"The decommissioned McNair US army barracks in Berlin is soon to be posh apartments.

Marginal Revolution pointed me toward this Financial Times piece about the (perhaps) coming trend of disused public buildings being repurposed as upscale abodes. An excerpt:

“In a suburb of Berlin, a German-American investment consortium is converting the disused McNair US army barracks into upmarket apartments. In the US, the original New Jersey Medical Center – a publicly funded hospital in the 1880s extended with art deco blocks in the 1930s – has now become apartments and a retirement community.

Such transformations are still relatively rare. Yet in the next few years they may become commonplace as western governments tackle budget deficits – and in doing so, free up a glut of public-sector buildings.

In some ways, the UK is ahead of the trend, thanks to two complementary tranches of legislation. First, planning policies have discouraged building on unspoilt ‘greenfield’ land, with the result that house builders have targeted old offices and warehouses for new developments. Secondly, health and safety laws have rendered many landmark public buildings effectively obsolete for their original purpose – making them so expensive to modernise that only residential conversion makes financial sense.”