Commercial/office/industrial space to residential? (Saddle River: apartments, lease, credit)

[GoodSchoolols]

I was reading an article recently involving the Pearson Education building in Saddle River off of Route 17. The owners of the building are apparently unable to lease out the office space and are trying to turn the office space into mixed use residential apartments and retail below. This is one small example of the trend lately of buildings that once employed people with decent paying jobs being converted into housing and service wage jobs (Chipolte, Panera, etc)

My observation and question is that this is being done on a large scale in Northern NJ, and I am just dumbfounded how all of these places of employment disappear, how does it make dense housing viable? Wouldn't less jobs mean less people to be able to afford housing? I can see that it is easier to rent out an apartment and throw a few chain stores in a building than to find a large corporate tenant willing to shell out massive amounts of rent money, but wouldn't the two go hand in hand (jobs and housing)

I hope I am making sense, does anyone follow what I am trying to understand here? I just don't get how all this dense (and expensive) housing they are creating lately are being rented out. Where are the jobs to support this?

[lammius]

It's not so much that jobs are disappearing, they're relocating. Perhaps you can blame/credit millennials for that. More and more, white-collar professionals want to work in city centers or near (short walking distance) to transit hubs. Suburban office parks are not attractive to firms seeking office space right now. The vacancy rate for office parks in suburban NJ and elsewhere in the country is really high, and in urban areas it's really low. So naturally some folks holding onto vacant space are going to look for ways to make it generate revenue again, and changing the use (provided the town allows it) could help.