5 Times Square Office-to-Residential Conversion

5 Times Square was about 80 percent empty. Nine floors leased in a 917,745-square-foot tower that Ernst & Young once filled. RXR, SL Green and Apollo are now gutting the 38-story building and rebuilding it as 1,250 apartments, most of them studios, in one of the largest office-to-residential conversions attempted in Manhattan.

Project Scope

Gensler is the architect. Work began in January 2026. Crews have erected a construction hoist on the southern elevation and stripped a band of curtain wall where new elevator levels tie into the superstructure. That detail is worth pausing on. An office tower’s elevator core is sized and stopped for office floor counts, and a residential conversion changes both the floor count and the stopping pattern, so the core has to be extended into existing structure.

313 of the 1,250 units will be permanently affordable to households at up to 80 percent of area median income. Empire State Development’s board approved the general project plan amendment authorizing residential use. The team closed a $1.3 billion loan from Morgan Stanley, Apollo and Corebridge, and the project uses the 467-m tax incentive and participates in New York City’s Office Conversion Accelerator. It’s projected to support about 1,400 construction jobs and 830 permanent positions.

Why It Matters

The unit mix tells you what the building’s geometry allows. 1,250 units in 917,745 gross square feet averages roughly 730 gross square feet per apartment, and once corridors, cores and amenity space come out, the typical unit is small. That’s not a market preference. It’s what a Times Square floor plate with a deep core yields when every apartment needs a window.

Which is fine, because studios in Midtown lease. The harder question is whether the arithmetic works without the 467-m abatement, and so far the answer is no. Every large conversion in this cycle has needed one.

That’s a policy dependency, not a market signal. If 467-m sunsets before the next wave of buildings hits the same vacancy math, the pipeline stops.

Project Team & Details