After years of sitting mostly dark, two office towers near Dupont Circle are about to get a very different kind of 9-to-5. The long-vacant buildings are being gutted and refitted into 532 apartments as Washington leans hard on office-to-residential conversions to revive a business district that emptied out in recent years. It is part construction shortcut, part tax-policy experiment, and it has neighbors wondering what kind of downtown community is being built, and for whom.
The Geneva Takes Shape
The marquee project, called The Geneva, comes from developer Post Brothers and will turn two former Universal Plaza office buildings into a 15-story residential complex with roughly 532 units and 60 permanently affordable homes, according to the D.C. Mayor’s Office. The deal only came together after the developer closed a stubborn financing gap with record green C-PACE financing and a lengthy property-tax abatement, details reported by The Washington Post. Those public incentives are a big part of why a large conversion like this can move forward at a time of high construction costs and tighter credit.
Money, Market And What People Will Pay
Developers like to point out that conversions move faster than building from scratch, but the rent checks still land firmly in the market-rate column. Reporting tied to a recent feature on NPR notes that one-bedroom asking rents in the Dupont project are projected at about $4,000 per month. That kind of pricing means the new homes will add to the city’s overall inventory yet will do less for households already priced out of Washington unless future projects come with more subsidy or deeper affordability requirements.
Conversions Already Moving In
The trend is not hypothetical. Local firm Foulger Pratt has already completed a major adaptive-reuse project one block from the White House and began welcoming residents in late 2025, according to the developer and industry reporting by CoStar. That early wave of move-ins shows that the technical headaches of conversion, from carving out new windows to overhauling mechanical systems and reworking floor plates, can be solved. It also illustrates why only certain buildings, with the right bones and location, get picked for this kind of expensive retrofit.
Why Cities Are Pushing Conversions
City halls across the country have strong motivation to make this work. U.S. office vacancy rates climbed to roughly 20 percent in recent years, leaving a glut of underused downtown space that local leaders are eager to turn into housing, according to market reports from Cushman & Wakefield. National coverage has put Washington, D.C., near the front of the pack, with thousands of conversion units either finished or on the drawing board as officials bet that more residents will help revive streets that emptied out after commuting patterns changed.
What Conversions Won’t Fix
“Office-to-residential conversion is not going to solve the housing crisis,” Tracy Loh of the Brookings Institution told NPR, a conclusion that matches Brookings’ broader work on adaptive reuse. Conversions can add useful new homes, especially in dense downtown pockets where buildable land is scarce, but Brookings researchers and many developers warn that the strategy will not deliver deeply affordable units at scale unless it is paired with strong policy support and subsidies.
Policy Tools And Questions…