Earnest question here, I don’t really understand the dynamics of residential conversion fully, but wouldn’t Nexen be perfect for a family-oriented affordable housing project? Bigger floor plates so bigger/wider units? Something like that?
A king-sized bed is seven feet by seven feet, which means it can't go into a room less than about ten feet by ten feet (or there won't be room to walk around it). A three-seat sofa is around eight feet wide; the viewing distance for a 60" TV is around eight feet, so a living room can't be less than... about ten feet by ten feet.
If you want windows on every bedroom as well as a living room, you need about twenty feet of windows for a one-bedroom apartment, or thirty feet for a two-bedroom (forty feet for a three-bedroom). You could cheat this down a little bit, but not terribly much, or the rooms start becoming less useful. And these are minimums; no one is going to be upset over a slightly larger room than typical.
With one dimension defined, the depth (the distance perpendicular to the windows) kind of falls out; if you have 25 feet of depth. then you have 500 sq ft one bedrooms and 750 sq ft two bedroom units (1000 sq ft three bedrooms), a little on the small side; at 30 feet of depth you have 600 and 900 (and 1200) sq ft respectively, a little more generous. At much more than 30 feet of depth, you start adding space that doesn't have any windows to match. You can use it for storage rooms, studies, home offices, or "shared light" bedrooms, that is, bedrooms without windows. With a "shared light" bedroom, you can put in windows or gaps that let some light come in from the windowed spaces, but that compromises privacy, or you can maximize privacy and result in a depressing bedroom. None of those are particularly attractive uses, so you wind up with a bunch of units that aren't particularly attractive as rental relative to their floorspace.
If you have 30 feet of windows and 40 of depth, you have either a 1200 sq ft two bedroom unit which will rent for a little more than a standard 900 sq ft unit (but not the 33% more the extra floorspace implies), or you have a standard sized three bedroom unit but one of the bedrooms doesn't have any natural light; so you wind up renting it for less than a standard three bedroom. If you make it public-owned affordable housing, you have to tell me why you think that poor people deserve living conditions that most people won't accept.