like this is where he's meant to be.

Camila: He cares about the community, make sure that everything works, not just now for the one building, but for the community in general, for the neighborhood.

David: And you can really tell that it means a lot to him to be able to provide affordable housing, sustainability, and making sure to fend off climate change.

All those things really resonate with him. You can tell that this is something he's doing because he believes one hundred percent in it.

FX Collaborative have a presentation that they did about office to residential conversions, which is a hot topic now, given that those conversions will be so much faster to bring housing online than doing it ground up.

We discussed the ins and outs in there, and he has so much knowledge about that. With the City of Yes and all the red tape that's being cleared, these office to residential conversions I think are going to happen more and we're going to have a lot of involvement in them, given the fact that we do voluntary inclusion housing, which is now going to be UAP, is going to be applicable to these office residential conversions.

Brenda: And 467-m.

David: Exactly. We work in both. This is our niche .

Brenda: I really liked hearing the considerations that he puts into whether or not a building should be converted. Our Skyliners are going to love it. They're going to have to listen to it. I'm not going to give any spoilers, you know,

David: I love seeing these people who are really experts in their field, really know this stuff and they're coming on, they're talking about it. I love that passion.

Brenda: We like to meet the people who are shaping the New York City skyline.

Speaker: That's right. And without further ado, here's Toby Snyder from FX Collaborative. Today we're thrilled to welcome a guest whose career is a testament to the art of blending vision with practicality. Mr. Toby Snyder, the Design Director at FX Collaborative Architects. From crafting floor plans of castles with grape soda rooms as a kid to leading groundbreaking urban housing projects, Toby's journey is as inspiring as it is diverse. A cartographer turned architect, he holds advanced degrees in architecture and city planning and his work at FX Collaborative bridges, sustainable design with a real world impact. Whether it's shaping the NYC skyline, championing affordability with Apex Place, or teaching future urbanists at Pratt Institute, Toby doesn't just design buildings, he builds communities. Let's dive into the mind behind some of the most innovative urban transformations of our time. Toby, welcome to Shaping the NYC Skyline.

We're so happy to have you. We've worked with FX Collaborative for such a long time. We work with you in a ton of inclusionary housing 421-a projects.

Brenda: Even a PFASH project.

Speaker 4: Right. Some of our proudest work is with you guys.

Speaker: We appreciate it, and we'll be working a lot, I'm sure, because lots of changes in the future, and you'll be talking a lot about office to residential conversions, and get into the details. But before we go into that, I want to know a little bit more about Toby. How did you get into this industry? It wasn't a straight trajectory, right? You started off actually as a geography major and you became a cartographer for National Geographic.

Brenda: That's very cool.

David: I can imagine what a cartographer does.

Brenda: Draws maps.

Toby: Yes, very good.

David: But how does that work?

Toby: It used to be a real specialized skill. Before the internet and Google Maps, there were certain people that knew where to find geographic information, knew how to scan atlases, knew how to look in a library to find maps, knew how to use GIS, that's geographic information systems.

And I had that skill set in the late 20th century, into 2000, 2001. And I worked for a company that made custom maps for local businesses and the World Bank. And I also worked at National Geographic on all of their maps that went in their magazines. It's a lot of research, and it's a lot of graphic design.

There's plenty of custom architecture companies. There are very few custom cartography companies. At the time there was like four in the country, and I worked for one of them in Washington, D. C. We made world maps. We made maps of the Washington D.C. metro stations. We made all of the maps for the World Bank and IMF.

David: As a child, you were doing these pretend mansions, right?

Toby: I would make maps of places like fantasy countries, a fantasy island, playing with Legos, drawing maps, making up cities, making up countries, making up islands, making up planets.

David: So how did your parents feel when you told them that you wanted to draw maps?

Toby: My dad was a salesman and my mom who passed away when I was five, she was an artist. She made jewelry. So doing something that's design related where you can make money, doing it, that was their two skills, like, can you pay the rent doing something that you love to do? That was the insistence. It took me a while to find this path, as you mentioned, I do have a lot of degrees, that's not necessarily an intentional ladder climbing, that's finding your path.

David: You graduate from school, get a job working in D.C. Where does the switch happen where you then go back to school and get a degree in city planning?

Toby: I met my girlfriend in college. She was working in a non profit in D.C. And I was working making maps in D.C. She had been assigned to read this book called _The Geography of Nowhere_ at our college She gave it to me. I read it. It was the light bulb went off moment. It's a whole treatise on what's wrong with zoning. What's wrong with suburbanization. Why are we tearing up our most beautiful and precious rural areas and just abandoning our cities and not re-densifying in cities? And so I read that and I was really hooked. And here I was making maps, designing from a graphic design point of view and looking at the world and looking at the city, but I'm not doing anything about it. I'm just recording what exists. And I read this book and I was like, all right, I have to get into city planning.

I was going in every weekend into Philadelphia to go to church and seeing abandoned areas, like empty lots and buildings burned down. And meanwhile, this beautiful landscape out in the rural areas outside of Philadelphia, is getting turned from the most beautiful landscape into the most boring, banal, car intensive, horrible McMansion. Strip mall, just so generic, taking everything that was special about it and removing all of it. So I was connecting all those dots. This is what urban planning and urban design is all about. So I applied to go study that, and my wife was applying to women's studies. And we found at the University of Pennsylvania, she could do what she was doing. I could do what I was doing. So settled on that.

I applied for the Master of Urban Planning department and they had specializations. And one of the specializations was Urban Design. And I was like, that's exactly what I want to do. I want to be an urban designer. And the director of the program was like, great, you're also going to get a certificate in Urban Design. I said, that's great, that sounds like I'm super qualified to be an urban designer. And then he's like, so you really want to be an urban designer? And I said, yes, and this is in my first semester, then he says, uh, well, you're going to need an architecture degree.

All: [Laughter].

Toby: If you really want to be an urban designer, you really need an architecture degree. So I was like, talk to my spouse and she was interested in a PhD program. I'll do architecture. She'll go for a PhD. Now, where do we want to go? Let's do the complete opposite of Penn. Let's do the most different kind of thing from this policy world. So I got accepted to RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. She got into Brown. We went there together to Providence and I was like, all right, I'll get the Master of Architecture, which is a three year degree. And I went there with the intention of becoming an urban designer. And halfway through the first semester there, just realize how completely transformative of a degree it is. You just have to go all in. It's like a monastery almost. So I just fell in love with architecture in its own right. So it was not just a solution to becoming an urban designer, it was also just for its own sake. And all of a sudden these childhood feelings of wanting to be an architect because I was playing with Legos. I was like, wait, I can actually do this. I thought architect was like astronaut. I never knew anyone who was an architect. I just didn't think that was like a thing, but all of a sudden it became real. So that was really fun. And it was totally transformative. And I was keeping these two lines in my mind open, one architecture for its own sake and one architecture as a reason to make the city better.

David: I love that concept, architecture to make the city better, and that's one of the reasons you wanted to be an urban planner. How can architecture be a solution to this problem that we face? It's kind of a moving target, right?

Camila: And what are the challenges to achieve that goal.

Toby: Architecture, there's many reasons that it exists. It can just be the result of financial and economic forces. It can be a result of land forces. It can be a result of cultural forces. It can be a result of so many different things. But for a lot of architects, they just want to make things . Like me, like my mom who made jewelry, just to make things. So they just want to make it for its own sake. They just love beautiful things. They love to build. They love to design. We need that. We need art for its own sake. We need Taylor Swift to write songs just because she needs to write songs. You know,

All: [Laughter}.

Brenda: Amen.

Toby: It also can be for social change. You need to write a song to help affect political change. You need to make a building for a reason. We need our cities to be well designed, to address the sustainability crisis, to address the housing crisis. We need there to be designed solutions that work for today and can work in the future. We need to reinvent what we had in the past when the world was a different place a hundred years ago, fifty years ago. We need to continue to adapt to our current working world. Design is a way to fix all of these things.

David: Just to pull back a little bit. Let's assume you're designing one building. How much are you looking at the neighborhood and community when you're just working on a single building, for example?

Toby: That's a great question. We actually have a pretty narrow view of community and neighborhood when we say it. In New York City there's even codified community districts. We think, oh, it should work within what's right nearby. It should somehow fit in. But the forces that make that building come into existence go way beyond the boundaries of just what's there. A lot of development in New York City is responsive to economic forces from around the world.

Certainly our housing crisis in New York City is actually part of a nationwide problem. So when we're building on one site, we are responding to community forces, but they go way beyond just the neighborhood. When we talk about the density of a building, how tall it's going to be, how many units are going to be able to be in there, it's responding not just to what the neighbors think it should be, but to a much bigger area. So I think that it's important that our designs are responsive to a much bigger area. What kind of units can be in there? How big should they be? What should the window wall ratio be, because we need to address the climate crisis, and if we have buildings that are too glassy, they're going to use up too much energy? That's creating global climate problem. I totally understand the notion of neighborhood and community districts here, but I always like to expand it much further than most New Yorkers think about it.

Brenda: I mean, you're not designing in a vacuum. Do you find that the clients that you work with are very conscious of their specific building and you bring in the aspect of what does the community need and what does the area as a whole need, or do you find it's really a balance of the client and you working together to benefit the community rather than just their singular building?

Toby: We certainly have our own point of view, but we are called FX Collaborative. We really do collaborate with one another and we collaborate with our clients and our consultants. So it's really a give and take. Some of them are really looking for our input. When we do international work, they're looking for us to bring a New York perspective to how we could do something , let's say, in Korea or in Turkey or some other place. When we're in a neighborhood, they know that we have a keen eye to pick up on what's actually going on in the neighborhood.

It's like when you describe something and somebody else that doesn't have training in it describes the same thing. They are sensing the same things, they're just not articulating as well what is going on, and ostensibly this is what we do all day long. We're able to tease out what's going on in the neighborhood, what feels right, what doesn't feel right, what it needs and what the site needs, what the client needs.

David: You've been working at FX Collaborative for your entire architectural career, you're the Design Director now, but can you give us an overview of the things that you did when you first started versus the things that you do as a design director? I'm trying to imagine what a design director is. And I'm thinking like somebody who's leading an orchestra, but from a design perspective.

Toby: Sometimes you're the conductor. Sometimes you're the composer and sometimes you're a first violin. I like the fact that it's all three. I like the fact that I don't have to pick one. The reason why I've been there for 17 years is because I've been able to just keep doing lots of different things. I like the fact that our firm does so many different kinds of work. Small office, a hundred some people, but we do like 10 typologies and we do them really well. So that's really exciting.

David: You guys are primarily in New York. You do things elsewhere.

Speaker 4: Project a dormitory in Turkey for a university. It was great.

David: How does that come about?

Toby: We have relationships with university builders, American universities, and colleges on smaller campuses, high schools and places around the world. When you're competing to do schools, most of the time you're operating at a bigger sphere of influence than just New York City. You can basically have a career of just doing housing in New York City, but when it comes to schools, you need a broader range. We had done other buildings for that same university. We had a good relationship with them. And so they asked us back to do another project there.

David: Anything interesting in Turkey that is very different from the way things get built in the city or even in the country?

Toby: We had done a high rise building in Istanbul, and they have a lot of earthquakes there. The building codes that regulate how buildings are supposed to perform during a seismic earthquake event were what's known as prescriptive instead of performative, meaning, they just said walls have to be 12 inches wide, floors have to have this much rebar in them, beams have to span this distance. We designed the first building that was based on a performative code, meaning if you can prove that it will perform a certain way in a seismic event, you will get permission to build it. So we did the first performance based and very green building.

David: How do you test that performance?

Toby: They do models for it, smaller models, but we definitely are working with our geotechnical and structural engineers.

David: So it's theoretical, not literal.

Toby: Although there are literal tests for the concrete pours to make sure that when we specify that the concrete has to be 6,000 pounds per square inch strength, they actually take a little portion of the concrete that's poured out on the slab, and they move it off to the side and they test that and five days later, we find out if that cured correctly that that passed the test, so we know that the rest of this lab passed the test. So there's lots of things on buildings where you are physically testing it as it's going.

David: How did you end up the Design Director?

Toby: Well, I've always had an interest in the design side of our work. We are making sure the projects are well managed. We're making sure that they're technically working well. And we're making sure that they're well designed. So there's sort of like these three rings. I had always leaned a little bit more towards design. And I always love a new project coming in. I always love taking a project to the end and getting to see details get resolved.

David: You really transcended where you came from. You're now not only just into urban design and planning, but also sustainability and making sure that your buildings help ease the climate crisis. How does that come into your tool bag?

Toby: Part of what keeps me and I think a lot of my colleagues going is we really believe in what we do. We love the work that we're doing. We're proud of it. We know that it's making the world a better place. We know that it's focused on this triple bottom line of equity and it's good for the environment and it's good for society. That really keeps us going. So when we're asked to do a study for a few floors of an existing building in a part of the town, New York City, that we're not really interested in, we know that it's fitting into a bigger picture that we really care about. So, we don't mind doing all of that work.

David: So I was looking through your LinkedIn feed. You posted on Apex Place in Forest Hills. You wrote, "It was always our aspiration to elevate these 100 percent permanently affordable apartments to more than just reliable housing, but all the dignity, sensitivity, and connection to the landscaping community around them that we all deserve. We couldn't be prouder. But this is not a mountaintop moment. This is proof of concept that we should advocate for and build throughout the city. We're just getting started." I read that I'm just getting chills. It's a great way to promote and to also show how much you care. Those are such powerful words , which is why I wanted to read it because I wanted our Skyliners to hear it. It really resonates with who you are and how you practice architecture. And I want to say thank you for that. We need more people like you in the world.

Toby: That is a project that we got as just a zoning study, in 2015, so eight, nine years ago. Working with this great developer, Phipps Houses, that does great affordable housing projects around the city. And so I got to work on it as just a planning thing. And then we got into the architecture and we got to design the buildings. And then we've thought about the craft and the details. And we worked with  Phipps and they worked with the co-op stakeholders that live there . And then we worked with Curtis and Ginsburg to get it built and constructed.

And finally got to go back to a ribbon cutting actually two years after it finished. There was council people there, there was the borough president there, and the head of Phipps Houses was there, and I was sort of hoping to get the chance to say what you read from LinkedIn in front of everybody, but they had microphone problems, and I couldn't get up there and say it, I was a little bummed out. But what was so great is that all of the things that I wanted to say, the people that live there and the people that work there and the custodial staff and the other consultants, they came up to me and noted all of the things that I thought were hidden moments that were little Easter eggs for us, they told us that that's what they loved and noticed. When the building speaks for itself and you don't even have to talk about it, what could be better than that? I was like, thank God I didn't speak because they just told me it. I couldn't believe that they noticed all of these things that we cared about. It shows that we can do densification on a NYCHA property that's very sensitive, that works with the existing that sort of elevates it.

David: Going back to your teaching roots, you are a visiting professor. What kind of things are you teaching ?

Toby: I'm teaching a little bit of theory and a little bit of practice, and I have gotten an opportunity to teach a few studios there in the meantime as well, but mostly it's just a skills class on how to present your work because I think city planners need to be visual and graphic. A lot of their work is just writing papers, and it's very policy oriented, but It does need to be able to speak to people in a very visual way. The spatial and the visual thinking is imperative. And as a general public, we don't have it. We can hear politicians and we can hear our writers and journalists tell us and remind us that we need 100,000 units of housing in New York City or 10 million across the United States, whatever the numbers are that are really going to make a change. Does anyone that's hearing that actually have a picture in their head? Do they know what the deployment or the building or the construction of 100,000 units look like? Do you know what that would mean if you just did it in your own neighborhood? What would that percentage mean? Can you visualize it? Does it sound like a horror story to you? Does it sound just like a modicum of growth? If you don't know how to draw it, then these are just sort of phantoms in people's minds, abstract. And like, sounds good, but put the pencil on the paper and draw it. And then you actually have a plan.

David: So you're not just shaping the NYC skyline, you're also shaping the education of architects.

Toby: And the best part is that afterwards they graduate and then they start working for HPD and City Planning and the community boards. And then you're bringing your projects around seeking approval and one of your former students on the other side of the table asking you questions, putting you on the stand saying, are we meeting their standard?

David: Going now to one of the important aspects with City of Yes is office to residential conversion, which is a hot topic. And you put together this great overview of the complexities and the problems it's solving, and the problems that you can't solve for because something might not be useful as a conversion. How did that come about?

Toby: A lot of us in New York City, a lot of us nationwide, are realizing that since the pandemic, we have an excessive office supply. We don't have enough residential housing supply. And the housing supply problem is particularly acute. Homelessness is at an all time peak in New York City, the housing vacancy rate is at one percent, so it's really important that we find housing wherever we can. We've been studying it for many years, whenever an opportunity would come up. We've known that there's a calculus that needs to be made for every given property, what should they do?

So, first you have to look does it have a lot of vacancy? If it does, then great, then this is a moment when you can think about converting it. We just studied a number of different properties. We had done some conversions like at St. Vincent's hospital, turning that into residences. So we had a lot of tricks and skills from that. And at the beginning of the year, we just started getting calls from different developers to study their properties. A number of them were large wedding cake buildings, some were strange lofts and warehouses out in Brooklyn. So all different shapes of buildings. And we were realizing very soon that there's no one size fits all. There's no cookie cutter approach. Our own process of evaluating went through this step by step.

First, you got to look at the vacancy issues. If there's no vacancy problem, maybe they just need to fix it up, do a renovation, and we do those sort of renovations for clients a lot, fixing up the lobby, putting a green roof on it, putting in an amenity space.

But then once they've decided, no, there's not enough people moving in, we have a problem. We have to look at the zoning issues. And a lot of that brings up some of the things that are changing in City of Yes. A lot of office buildings are quote unquote overbuilt. They have more than the allowable amount of residential floor area than they would otherwise, particularly if they were built after 1961. So first it had to meet some of those challenges.

A lot of times the buildings are built with windows that are too close to the property line. So you have to figure out where are the places in the building where you can get legal light and air.

Then you have to look at the floor plans. Like what's the shape of it? How close are certain elements to the core? Does it have weird inner courts. Does it have unique features? Does it have a lot of setbacks? How can you figure out floor plans in there? So, sort of work from this very high level down to the nuts and bolts.

And that can be just in the first like two days of looking at the property, or it can be over the course of two or three weeks. It depends on the complexity of the project. Now we've done so many different ones that we really know what is working, what is not going to work. That's one of the great things about getting experience in architecture. It's not that you necessarily become more creative, you just learn how many things are going to be dead ends. And I will only invest my time on the creative solutions that could really work.

David: Finding new dead ends.

Toby: Yeah. We come up with. A set of plans. We come up with area charts with the yield. We come up with a list of issues of things they might need to fix for a particular owner. And they know this is a very important document. Maybe the market right now doesn't make sense for a conversion because I still have tenants paying rent, but in two years maybe the HVAC system is going to be at the end of its life. It's like going to the doctor, get a checkup we're letting them know, this is the feasibility of doing a residential conversion for your property.

And some of them are moving further along than others. But we are particularly proud of this one at 95 Madison, in that time, has gone to the DOB and gone through landmarks and gotten approval and it's already in construction. And we had to move the core in it. And we've dealt with a whole gamut of things in a very condensed amount of time. All before City of Yes.

David: What are clients coming to you and asking you to do on conversions. Are they asking prospectively or because we're in trouble.

Toby: They're asking for all of those reasons. And there's one more reason they're asking because someone is putting it on the market because they're having trouble leasing it. So all of a sudden there's a building for sale, there's potential developer that's looking to buy it, they've got two weeks before they're going to have to put in a final and best offer. And in that that two weeks we are coming up with the study for them.

Brenda: What's part of that study? What's the analysis ?

Toby: The most important thing I think that it comes down to is them getting this area chart that says what the total rentable or the total sellable square footage they can get out of it is, and then a set of simple single line floor plans that just show how many units is it, what kind of units are they going to be? They're not going to be fully fleshed out apartment units, but they just have to get their mind around what kind of apartment units are these. That's what they need to know.

David: What locations are you generally looking at? Is it all Manhattan or are you in outer boroughs as well?

Toby: We've done studies in the outer boroughs, certainly in Downtown Brooklyn, a number in Queens, a lot in Manhattan, within Manhattan a lot in East Midtown where all of a sudden they've got the greatest class a competitors right next to them, like One Vanderbilt.

Along 3rd Avenue, in the late 40s, early 50s, this new class of office buildings, the wedding cake buildings, were built up. This is early days of that modernist box. So they're typically shallow floor to floor heights, typically very deep floor plates, typically a lot of elevators. Sometimes they have operable windows in them, so we've just studied a number of them for a number of different folks.

David: Office residential conversions are getting a real boost. I think this is going to be very lucrative for developers in the next few years.

Toby: I think the biggest game changer is them moving this date and the geographical expanse of what could be converted. There's so many office buildings that, as I mentioned, are what we call overbuilt. They've got more floor area in them than would be allowable for a typical residential building, which is typically 12 FAR, in the dense downtowns. For lower Manhattan and the other central business districts in Queens and Brooklyn, only buildings up to 1961 were allowed to convert all of their floor area to residential. And then there was a very small segment of lower Manhattan that buildings built up to 1977 could also do it. Now they're saying citywide, all buildings up to 1990, if they're quote, unquote, overbuilt office buildings can be converted. We do a lot of mixed use buildings. We do buildings where there's a certain portion of it that's offices and a certain portion that's residential that. Those sort of hybrid buildings can be difficult with certain buildings. The building that we're in right now, 570 Lexington is this great very narrow portion for the top of the building, which ostensibly would be great for residential. It's also really great for office. Maybe nobody's moving out of there because of the great offices up there. And then the lower floor plates down here, you know, this as a potential building conversion, it might make sense that the top of the building you do residential on the bottom is office, but then how do you do the ground floor? So mixed buildings, because you were capped at a 12 FAR is a challenging thing. Now the whole building can be converted. So that just makes things a lot more feasible.

David: So we need more housing, and we need it faster. And it's much faster if you have a good candidate that qualifies and falls within the criteria that you were talking about earlier. What other things, in the City of Yes, are really going to help clear the regulatory path to clear those hurdles.

Toby: The FAR, the opportunity to do overbuilds I think that's the big one. Another one is, and this is a change that's actually already taken place, home offices, which is basically a room that's far away from the facade where you could work from or maybe it's a good place to take a nap in the middle of the day. It's not a legal bedroom. The size of those has been allowed to be increased to a much larger size. And the rules for required recreation space on rooftops, it's going to be made more flexible. Existing zoning for a lot of the conversions, 30 percent of the roof would have to be made accessible recreation space for the whole building. Now, it's just going to follow typical residential building standards rules. So that should make it much more flexible for how you're allocating rooftop space and working with recreation space. Also just by enabling this larger number of buildings to be able to be converted through the article one, chapter five, there are shorter window to wall and window to property line requirements, some of which are noted in the Multiple Dwelling Law. So, all of a sudden windows that would have been illegal before are now going to be legal. That's great. That's for a lot of like things that are far back from the backside of a lot of properties, side core buildings. So I think those are some of the really important ones. And the Building Department itself, getting used to this by the conversion and the studies and the questions that we had to work to get through for our 95 Madison project. The commissioner was coming in and some of the folks from their housing accelerator were coming in and looking at the project. By us working through the kinks, we've opened up the floodgates and it's enabled them. They're going to have a much quicker understanding. And so things should be getting approved quicker now and that regulatory hold time when buildings are going through the plan examiner process should become a lot faster now. And the trades are going to be getting used to, we're going to be putting H pack units in windows. A mechanical unit that was fairly new just five or six years ago, very efficient mechanical system that worked for apartments is great for office to residential conversions. It wasn't even really in the United States before six or seven years ago. Now that we use it on one of our larger new buildings, we're advocating using it on some of the conversions. That kind of technological research, that's really important that that speed things up and then the cost of those units come down.

David: So many little things are really helping out this process, making it cheaper and faster, helping both the people who are creating it and also the end user.

Toby: And getting used to the marketplace, getting a sense of, is someone going to rent a one bedroom that's 900 square feet where there's a second office in the back? Is the market ready for that? And as the first one comes in line and they realize that they rent out or they sell out very quickly, oh, there is a market for that. These units that might be a little funky, a little quirky, are not like the standard things that you would do in a new building. When they find out that they have a real market value, that can really accelerate

David: I think there is a market, there's going to be a lot of these conversions coming up. In your presentation, you also discussed the easy case where it's obvious that the conversion would work.

Toby: What's easy about it is that it already had operable windows. So we knew that we would be replacing them, but that we don't need to reinvent the wheel with that. It has a shorter core to wall dimension. We actually moved the core in that building.

David: When you say core, what does that mean?

Toby: Most of the time we are talking about the elevator shafts and the stairway shafts, which are important vertical circulation, which continues straight from the bottom of the building up to the top. And also a lot of times there's a lot of additional structure that's built around those cores because they are continuous vertical structures moving through a building. So, typically not the easiest thing to move around. Sheet rock walls that are on carpentry and light gauge steel is an easy thing to demolish, but a core is a hard thing to demolish.

David: Why would you need to move a core?

Toby: On this particular building, it had two sets of cores, two sets of elevators and stairs that were up against perimeter walls that were getting pretty close to the back windows. So they were actually in places where if they weren't there, it would free up windows where you could have a unit. Plus, by moving them to the center of the building, it made for a more efficient floor plate. We could have more apartments. We didn't need to have the cores in two different locations. We could have one consolidated set of stairs, elevators, trash room in the middle of the building. It is a cost to do that, but the cost is really rewarded by new sellable floor area that you're creating on rental buildings, especially a lot of the large ones. Office buildings typically need a lot more elevators per square foot than a residential building. Sometimes it's a factor of two to one. We need one elevator for every 50,000 square feet of offices, but you need one for every 100,000 square feet of residential. So basically almost every one of these overbuilt office buildings has got twice as many elevators as you would need. So you have to make a decision. Do we just leave them in place and just have an over elevated building? Maybe that's fine. Maybe that's the right thing to do. Or let's demolish that, take it out and just put in some other uses in that part of the floor. It's a cost, but you have to figure, are we going to make up for that cost with what we can rent for that floor area?

David: That one's the easy one. What was a difficult one and talk about why and how to spot something like that.

Toby: It was a large wedding cake office building on 3rd Avenue. What's hard about it is just how far the facade is from the inner portion. So how much of the floor area would be pretty far from the nearest window. That's what's difficult about it. We can design units that are pretty good, up to 40, 45, 50 feet deep. Once it starts getting further deep than that, it's particularly challenging. So what are you going to do with that space at the inside of the building? We came up with a number of creative solutions, things that could be done that don't necessarily rent at the same value as a apartment per square foot, but have other uses. Storage spaces, a podcast recording studio room, just like this, something that is not actually part of your apartment, but across the hallway, deeper in the building. We've done other buildings like the one at Apex Place where a certain portion of the building in the lower down part of the building was up against a parking garage. We couldn't put apartments, but we could put storage units in it. Most folks have more things than they need and you don't necessarily need to have one storage unit per unit, but you can put them up on the open market in the same way that parking spaces you don't have one for everybody, but you've got enough. You get a variety of them. You have them at different sizes and different shapes and different people can use them for different reasons and you just rent them out at a different value and you could really customize that and really enable people to have, their home life and their hobby life, their other life, that's facilitated by having in the same building some other space.

David: I think those are good solutions to the problems. If you're creating a different use, it doesn't need that light and air. What do you imagine is going to happen once the City of Yes is in play. We hear from clients, developers, who call us and talk to us about what they're thinking. And we see the trends because we talk to so many people. I assume you and your colleagues at FX Collaborative have the same thing.

Toby: My guess is that office vacancy is not a permanent thing, but there's also going to be a phase to that. I think there's a bell curve here. I think we are in the early adopters phase for some of the large buildings. We're going to keep studying, and a few more of these very large buildings with really deep floor plates are going to go for the conversion and they're going to finally start renting and people are finally going to start moving in and their experiences of having moved in, there will be enough of them that that will become a type. And then all of a sudden everyone's going to be doing it. And then pretty soon, maybe three, four years, we're going to use up all of the potential candidates. We'll go back to there only being Class A office buildings available and we're going to start to need to build new office buildings.

But with that huge surge that I think we're going to have over the course of the next two, three years, I don't think we're going to solve the housing crisis just with office to residential conversions by any stretch. So the housing pressure will still be there and we're going to still need new construction and we're going to still need ADUs in the outer boroughs and we're going to still need all of these other incentives at the same time.

Speaker: I fully agree. Going back to the sustainable green, fending off climate change. How does that work in conversions? How are you dealing with those issues

Toby: That's a great question. The big carbon footprint from buildings comes from their heaviest members, the concrete and the steel and the carbon needed to make concrete and make steel is a huge part of their footprint. So when we're doing new buildings, that's really the carbon footprint.

We still need new buildings, but that's where it's coming from. So if you have an existing building where you're pretty much keeping the existing steel and concrete and some of the heavy metal in the facade and maybe some of the glass, maybe not. But basically if you're keeping all of the big heavy elements, there's no carbon going into the atmosphere to recreate that because you've already got it in place.

So now you've got a much, much, much lower carbon footprint. So it's actually a really, really sensible thing to do. Also, just from a commuting point of view, most of these big office buildings are in central business districts that are extremely well connected to transit. So all of the emissions you're just not going to have to worry about.

Then they're going to probably need to swap out their 20, 30, 40, 50 year old mechanical system. I'm sure that it's not operating as great as a new one could operate. So yes, you are throwing out old equipment, but the new thing that you're putting in is going to operate at a much, much lower operational cost. Those are the key components.

There's great ideas about like, let's cut out huge portions of the facade and take that floor area that we were entitled to and put it on the top of the building. If you can avoid doing that, if you can find some other creative way to do that, basically the building was originally designed by some other architect at an earlier stage and it does have a logic to it. As much as you can take advantage of that logic, that's a great thing it's just like all of the surgery that we need, the less invasive it is, the better your results are. It's not to say that we don't want to try really creative things, there's some facades that really need a lot of work to make them perform better, to look like an actual person lives there, but with less surgery, you might have a more successful project.

David: You have been just a wealth of knowledge. I want to give you the opportunity to say anything that you want to say that maybe I hadn't asked you or bring up.

Toby: I was thinking of something as I was coming over here 'cause I realized today's Tuesday after Thanksgiving. We have Black Friday and we have local Saturday, there's Cyber Monday. Today is called Giving Tuesday. I know in the non-profit world, there's a lot of folks that are asking for contributions today on Giving Tuesday. And I'm not going to pick anyone in particular, but it's this time of year when we're all thinking about what can we do for those that are less fortunate than us. And I mentioned that thing about the homelessness in New York City. And so some of us are doing coat drives and giving money. The problem is we are not actually making space for our fellow human beings to live in this place with us. The thing that you could really do that's giving is let people move into the city. So don't be a NIMBY. Allow for the fact that your neighborhood's going to change, that more people need to move in, that the city is growing, that we welcome immigrants, we like our children to be able to live around us, we want the population to be able to remain here, let's just make space for our fellow human beings. So the next time you feel an urge to be opposed to some new development, realize that you are part of the homelessness problem. Every unit that you want to not have in your neighborhood is one more person sleeping out on the street. We're all part of this together. So if you're feeling generous today, make space for someone else.

David: So wonderfully said, and another testament to your character. I'm giving you an opportunity to plug and then you go right to the giving, which I love, Toby. You're warming my heart and I'm so happy that you came to join us and we got to know you so much better because you just said that so well and I couldn't agree more. People don't want to be inconvenienced, but is your inconvenience more important than someone who can't stay in a house or an apartment. I completely resonate with everything that you're saying. And I sense that you really love this business, this industry, design. This is what you were meant to do. It's very clear. And we're very fortunate to have you here.

All: Thank you much for coming.

Toby: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you.