alt Hacker NewsNYC's advantage is that older office buildings are more amenable to adaptive reuse.
Modern office buildings have deep floor plates and sealed windows, relying heavily on HVAC and artificial lighting to make the center of the building habitable. Bedrooms require exterior windows, so an optimal floorplan is a ring of bedrooms around the outside which leaves gobs of low value square footage in the middle.
Yes, this is a huge advantage (and one among several reasons why malaise in the commercial real estate market in other US cities doesn’t transfer easily into lessons about NYC’s market).