If you’re a New Jersey suburbanite, you’re probably familiar with the seemingly ubiquitous collection of office parks dotting the landscape.
They’re everywhere — but since the COVID-19 pandemic and shift to work-from-home, many of them sit nearly empty. Some have become ghost towns.
“Our suburban office inventory is overbuilt and under-demolished,” said economist James Hughes, dean emeritus of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
So what do you do with them? Repurpose them. That’s what’s called “adaptive reuse” — the practice of taking a building or property and repurposing it for a new function…
How did we get here?
New Jersey saw a glut of office space construction in the 1980s, as talent fled urban centers across the region, Hughes said.
He estimated that by 1990, 80% of all the office space ever built in New Jersey had gone up.