Increasing numbers of hospitals are closing in the same communities where the current lack of housing has reached a crisis. These concurrent trends present a unique opportunity to sustainably re-use hospitals into much needed college and university housing.
Using two national models as examples, this presentation reviews a recently completed project in Portland Maine and shows an in-progress adaptive re-use of the recently closed Eastern Niagara Hospital in Lockport, New York.
The premise of this session is that hospital buildings present excellent opportunities for conversion to other uses, especially housing. Presentation will include excellent examples of adaptive re-use conversion, including Mercy State Street Hospital in Portland, Maine and Eastern Niagara Hospital in Lockport, New York.
Mercy was a 250-bed 1940’s historic hospital, which is now fully occupied with housing, including half dormitory space for graduate students and half young professional and workforce housing. The former hospital has converted the old lobbies and waiting areas into amenity spaces such as fitness center, co-working space, library, retail, community penthouse dining and kitchen, and self-storage units in the basement.
The second case study focuses on the Eastern Niagara Hospital in Lockport, New York. Like many other hospitals of its vintage, Eastern Niagara was losing money and
closed in July 2023. The hospital building has significant infrastructure capacity as well as the classic hospital configuration of narrow floor plates with extensive windows that lends itself to housing and other people-centric uses.
This session will explore the adaptive re-use of Eastern Niagara Hospital for community- serving functions such as workforce housing, dormitory use, and campus and neighborhood-supporting retail.
Using site plans and floor plans to illustrate how a hospital conversion works, we will demonstrate a new concept for the development of student (dormitory) and faculty and staff (workforce) housing nationally.