[HN Gopher] Can turning office towers into apartments save downt...
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Can turning office towers into apartments save downtowns?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-05-07 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| Simulacra wrote:
| Turn them into low income housing and service centers for the
| poor.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Yes, lets concentrate poor people in tall apartment towers in
| downtown areas. What could go wrong?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > What could go wrong?
|
| Or what could go right. Service and civic workers would
| finally have housing that wasn't 2 hours away from their city
| jobs.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Nobody will live in the projects except people who have no
| way to escape.
| pineaux wrote:
| This is not true. Here in Holland developers of high
| rises are forced to make 40% of it social housing. This
| works quite well. The social housing system is broken,
| but thats mostly because they havent built enough housing
| in the last 50 years.
| anon291 wrote:
| > The social housing system is broken, but thats mostly
| because they havent built enough housing in the last 50
| years.
|
| So it's not working well.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Nobody will live in the projects except people who have
| no way to escape.
|
| There are more people for whom ex-commercial housing
| would work - than there are (or ever will be) units to
| house them.
|
| Even in a tough neighborhood I'd of done it, if I had
| work nearby. I once parked the I was living in my
| employer's parking lot.
| Raztuf wrote:
| Not to be cynical but this is an invitation to rampant
| criminality in city centers.
| scanr wrote:
| London seems to manage this petty well. I think it's quite
| healthy for a city to commingle folk from different income
| groups rather than house them in specific areas.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Why should the government steal my income to destroy the
| value of my property by paying to house criminals next
| door?
|
| The Free Market solves this perfectly - let people own
| their property and have a stake in where they live and
| maintaining the community and safety.
|
| We just need to let people build and bring a real free
| market to property.
| oo0shiny wrote:
| How is the government stealing your income or destroying
| the value of your property? Seems a bit hyperbolic.
|
| And if the free market solves this, why are we in this
| situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market
| have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty
| houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Because there is no free market in housing whatsoever.
|
| Owning land doesn't give you the right to build anything.
| You need planning permission - which means permission
| from the local council, local homeowners and
| consultation, etc. which gives the NIMBY attitude so much
| power.
|
| There aren't piles of empty houses. There aren't enough
| houses at all.
| kube-system wrote:
| The free market doesn't work when there is extreme supply
| inelasticity, as is the case with land in desirable
| areas.
| anon291 wrote:
| > And if the free market solves this, why are we in this
| situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market
| have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty
| houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
|
| There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the
| free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there
| is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that
| makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free
| market principles stop applying, since they presume a
| basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a
| government perspective is to remove the agency of those
| who are so drug addled that they cannot make good
| decisions.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| The fact that you assume all of the poor are criminals
| disqualifies you from having your opinion on this taken
| seriously.
| dleink wrote:
| The posts you are responding to said "low income", "poor"
| and "different income groups". The classism required to
| go from that to "criminals" is very disturbing.
| Xirgil wrote:
| London has sky high rents for young professionals while
| also taxing them exorbitant amounts that ends up subsidize
| social housing for "economically inactive" people. I would
| not call that efficient.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| Not if it's implemented correctly:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4933022/
|
| But you know what does increase crime rates? Vacant
| buildings.
| darby_eight wrote:
| Don't you mean the opposite? Surely the crime comes from the
| financial instability. I don't see how you could address the
| crime without addressing the financial instability.
| walkabilitee wrote:
| Causation goes both ways. Intelligent, educated, and well-
| paid Hacker News posters often don't understand the cloud
| of chaos, crime, poor decision-making, and deflected blame
| that hovers over the lives of many poor people. Section 8
| landlords understand that while such people may comprise a
| minority of their tenants (or not), it only takes one to
| ruin a building and the surrounding neighborhood.
|
| On a certain level this is common knowledge, reflected in
| the real estate markets of all big American cities. Dirt-
| cheap housing stock can be found in large swaths of
| Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, et cetera. It's
| cheap because even the most desperate families would rather
| live anywhere else, around anyone else.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Meanwhile, we refuse to house our homeless but will give
| $6.5B to Samsung to build a chip plant.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Prioritising homeless doesn't contribute to the society,
| prioritising plants, factories and businesses
| contributes.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Prioritising business just concentrates money in the
| hands of people who already have money while nothing to
| address the day to day concerns of actual people.
| walkabilitee wrote:
| Did you read my comment about a largeish portion of the
| actual people?
| rangestransform wrote:
| concentrating/diffusing poverty is a different axis of
| policy vs. housing/not housing the destitute
|
| the unfortunate circumstances surrounding NYCHA properties
| was due to concentrating poverty, in singapore public
| housing is economically integrated so as to avoid the same
| problem
| SmoothBrain123 wrote:
| I love Judge Dredd.
| schneems wrote:
| Mixed income and mixed use is my preference.
|
| The Austin Plaza Saltillo project is a great example. Shops at
| the bottom make it useful for the whole community. Parking is
| in garages underneath which promotes walk ability. When you see
| someone going to their place you don't know if they are on food
| stamps or are a tech millionaire. There's less stigma and more
| respect for all neighbors.
| rak wrote:
| I like this idea. I would even settle for the mixed income
| housing that a lot of development companies here (DC) were
| supposed to build when they received subsidies from the
| government.
| redtexture wrote:
| It is expensive to convert a building. Not exactly low cost,
| nor low income capable.
| the_optimist wrote:
| Rather than this relatively low-effort idea, just think about
| the other marginalized groups for which appeal could be
| curried: - orphans and widowers - statutorily limited peoples -
| losers of the womb lottery - the soft in spirit - students of
| life - unhoused migrants - homeless encampment simulator
|
| And failing this: - displaced urban wildlife - tear it down and
| make space for plants
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| > losers of the womb lottery
|
| What?
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| This is a recipe for disaster.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| You'll hear the owners and developers crow about how it's not
| worth it.
| pwthornton wrote:
| Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be
| converted to housing. The depth and shape of the building matters
| quite a bit. A lot of office buildings are very deep and would
| result in a lot of rooms/space without windows or access to
| natural light.
|
| The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of
| these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the
| very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit.
|
| But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on
| conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel
| things to do with this deep interior space?
| redtexture wrote:
| Fire codes and building codes are an impediment to modifying
| distance from openable windows, for bedrooms.
|
| Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written
| the way it was for a reason.
| elicash wrote:
| I can absolutely see the safety argument for distance from a
| window. Fair! But I will say, as someone who made his
| windowless basement his bedroom even though I had other
| options in my home, I love a super dark space to sleep.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _means changing the national fire code_
|
| Skyscraper windows aren't usable for egress. This is a solved
| problem.
| jxf wrote:
| Not all of the building needs to be direct residential; for
| example, I could definitely imagine some light retail, a
| computer lab, a tool library, an indoor track, a gym, et
| cetera.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| In Tokyo you have buildings with levels of retail,
| restaurants, bars, karaoke, etc. I'm sure Seoul and probably
| other dense cities have this too. Korea Town in mid-town
| Manhattan also does this, but that's just one little block.
| I'm really surprised there's not more of this in Manhattan
| actually. I'm sure it exists more than I'm aware of, but it
| should be more prevalent in a city that dense.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| The problem here is zoning laws, in most places in the US you
| can't build businesses right next to residential. We would
| have to change our zoning laws and do something similar to a
| 5 by 1 (bottom floor is retail, top floors are residential)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The same in Europe, zoning laws are a bitch and they're
| basically existing for bribes. Many local city counsellors
| get paid off to change the zoning laws and thus raise the
| price of the briber's property.
| immibis wrote:
| At least in Berlin this doesn't seem to be true. While
| zoning laws are a bitch and exist for bribes, none of
| them prohibit intermixing offices with residential or
| retail with residential, and such buildings are very
| common.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah true here in Spain it's very mixed too. It's better
| like that I think because this way the neighborhood
| doesn't become deserted at night and also we can go to a
| local restaurant for lunch.
|
| The 'zoning' here is more building by building rather
| than neighborhood based.
|
| But I mean the same kind of administrative issue holds
| back conversions here. Most Office buildings here would
| be ideal. They're not that big because here it's illegal
| to offer office space without plenty of daylight.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, these laws absolutely should change. I would hope
| that any municipality facing a problem like this, with lots
| of empty office space, would also recognize the fact that
| their zoning rules are a bad idea.
| deegles wrote:
| I saw a picture of one of those giant suburban developments
| in Texas... like thousands of cookie cutter homes over a huge
| area. But I'm sure you could provide the same amount of
| living space and better amenities in a focused apartment
| building. There should be schools and restaurants and shops
| etc spread out over every floor. Or maybe like a 90's
| shopping mall with a 30 story apartment building on top. It
| just makes sense to me.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Why buy a nice suburban home and invest in your future when
| you could instead live in a windowless former office
| building with hundreds of other families?
| r14c wrote:
| A home is a really silly investment (i know that goes
| against the prevailing "wisdom"). the economic
| opportunities of living in an urban area coupled with
| investing in things that are actually economically
| productive are more likely to benefit you in the future.
| does your suburb's tax base cover the infrastructure
| maintenance costs? is this why suburban folks are so
| sensitive to their property values, because any little
| thing could send the development into a tail spin? sounds
| like a pretty dodgy investment to me.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| A home is considered the new hotness, and if you don't
| own one, you're not financially smart for some reason. At
| least this is according to the hivemind at
| /r/personalfinance. Meanwhile, there are very legitimate
| reasons not to own a property.
|
| Methinks people buying right before COVID at rock bottom
| interest rates has clouded the judgement of many. This is
| not a sure fire road to success right now, I can tell you
| that much.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > and if you don't own one, you're not financially smart
| for some reason. At least this is according to the
| hivemind at /r/personalfinance.
|
| The government will give you a bunch of free money to
| leverage an investment in real estate. This isn't true of
| other investments.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| And this free money, much like government guarantees for
| student loans, has only exacerbated the situation between
| the haves and the have nots.
| r14c wrote:
| most investment assets can be financially leveraged. IMO
| suburb home ownership provides more of an illusion of
| financial security and leverage than the real thing.
| being able to buy a house, condo, or apartment in an
| urban area is a much more significant marker of financial
| success than doing the same in a heavily subsidized
| development with limited economic productivity.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I think it's financially smart to attempt to no longer be
| at the behest of a landlord's whim to raise rent. Home
| ownership is not even close to being out of reach for
| young people (like myself), but living in or near a city
| center absolutely is.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| And I agree with you. I've made this point on an earlier
| thread here on HN... but the prices and interest that
| goes along with it is absolutely insane in places that
| are remotely desireable (see Phoenix, AZ) and I'd need to
| be effectively house poor, when the same place I looked
| at five years ago I could have afforded with my salary at
| the time no problem.
|
| Such is the dreaded once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe like
| COVID and the money printing scam that happened after
| that that destroyed so much value in money. But others
| that got in before me at historically low interest and
| reasonable asset prices just tell me I need to buck up
| and work harder. I bet you they would be shitting bricks
| if they were in my shoes. It's like a nightmare I haven't
| been able to wake up from. :(
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think
| that people would generally be a lot happier if they can
| find comfort in living a relatively simple life. I know
| most people can't just uproot themselves instantly, but
| in my personal opinion, living somewhere more rural is
| 100% worth it in every single way. Lower cost of living,
| closer local communities (you GOTTA give a friendly wave
| when you drive past a stranger on a backroad, them's the
| rules!), more sunshine, fresh air, wide open fields...
|
| The job market isn't as competitive as the Bay Area, but
| if you can remote work and/or get a local non-tech job
| making a livable wage (there's so many lifted trucks out
| here, these guys make _money_ ), it almost doesn't matter
| what you do for work, it pays the bills and you can spend
| time with family after that. You have a house, you have a
| car, you have a family, maybe you even have a camper like
| many others around you, and you go camping at the lake
| every month in the summer! Truly, rural living can
| actually be an idyllic paradise if you do it right!
| dustincoates wrote:
| I don't own, because I think it's best for my children if
| they grow up in this city, and the city happens to be one
| where unless you hit the jackpot (literal or parental) or
| decide not to save for retirement, you aren't owning.
|
| And yet... I wish we could. I know it's not a great
| investment monetarily, but there are the fringe benefits,
| like being able to make the place my own or knowing that
| I'm not going to have to relocate the kids in a couple of
| years with a few months' notice because the landlord
| decides he wants the unit back.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One thing I do know is that all these people talk about
| this "nice place for yourself" instead of "being packed
| in like sardines" but then the people in the former also
| will talk about some loneliness epidemic etc etc.
|
| I grew up in various times in a rural place with all
| sorts of animals where it was just me and my brother for
| miles and I also grew up later in a city where there were
| so many kids we would self-organize into all sorts of
| games and sports.
|
| Personally, the rural place was great and the urban place
| was great, but the suburban place has neither adventure
| nor abundance of playmates. Hundreds of nearby families
| is the absolute dream!
| hooverd wrote:
| The great thing about the city is that there's also a
| loneliness epidemic there.
| immibis wrote:
| Maybe, but it's a twenty minute subway ride to the
| nearest hackerspace.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why buy a nice suburban home and invest in your
| future_
|
| Lots of recently-built suburbia is a money pit [1].
|
| [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-
| the-real-...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Hundreds of other families is my neighborhood, community,
| connection. I invest in my people not property.
| jen20 wrote:
| The problem is never the suburban home - which are indeed
| often perfectly nice. The problem is the suburb itself,
| and the kind of people it attracts - those who think that
| walkability isn't a concern, and are content with driving
| to eat at a chain restaurant in a strip mall by the
| highway. Sounds like a properly crappy life to me. I for
| one will never buy property where I don't have a choice
| of bars to walk to.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Lots and lots of suburban houses are in fact the problem.
| Many of them are effectively temporary without being
| priced as such.
| ikiris wrote:
| Because roads and pipes cost money, and you eventually
| have to pay for it.
| jimberlage wrote:
| I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but the "with hundreds of
| other families" is the thing that makes college so fun,
| cities feel alive, etc. Some people are into that - and
| suburban life is increasingly feeling the absence of it.
|
| Having a shared space where there are enough families
| around that there will be 10 kids guaranteed on the
| playground is nicer in a lot of ways than having 3 kids
| try to decide whose spacious yard is the gathering spot
| today.
| mminer237 wrote:
| How would any store or restaurant survive being on the
| third floor in the center of an apartment building?
| egypturnash wrote:
| If the building's dense enough then you have a built-in
| set of regular customers. Especially if, say, you're a
| restaurant in the middle of a building with super-tiny
| kitchens in the apartments, like the ones described in
| the link.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Call it a speakeasy. People seem to love overpriced,
| secret businesses.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I mean they'd have a built in customer base, and the
| workers would have an enviable commute, no?
|
| Delivery costs could also be super cheap.
| triceratops wrote:
| A bar that's only an elevator ride away sounds pretty
| sweet.
| jen20 wrote:
| They manage it in Asia without a problem. Hong Kong and
| Seoul are full of such places.
| bombcar wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Those homes are surprisingly cheap to
| throw up and you don't have to do any additional
| support/maintenance.
|
| And you'd mainly be missing the yards.
|
| Most of these office buildings they're talking about should
| just be knocked down and new purpose-built multi-use
| buildings built in their place.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I used to live in 100+ year old warehouse building converted
| to residential. It has even less windows than a glass paned
| high rise. They used the interior space exactly like this.
| One floor had a gym. Some floors converted the space to
| storage units available to the residents. Other floors had
| other shared common space. All ideas as you probably took 5s
| to come up with. It's really not a hard problem to solve that
| any developer worth their salt would not be able to solve.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep
| interior space?_
|
| Yes, here's an article with great visualizations on how
| developers are coring out the center of repurposed office
| buildings in order to create columns of natural light (and how,
| in certain jurisdictions, this lost square footage can then be
| reclaimed via new construction stacked on top of the building):
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Or even better just give every unit multiple huge bathrooms,
| dens, libraries, etc...
| geodel wrote:
| Well of course one can even have whole floor for single
| family. It is a small matter of how much one can pay for
| the space of that size that need to be hashed out.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| An office to condo conversion is going to be luxury
| regardless.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Doesn't even have to be novel, especially if they can combine
| floors to make taller spaces in the inner column.
|
| Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket
| ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with
| enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on.
| Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you'd find in a
| mixed use city with cheap real estate.
|
| Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner
| column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to
| simulate outdoors.
| equalsione wrote:
| It would result in fewer units, but you could introduce
| "courtyards" that would act as corridors of light. It would
| depend on the depth of the building. You could potentially do
| it over two or more stories.
|
| Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to
| act as light tunnel might work. Or give the deeper units over
| to utilities, communal areas, etc
|
| A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant
| and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try. Check
| out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen
| - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.
| lazide wrote:
| None of that is possible without massive changes to the
| structure of the building. Those spaces are currently used
| for elevators and utilities.
|
| Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal
| showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are
| run to where they would be needed for multiple residential
| units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a
| requirement for non-marginal US housing.
|
| Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already
| more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft)
| than residential, and high rise construction is more
| expensive than normal commercial construction.
|
| So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some
| kind of 'great depression' type situation, it would be doing
| a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive
| building to be competing in a space where everyone else did
| things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for
| economic viability.
|
| Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation
| necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.
| banannaise wrote:
| Right, so the core of the building is elevators, hallways,
| and something that doesn't require light. The first use
| that comes to mind is resident storage. Using space on
| upper floors for storage isn't how you would design a
| residential building, but it is a useful purpose for
| otherwise useless interior space.
|
| Additional leftover interior space can be used for
| amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most
| efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the
| existing space that doesn't require tearing down a
| building.
| lazide wrote:
| As long as we get the building 'for free' (don't have to
| consider/pay for the original costs to build it), it can
| definitely be retrofitted for many purposes somewhat
| economically.
|
| Maybe a bit like the industrial lot to condo process that
| happened in NYC and other places awhile ago?
|
| It'll be weird, but folks will adapt.
|
| I'm not sure why folks wouldn't just build in the 'burbs
| (and work remotely) in most cases though?
| Qwertious wrote:
| >As long as we get the building 'for free' (don't have to
| consider/pay for the original costs to build it), it can
| definitely be retrofitted for many purposes somewhat
| economically.
|
| ...they could be used as home-offices perhaps?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| When it comes to London, the 'burbs' means get into a
| crowded train (or wait for the next, or the one after
| that as they are packed in many stations) AND spend 2h
| per day commuting (+ the very expensive fares). As a
| young professional in London I would prefer to have a
| nice 30-40sqm (~300-400 sqf) studio in the center, close
| to a market/park and be 20mins door-to-door to my work.
|
| If one of the mega-big buildings would be converted to
| studios, meaning they could 'slice' 20-30 studios per
| floor, keep one floor for gym/dry cleaners/etc. they
| would be making a (financial) killing.
| teachrdan wrote:
| >None of that is possible without massive changes to the
| structure of the building.
|
| This is addressed in TFA. There was one building the
| profiled architect designed where they spent the $$ to turn
| the elevator core into a courtyard. He was able to add back
| the "lost" square footage as additional floors, which made
| the project profitable enough to build out.
| lazide wrote:
| By not having elevators? How does that make any sense for
| any mid-rise or higher?
| cnntth wrote:
| Addressed in the article! Apartment buildings need less
| elevators than offices since residents tolerate longer
| waits. There's still elevators, just less.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is
| already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per
| sq ft) than residential
|
| And yet, results in a shitty experience that residential
| users just won't accept...
|
| (And yeah, it's shitty for commercial users too.)
|
| There's something very wrong with the entire thing.
| lazide wrote:
| Commercial is more expensive because it is designed for
| higher wear, longer tenancy times, dramatically higher
| utilization, and more customization.
|
| It's common to run wiring in conduit, use hung ceiling
| (with space for running lots of extra services),
| construct the framing out of steel and concrete (instead
| of wood and stucco), and electrical and HVAC demands are
| dramatically higher. Networking needs to be more reliable
| and easier to manage at scale. Electrical needs are often
| orders of magnitude higher. Everything from locks, to
| outlets, to flooring needs to be sturdier to handle the
| increased traffic and wear.
|
| Even a dentists office or hair dresser will need to mount
| heavy chairs sturdily, pull lots of extra power, and have
| to worry about weird chemicals or x-rays and the like
| hurting other tenants.
|
| Additionally, they're zoned to have access to high volume
| transit and/or parking.
|
| It's not a surprise why commercial is more expensive.
| It's made for a different use case.
|
| It still is only going to be 'good enough' most of the
| time. And by 'good enough', that means tenants pay.
| Anything else is usually 'lipstick on a pig' as it were.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a
| requirement for non-marginal US housing.
|
| The question is why, and what's wrong with marginal housing
| (sounds like a great way to reduce homelessness)
|
| The numbers show that Americans order delivery and eat at
| restaurants more (and cook less) than they have in recent
| history.
|
| It's intriguing because while flipping and renovating
| kitchens to have more space - stoves, ovens, and
| refrigerators is on the rise, fewer families actively use
| the space over the last decade. (The same can be said for
| colleges moving from dorms to apartment style housing)
|
| This especially applies to marginal households, but also
| significantly to upper middle class -> upper class and
| dense housing.
|
| That's not to say it's healthy for our diets.
| lazide wrote:
| You're going to see a shift in the coming years due to
| inflation - more folks are already eating at home anyway.
|
| But the answer is because sometimes you do need a
| kitchen, even if it's to boil some water or whatever or
| reheat takeout, or because your Mom is visiting and wants
| to make something. Sharing a kitchen is often a nightmare
| if you can't control who else is sharing it - constant
| fights over dirty dishes being one example. They often
| get tied up exactly when you want to use them too.
|
| And having your own bathroom (the two are highly
| correlated as both require 'wet walls', and custom
| plumbing) is great when you want some privacy, are sick,
| etc. or have some safety concerns.
|
| It can get even more gross and disturbing to share those
| when you can't control who you're sharing with. It's a
| common friction point to share a bathroom even with room
| mates. A lot of people (especially women) flat out avoid
| public bathrooms due to safety and 'ick' concerns.
|
| Imagine if the only toilet you could use if you woke up
| at 2am and needed to pee was a public toilet.
|
| There is nothing wrong per-se with marginal housing,
| except they tend to attract 'marginal people' that bring
| with them trouble that others don't want to deal with if
| they can avoid it. It does help with homelessness and the
| like - but it tends to self filter into dangerous
| territory, because who is going to want to stay at a
| place where homeless people stay unless they are homeless
| themselves?
|
| Sharing them is always a step down in experience. It is
| always cheaper though, as the kitchen and the bathroom
| are usually the two highest maintenance and 'most
| expensive' rooms.
|
| Most folks stuck in those situations move out ASAP -
| think dorm rooms and barracks. Or homeless shelters.
|
| Singapore is extremely far along in the 'eat out at
| restaurants' side (it used to be, most Singaporeans ate
| out at least a couple meals a day), and even they have
| kitchens and private bathrooms in all the subsidized
| flats.
| bombcar wrote:
| Marginal housing was basically outlawed because of
| abuses, but there are various ways around it if the
| demand/desire is there (hotels are marginal, for
| example).
| vidarh wrote:
| London has several "co-living" [1] housing units at this
| point, that are basically upscale house-shares for people
| willing to pay extra to not have to deal with the hassle of
| house-shares.
|
| Yout get a self-contained flat, but kitchens etc. will be
| tiny, and then on top there are shared spaces like co-working
| facilities, lounges, cinemas, gyms, and staff arranging
| social events etc.
|
| I'd imagine former office buildings could work well for many
| of the amenities for projects like that.
|
| [1] https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/lifestyle/coliving_londo
| n/1...
| flerchin wrote:
| Storage, laundry facilities, gyms, office-spaces (gasp!). Less-
| than-optimally used is still better that completely unused.
| foobarian wrote:
| It would be pretty fantastic to have some office space still,
| since now it will be possible to live right next door. Or
| same door even!
| datahack wrote:
| Japan just used fiber optics to run sunlight to inside
| apartments for natural light in skylights. Obviously the
| apartments are cheaper typically, and as long as people get
| exposure to light like this they are generally ok.
|
| I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a
| cultural and financial issue. I don't think the problem is
| whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in
| place to encourage it.
| dagw wrote:
| _I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but
| a cultural and financial issue._
|
| It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building
| codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can
| and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to
| solve these problems end up being against the building codes.
| Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how
| clever your technical solution is.
| slashdev wrote:
| Yes, this is the real problem
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, to be fair, a firefighter at the end of a ladder
| can't evacuate someone through a fiber optic run.
| dagw wrote:
| Surely you can solve that by having the occupants sign a
| waver as part of the rental contract where they wave
| their rights to be evacuated or rescued in the event of a
| fire.
| kube-system wrote:
| This hypothetical building wouldn't exist, because it
| would have never had a building permit issued.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's one of those rights you can't sign
| away. Fire codes are strict.
| beaeglebeachh wrote:
| My permit says "NO building code or utility inspections
| will be performed."
|
| I signed that "right" away with the county recorder, it
| was no problem. Been able to do that for 2 decades in my
| county. Turns out when people build what they like you
| get weird shit but little to none of the "but muh codes"
| fire hysteria came true.
|
| Meanwhile California morons building with regulatory
| checks out the wazoo get ate up in wildfires. It's like
| watching actual insane people.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, some places in the US DGAF, and in others there's
| not even a municipality to issue a permit, let alone
| enforce one. However, these situations typically are in
| places where high occupancy buildings don't exist.
|
| But if you've read anything about disastrous fires
| throughout history, the reasoning for modern fire codes
| is rather apparent:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nightclub_fires
|
| The deadliest structure fires in history pretty much have
| one thing in common: people couldn't get out. There's
| something to be said for a homeowner who builds their own
| death trap, but it's a good thing that large commercial
| properties have to jump through hoops to ensure they
| don't create a death trap for hundreds of others, just to
| save a few bucks.
|
| Wildfires are something else entirely -- forests are not
| man made and their creation is not subject to laws. You
| wouldn't argue that laws against murder are silly just
| because you could be attacked by a wild animal, would
| you? We regulate buildings because people build them.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Windows are not just an aesthetic thing.
|
| In the US windows are also a required means of egress from a
| bedroom in case of fire. Technically the requirement is two
| means of egress of any type, but in effect this means the
| door and the window, where someone can be rescued by a fire
| truck, escape onto a different path, etc.
| dugmartin wrote:
| I can imagine internal apartments designed with an open
| concept kitchen/living room and then a row of
| bedrooms/bathrooms off the open room. Then you could have
| an hallway off the back that funneled in natural light and
| the bedrooms/bathrooms could have windows that opened unto
| that. That gives you an unimpeded escape path.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The two means of egress cannot lead into the same path
| (the hallway) since the point is to provide an
| _alternate_ escape path.
| selectodude wrote:
| High rises don't usually work like that for obvious
| reasons.
| datahack wrote:
| Indeed, but tradition is not necessarily the only way to
| have safe policies. We have many more advanced escape
| systems that work incredibly well these days. I'm sure
| there are alternative escape technologies that don't
| involve windows in a skyscraper in 2024.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Windows are the _cheapest_ second form of egress.
|
| Punching through a new set of pressurized, fire rated
| stairwells would be significantly more expensive.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Wait can this be covered by just giving the bedroom two
| doors? That seems pretty straightforward...?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The doors need to open into different escape paths, so
| not the same hallway or front door. The window goes
| outside.
| maherbeg wrote:
| You can also install solar tubes to do something similar.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is conventional wisdom, but it always felt odd to me.
|
| Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces.
| In the beginning, they were low cost because of some
| undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-
| demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major
| selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial
| space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not
| possible?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Because industrial space needs room for very large machines,
| which means large volumes and good access to them.
|
| Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of
| small volumes and poor access.
| yardie wrote:
| Lofts evolved from old factory and warehouses. This was in an
| era before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting. You
| needed lots of windows to light factories and lots of
| vertical space for convection cooling to work. Factories were
| at the edge of town and that town grew into a city.
| Eventually, the edge was closer to the center than the
| suburbs. And a new generation wanted to be city dwellers.
|
| Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some
| of the most in demand housing because of the large space and
| natural lighting.
| vel0city wrote:
| Old (like early 1900s old) industrial spaces are radically
| different structures than commercial office real estate from
| the 80s and 90s.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| the buildings built 100 years ago to be converted 50 years
| ago are very different from the buildings built 50 years ago
| to be converted today. Improved efficiency and optimization
| for purpose in building design plays some role in that.
| bombcar wrote:
| Because buildings that were already old 50 years ago were
| built before elevators and other massive height building
| techniques. Look at old factory pictures, usually about three
| or four stories max. That's much more adaptable than a
| gigafactory or a World Trade Center.
| cs702 wrote:
| Charlie Munger was an advocate of residential buildings that
| have virtual windows (letting in "artificially created
| sunlight") instead of actual windows. Before his death he
| proposed such a residential building for UCSB:
|
| https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa
|
| https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive...
|
| Needless to say, conventionally minded experts of all stripes
| vociferously objected to it, including architects:
|
| https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munge...
|
| ...But I wonder if maybe cities should conduct small-scale
| tests of Munger's ideas to find out if they help put all that
| abandoned office space to good use.
| mplewis wrote:
| Charlie Munger was a weird freak who fancied himself an
| architect. The only thing that qualified him to design a
| ridiculous building for UCSB was donating an insane amount of
| money to UCSB.
| bnralt wrote:
| I don't get the point. From what I can see, dorms
| construction often costs around $70,000. Munger was
| advocating that we get rid of windows and put students in
| exceptionally tiny rooms, and the cost will be about $267,000
| per student? How is this an advantage?
| currymj wrote:
| as i understand it, the theory was that it would discourage
| the undergraduates from hanging out in their rooms, and
| force them to hang out around campus and socialize, and
| this would be good for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| My experience from a long time ago was that dorm rooms
| were never really a place to hang out. My undergrad had
| rooms off a kitchen/suite area and people did hang out
| there. But rooms were mostly for sleeping (etc.),
| studying, reading, etc.
| michaelt wrote:
| Yes, there are good reasons conventionally minded experts
| of all stripes vociferously objected to it, including
| architects.
| jrockway wrote:
| As someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on blackout
| curtains (and sticking electrical tape on every LED in the
| house), I'd be happy to buy an apartment where few of the rooms
| have natural light. I know bedrooms have to have windows so the
| fire department can pull you out of a burning building while
| you're asleep or whatever, but personally, I am not a fan of
| the noise and light most of the time.
|
| I just think there is so much space that you can use in a
| residential setting without natural light. Your movie room.
| Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where
| they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker
| activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy
| it at a discount if it were offered to me.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I rented a place specifically because one of the bedrooms has
| no windows. Easily one of the best quality of life
| improvements.
| webdood90 wrote:
| Great, until it's not. You have no escape in case of an
| emergency. The room probably wasn't technically a bedroom.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think the probability of that is lower than my
| probability of death on my motorcycle. So they're
| probably going to be fine. Everything is fine until it's
| not.
|
| The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to
| be 1s+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial
| functionality there we provide is legibility in the
| marketplace.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's easily remedied - axes and specialized entry tools
| can be used for exiting.
|
| Yeah, if it doesn't meet the legal definition of a
| bedroom, it can't be listed as one. That's partially why
| there are so few interior rooms - lower property value vs
| if it was a bedroom (but mainly consumer demand for
| windows).
| eropple wrote:
| _> That 's easily remedied - axes and specialized entry
| tools can be used for exiting._
|
| You keep an axe in your bedroom?
| giantg2 wrote:
| My bedroom has a window, so no. If your bedroom doesn't
| have a window and you're concerned about another exit,
| then sure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes. Seattle is earthquake country, and I want to be able
| to get out if the doors are blocked or jammed from
| earthquake or fire. It's a fireman's axe, as that job is
| what they're designed for. I also keep a fire
| extinguisher in the bedroom.
| bombcar wrote:
| I mean you're also an axe murder, but that's besides the
| point. ;)
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah, you can put beds in whatever room you want. You
| just can't sell a room with no window as a bedroom.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Even simpler, many interior walls are built with studs
| covered by drywall.
|
| Most able bodied adults can break drwall between the
| studs. It's not a particularly strong material.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It really depends on the drywall. If it's 3/4 inch
| soundproof drywall over sound insulation with services
| like water, electrical, and sewage you can break it but
| now you have to navigate the services. And many people
| aren't going to shove themselves through studs on 16"
| centers.
| giantg2 wrote:
| _If_ they 're worried about not fitting through 16" studs
| (let alone this entire scenario), then they should select
| a room with two doors. If you can't fit through studs, I
| find it hard to believe they're fitting through most
| windows (generally a more awkward position with limited
| dimensions too).
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Those services are in very limited places in interior
| walls. You may have an electrical line running to the
| outlets, but you be extremely unlikely to hit sewer or
| water. If you do, the gap ti the left or right is
| extremely unlikely to also have the same services.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You have no escape in case of an emergency_
|
| Nobody is exiting the 60th floor of a skyscraper through
| the window. We don't even have ladders that go that high
| on firetrucks in New York [1].
|
| [1] https://www.fdnysmart.org/fire-trucks/ _95 ft, or
| about 10 stories_
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| What, you don't keep a parachute under your bed?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| High up in an NYC building, there is no escape regardless
| of windows. Also, my quality of life with good sleep is
| so high, its easily worth it
| kbenson wrote:
| It's less about natural light than ventilation. If whatever
| ventilation systems the building uses breaks down, interior
| rooms without opening windows are a liability.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| This seems wrong... are people opening windows on the 60th
| floor? What about those buildings whose design precludes
| easy retrofitting to openable windows? I'm not being
| rhetorical, I'd like answers.
| kbenson wrote:
| I figured looking up tall residential building and seeing
| what they do would be a good indicator of norms. The
| tallest Residential building in New York is Central Park
| Tower at 98 above ground floors:
|
| _The residential stories have casement windows, within
| the curtain wall, that can swing up to 4 inches (100 mm)
| outward. In addition, some condominium units have
| motorized windows at least seven feet (2.1 m) above the
| floor._ [1]
|
| The condominiums start on the 32nd floor, according to
| the same article.
|
| If building can't easily be retrofitted to allow openable
| windows, then I would assume they either can't be used
| for residential or they could try to get some sort of
| exemption if they can prove it's safe. I'm mostly going
| off what I know about building codes and what I've read
| previously on the topic when it's posted and it's delved
| into what the actual problems are in converting to
| residential.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Tower
| JackFr wrote:
| Opening windows on high floors is great -- you don't need
| screens cause most urban insects stay much closer to
| ground level. (Although admittedly I haven't opened any
| windows higher than 20)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Office towers do not have windows that open, aside from
| some very old ones might have windows that open.
|
| Commercial building windows in general do not open at all.
| kbenson wrote:
| My understanding is you have to fix this when changing to
| residential. There are building codes requires to be met
| for residential housing, and normally that includes
| openable window space for both ventilation and egress in
| an emergency. Maybe they'll make an exception for egress,
| but I doubt they will for ventilation.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I don't understand building codes. It's not safe for
| people to sleep there, but it's safe to work there for
| eight to twelve hours a day? Something is off.
| asalahli wrote:
| Presumably because you're awake while working and can
| notice problems when they happen. Not so much when you're
| sleeping.
| MatmaRex wrote:
| I mean... yes? I don't see what's so confusing. In an
| office building, if anything goes wrong, an alarm goes
| off and everyone leaves, and insurance pays for damages.
| In a residential building, you have people sleeping,
| sick, possessions they might not be willing to leave
| behind, babies, pets... It makes sense for the safety
| requirements to be different.
| lazide wrote:
| Are you regularly alone and unconscious when at work?
| WalterBright wrote:
| What good is an egress window 30 stories up?
| kbenson wrote:
| Exactly why I would expect them to make an exception for
| it. Unless the local laws have been changed specifically
| to allow for that situation, I doubt the laws started out
| that way though. I don't imagine the people designing
| building codes for residential living put a lot of
| thought to extremely tall buildings _initially_.
| coryrc wrote:
| Lots of tall condos have windows that can't open.
| kbenson wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're being lax in your terminology or
| whether you are misinterpreting my point.
|
| The problem is not that every window needs to open, it's
| that _some_ windows need to open. In the building codes I
| 've seen in the past for residential homes, that was
| expressed as a percentage of square feet of the room or
| entire building.
|
| So, are you saying there are plenty of tall condos where
| no windows in a specific dwelling open, or that they have
| some windows that don't open? If they have no windows
| that don't open, do you mind mentioning where, as I'd be
| interested in what the solution was to the problem of
| needing to allow for passive ventilation.
| jen20 wrote:
| This very much depends on where you are. I had an
| apartment in a high-rise building in Austin TX a few
| years ago that did not have openable windows of any kind
| (I also did not realise this until after signing the
| lease, which was unfortunate). I assume the building met
| code.
| valenterry wrote:
| Isn't ventilation most of the time built into offices and
| hence _much_ better than what you can get in most
| residentual buildings?
| kbenson wrote:
| When it works, sure. You don't generally sleep for
| extended periods in an office though, so would probably
| notice it getting stuffy. Sleeping or bedridden people
| might not notice or be able to easily do something about
| it though if oxygen levels drop.
| valenterry wrote:
| Sleeping produces less co2 than working. Therefore, if
| you don't feel it getting stuffy (without opening
| windows) at work time, then sleep time should be no
| issue. Besides, offices have to deal with more people
| than residential buildings. And air quality depends on
| the number of people (and what they do).
| kbenson wrote:
| The difference when sleeping compared to resting or low
| activity work is that sleeping is about 60%-65% of
| resting from what I've found.[1] I'm not sure why we
| should assume that shouldn't be a problem. We could be
| close to a low oxygen situation prior to sleep, and then
| start sleeping and have hours for it to get worse.
|
| We don't generally design safety regulations around
| "should" and averages, but instead when edge cases
| happen, as the magnitude of the outcome is very important
| to take into consideration. I'm not sure what you're
| trying to express with your comment.
|
| 1: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-persons-
| d_691.html
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Most high rise office buildings use steam (older bldgs)
| or heat strip for heating. If there's an electrical
| problem, all fans blowing the treated air stop. They use
| chilled water flowing through air handling units for A/C.
| (in winter, these same units supply the heated air, the
| flow of chill water is usually halted.)
|
| In a system like this, if the AHU stops for any reason,
| the whole floor is effected. Since chillers and
| associated equipment are very expensive, I would imagine
| the maintenance fees would be uncomfortable. (get it?
| Sorry.)
| Loughla wrote:
| I think maybe spread out across all owners it might be
| palatable. You have to figure, if your heating/AC conks
| out, you're into that for 20k. So that's a pretty decent
| number when/if you're talking about multiple flats on one
| floor, right?
| dv_dt wrote:
| I would think that the people density that an office
| space is built for is higher than residential density.
| Even a studio apt is more individual space than many
| shared office layouts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Modern skyscrapers do not have openable windows, so the
| building ventilation system is totally relied on anyway.
| kbenson wrote:
| See my cousin comment about Central Park Tower. Modern
| _commercial_ skyscrapers seem to not have openable
| windows.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| One of the newest and tallest skyscrapers in Seattle,
| Rainier Square, not only has openable windows throughout
| but on some high floors has massive _sliding_ windows
| that open up to a sheer drop (widely recognized as a bit
| of a potential safety risk).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Closed windows won't necessarily save you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Garry_Hoy
|
| > While giving a tour of the Toronto-Dominion Centre to a
| group of articling students, he attempted to demonstrate
| the strength of the structure's window glass by slamming
| himself into a window. He had apparently performed this
| stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced
| harmlessly off the glass. After one attempt which saw the
| glass hold up, Hoy tried once more. In this instance, the
| force of Hoy slamming into the window removed the window
| from its frame, causing the entire intact window and Hoy
| to fall from the building.
| avarun wrote:
| They won't save you if you're a complete idiot, yes. Why
| did this guy think this was in any way a safe thing to
| do?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I've always wondered what he thought on the way down.
| winkywooster wrote:
| whoa, this links to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths, and
| there are some crazy deaths. one that stands out is Kurt
| Godel: "The Austrian-American logician and mathematician
| developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned and refused
| to eat food prepared by anyone but his wife. When she
| became ill and was hospitalized, he starved to death."
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think in most places that bedrooms just need two means of
| egress plus possibly a specific ventilation requirement,
| which is most commonly met via a door plus a window, but
| could be met by two doors to two different legal means of
| egress (and an HRV/ERV if ventilation is required under
| locally adopted code).
| snarf21 wrote:
| I feel like this is not that terribly different than row homes
| in the city. They only have windows in the front and back and
| the back might just be a view of the building backing up on
| them from the other street. These houses already have a long
| skinny footprint and it works fine. It doesn't seem that hard
| to do the same with office buildings. Additionally, amenities
| like a gym, laundry, community room can all be placed in the
| center of each floor as desired.
| irrational wrote:
| But a row house has a front and back door. In an office
| building, the entry would be in the middle. You could divide
| each floor up into four apartments - two long apartments
| stretching the width of the building, say on the East and
| West ends. Then two smaller apartments with windows on only
| one side on the North and South ends of the building.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Why not divide it into four corner apartments?
| hibikir wrote:
| Four corner apartments work great if the floor plate is
| small enough to divide the floor by 4 and end up with a
| sensible square footage. Many office buildings are just
| so much bigger that this would lead to massive apartments
| that have few interior walls. Those are not so easy to
| sell. That's a reason the modern residential skyscraper
| is typically a narrow needle, instead of being shaped
| like Sears tower.
| gumby wrote:
| > But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on
| conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel
| things to do with this deep interior space?
|
| What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments
| had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper
| windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even
| have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings
| and skylights.
| SamBam wrote:
| I was thinking instead you could remove a long rectangle from
| the middle of each floor, so that the two remaining sides
| could have windows facing each other.
|
| If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on
| each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the
| middle block pushed out on each level.
|
| In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of
| all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so
| of the potential floorspace.
| dexwiz wrote:
| The feature you are describing is a light well. They work,
| but I am not sure how well in the configuration you are
| describing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell
| cduzz wrote:
| There's a good "odd lots" podcast about this[1]. There's
| another of their podcasts about how apartment zoning rules
| make it hard to make "family" apartments[2]. Basically you
| need two egress points, windows that can open, windows in
| kitches and bedrooms. All of these are directly in
| contradiction to modern office buildings with open floor
| plans, fixed windows, shared mechanical systems.
|
| So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments,
| but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of
| floor space.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk
| [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME
| MR4D wrote:
| I'll second this - great podcast episode!
| gumby wrote:
| > you end up losing a bunch of floor space.
|
| You're losing 100% of the floor space when it's an unused
| commercial building.
| cduzz wrote:
| I'm not sure your accountant would agree.
|
| An un or under-rented building has some potential value
| based on various hand-wavy factors. Things may get better
| next year and you've only lost a year's of potential
| revenue. You may be able to hand the burning bag of dog
| crap to some star-eyed dreamer.
|
| Taking out a loan, applying for permits, etc, locks in
| the loss. You get to tell your bank the asset they've got
| for collateral is worth a lot less, but hey you've got a
| plan that involves chopping the building apart so there
| are big holes in it so you can rent it to residents
| instead of commercial leases.
|
| Hey it's a brand new market and a wonderful opportunity
| to get in on the ground floor.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > I was thinking instead you could remove a long rectangle
| from the middle of each floor, so that the two remaining
| sides could have windows facing each other.
|
| The space you're referring to is where the elevators,
| staircases, and utility risers are. A high rise building
| needs all three of those things so this idea isn't going to
| work.
|
| Also, cutting out giant chunks of a pre-stressed [0]
| concrete floor plate might be possible, but the risk and
| cost would be enormous. I'm just a dumb subcontractor PM,
| not a structural engineer, so I may be wrong about that, I
| just know it's a very expensive mistake to core drill
| through a pretensioned cable, so we pay people to use
| ground penetrating radar to scan the slab before coring.
|
| [0] https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Prestressed_c
| oncre...
| jessetemp wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. If there's enough room between
| floors already, I wonder if you could squeeze in some
| horizontal periscope skylights without removing floors. Just
| need to occasionally send someone out to scrub the exterior
| window like in that show Silo
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| Minus the part where you're also condemned to death I
| assume?
| pnw wrote:
| Impossible to pull off on a modern office building designed
| with pre-tensioned concrete floors. Cheaper to demolish the
| building and start again.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Pickleball courts!!
| detourdog wrote:
| Charlie Munger did it.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind...
|
| I know there is an HN thread.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| What they would do with a space like this in nearly every place
| on earth except America is make it a marketplace.
| akgerber wrote:
| There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do
| with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in
| post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and
| lots of bicycle parking.
|
| The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as
| well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings
| being expensive urban space. The same is true of city
| governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center
| commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take
| years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to
| accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.
| immibis wrote:
| These problems rely on a particularly rigid definition of what
| housing is. If your house had a back room with no natural
| light, that would be be far from convenient. But would you
| accept it if it cost half as much? I bet you would.
|
| There are probably safety reasons why every room must have
| natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > Conventional wisdom is that only certain office buildings can
| be converted to housing.
|
| If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom
| can be thrown out the window.
|
| I once toured a building that had been converted from an old
| warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the
| condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the
| inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned
| the space directly across the hallway. They were very large,
| and people had transformed them into offices, arcades,
| workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about
| anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't
| "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and
| the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have
| been.
|
| You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as
| "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you
| can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.
| leoedin wrote:
| That sounds great! The thing I love most about living in a
| house is the prospect of "engineering space" - places to do
| carpentry, electronics, home maintenance etc.
|
| Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is
| actually great otherwise.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Would a space in the center of an office tower really have
| enough air ventilation for ordinary hobby-maker work like
| sanding, soldering, painting, resin molding, grinding, etc?
| pragma_x wrote:
| Considering what some people do with basement spaces and
| almost no ventilation at all, I'm going to hazard a guess
| that a windowless interior room is not a dealbreaker.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Plus the fact that the commercial space that's being
| converted was often used for this sort of thing already
| anyway. Yes, this is mostly office space, but many
| engineering firms have an electronics lab or small
| prototyping workshop in their "office" space.
| et-al wrote:
| If anything with large towers, I wouldn't be surprised if
| the HVAC is routed adjacent of the elevator shafts in the
| center of the floor.
| nine_k wrote:
| Offices have ventilation. They are usually more densely
| manned than apartments.
|
| Unless they specifically tear it down during
| redevelopment (why would they?), there should be plenty
| of air circulation.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Are you willing to share where that building is? It sounds
| like a dream to me.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| It was in Chicago, west of downtown
| beaeglebeachh wrote:
| Yes west of Chinatown. Cermak I think. Spice warehouse in
| days of old IIRC. Was used for raves decade+ ago. Place
| is a trip. I camped on top of it once when I was
| homeless.
|
| I've forgotten of that place for years. Truly magical.
| Thank you for the memory. I almost shake recalling it.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I think there are multiple of these kinds of buildings.
| The one I looked at would be considered West Loop these
| days.
| hamburga wrote:
| I'm actually looking at "West Loop" apartments right now.
| Would you mind sharing the address of the building?
| cozzyd wrote:
| It sounds like maybe 165 N canal if my recollection from
| when I was condo shopping is correct (it was a bit above
| my price range, but I seriously envied the large storage
| space). The condo I ended up buying (a converted office
| building in the east loop) has a similar hall of storage
| rooms but they are much much smaller and not practical
| for anything other than storage.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Sorry, it's been a long time and I don't remember. I know
| that we were looking for places that were within a 15-20
| minute walk from the Loop offices where we worked.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I read your description and thought of a building in
| Chicago, but there must be a few like this. The one I was
| thinking of is in River North along the river.
|
| It's a beautiful building, with roomy communal spaces and
| vintage timber all over. I probably would have bought
| there if I weren't too noise sensitive for timber floors.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| NYC has a few places like this, but typically it is living
| space above the ground floor, and you can rent "dont-ask-
| dont-tell" space in the basement. Most people use it for
| storage, but I've seen a few workshops in them.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| > If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional
| wisdom can be thrown out the window.
|
| Conventional wisdom is that there won't be too many windows
| available to throw conventional wisdom out of :-)
| rgblambda wrote:
| Especially if the windows don't open.
| hedora wrote:
| I've seen similar, except the building had > 10 ft ceilings
| for some reason (it had been a factory). The owners built a ~
| 9ft "building" that was missing a wall (and ceilings) inside
| the space. That was where the kitchen and bedrooms were.
| Light came in through the open wall in the kitchen, and from
| where the drop ceiling in the bedroom would have been. The
| rest of the factory floor was hobby / office / entertaining
| space.
|
| It was spectacular.
| bombcar wrote:
| The danger is that people will be tempted to use the
| unlivable space as living space, and then you get some
| massive fire that kills a bunch, and then reactionary laws
| that prohibit everything uselessly.
| kumarsw wrote:
| I dunno if it's practical, but the idea of an urban "garage"
| for woodworking/storing your kayak sounds kinda awesome.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional
| wisdom can be thrown out the window.
|
| Maybe, but you can't throw out the building codes. A
| warehouse, certainly, can be retrofit. But office towers?
| Almost certainly not.
|
| Elevators are not sized for residential; electrical service
| not sized for residential loads
| (dishwasher/dryer/microwaves/ovens); HVAC not sized for
| residential heat loads (same as above); metering requirements
| means the existing electrical rooms are not large enough
| (they are never large enough); plumbing and sewer are not
| sized for residential.
|
| It goes on and on. Even if you got the building for free,
| you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still
| cheaper to demolish and build again. It's not entirely clear
| whether it is or is not.
|
| It can be done if you make huge, expansive apartments, which
| has to be read as "really expensive". There aren't that many
| really rich people who can drop 5 figures per month for an
| apartment.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Water and sewage drainage is also a big deal. Almost impossible
| to retrofit for 150 bathrooms, around the buildings, when you
| originally had 20, around the elevator columns.
|
| Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in
| NYC for 40 years.
|
| We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really
| important consideration, in almost any human venture.
| ff317 wrote:
| What about common spaces? Put the dwellings on the outer edges,
| and use the middle of each floor around the elevators as: gyms,
| libraries, swimming pools, saunas, indoor sports/games
| (pickleball? table tennis? air hockey? retro arcade machines?),
| meeting rooms and small-event spaces for residents? maybe a
| food court with 3rd party vendors? All kinds of creative things
| can be done!
| coryrc wrote:
| SROs could use regular buildings with centralized plumbing.
| Bedrooms can do without natural light. Zoning laws can be
| changed.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Just a reminder that lofts used to once be the least desirable
| places to live. It wasn't until people figured out how to live
| in them that they became cool and desirable.
|
| Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a
| building for natural light and your office and workshops in the
| unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for
| storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these
| buildings excel at providing.
| carabiner wrote:
| In cities where people are renting out living rooms, closets as
| sleeping areas I think windowless units would definitely be
| viable. Hong Kong has cage bunks, SF has adult dorm rooms.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I don't think the shape of office buildings is a problem, you
| can just have stores and storage on the inside and apartments
| on the outside.
|
| The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings
| that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to
| have plumbing ubiquitously.
| avmich wrote:
| > Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep
| interior space?
|
| A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for
| himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly -
| several groups of 3 spaces in each.
|
| One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a
| living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture,
| some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even
| with doors.
|
| Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink
| with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows.
|
| And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves.
| Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum
| cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to
| hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or
| finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have
| windows.
|
| The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to
| keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If
| the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems
| with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use
| as a buffer for something which becomes unused and
| inconvenient.
|
| Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar
| manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and
| miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for
| non-living purposes.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Isn't that the norm already in US? I am from Europe and I
| have 3 living space rooms with windows taking two outer walls
| and inside there is bathroom and storage area with no
| windows?
|
| Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?
| bombcar wrote:
| Bathrooms in houses often have windows, but not always. In
| apartments I've been in it's been about 50/50.
|
| Definitely the classier (and older!) had windows.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| In houses yeah, but in apartments, and any new
| developments I would definitely not expect to see
| windows.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Separate the internal hallways, convert the outside to
| residential, keep the inside commercial but redevelop it to
| support mixed office buildings and retail. Give the bottom
| floor a mall entrance.
| llsf wrote:
| If the build ing is too wide, could we still do a mix use ?
| With residential on one side, and office on the other side /
| interior of the building ?
|
| R R R R R R R
|
| R R O O O O O
|
| R R O O O O O
|
| R R O O O O O
|
| R R R R R R R
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Much of the OP addresses that question.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| There was a big value drop during the pandemic which is still
| ongoing because of home office. Turning them into housing could
| indeed be a good option for people in big cities, but the real
| estate market cares about money and housing is not the best
| option for them.
| FredPret wrote:
| The other option is empty offices
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Im not sure about the laws in the US but here in Germany for
| example if you rent an apartment and pay your rent you can't
| be kicked out.
|
| The set of laws is different for office buildings and
| apartments.
| FredPret wrote:
| Are you saying they can't evict the office tenants in order
| to convert the building? I'm sure any transition from
| office -> condos will be long, messy, and expensive. Still
| better than dead, empty cities though.
| swozey wrote:
| IIRC (it's been awhile) most office leases are for 5
| years, or maybe 3.. I forget. Not sure if they'd have any
| stipulations to allow evictions in an instance like this.
| FredPret wrote:
| I would imagine if office buildings offered tenants a
| get-out-of-your-lease-free card, they'd jump on it.
| Office leases are not cheap, and go on for years (last
| one I dealt with was 7!). And if the office is empty...
| onemoresoop wrote:
| They'll manage to eventually enforce a massive RTO.
| FredPret wrote:
| The most pro-office scenario I can imagine is this:
|
| - There's a massive economic downturn resulting in job
| losses, power briefly shifts from the employees to the
| employers, and the incumbent office-heads indeed insists on
| RTO.
|
| - But they would soon go out of business competing against
| new employers that are remote-only and have far lower
| overhead, killing RTO again.
|
| EDIT
|
| One other scenario that just came to mind is an extreme
| amount of new building and revitalization in cities. If
| they build enough units, and enough big, nice units, and
| spruce up the place a bit, living in a city will become
| cheaper and more practical.
|
| If I can live in a huge nice condo with decent rent, no
| homeless people on the sidewalk, and close to the office, I
| wouldn't mind RTO so much.
|
| As it is, city living only makes sense for those in their
| 20's or those who are truly dedicated to the city
| lifestyle.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Archived: https://archive.is/Rg8g2
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Let's not "save" them, which is just an attempt to bail out the
| landlords who have been gouging the rents and manipulating
| building codes and laws, sabotaging rail, and doing everything in
| their power to keep rents artificially high.
|
| Step 1: Let all the landlords go bankrupt. The buildings will be
| repossessed and owned by creditors, but still there.
|
| Step 2: New people buy them for a fraction of even the current
| price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an
| empty lot.
|
| Any other plan is an attempt to transfer wealth from the people
| to the landlord class to save their skin. Hard pass, let them use
| their 75 years of ill gotten rents.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price,
| and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty
| lot"
|
| If no one truly buys them, you don't get an empty lot. You get
| abandoned, dilapidated buildings and all the associated
| social/environmental problems that comes with that.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| Or the city could just invoke eminent domain, buy it at a
| very low price if the owner can't demonstrate it having a
| high market price, restore the building and democratically
| choose an equitable process to rent it or sell it, hopefully
| favoring existing citizens.
|
| But of course, we'd have to be a lot more aggressive about
| invoking eminent domain for this to be effective. To that
| end, it would make sense to also establish policies ensuring
| it's easy to invoke it fairly and transparently - ie, easily
| allowing other parties to bid against the city for higher
| prices in cases where eminent domain is to be used this way
| (stipulating that those parties also take measures to restore
| the building, etc).
| cm2187 wrote:
| Your city will rather go bankrupt. Just take Detroit as a
| guide.
| jan3024 wrote:
| I am a landlord and I honestly don't understand how this
| knowledge isn't better known. It's free money, if you're not
| taking it I am.
| some_random wrote:
| That's working great for St. Louis! Empty husks of building
| that have sat empty and unmaintained for years being bought for
| cents on the dollar is definitely a sign of a healthy city
| marssaxman wrote:
| The world could definitely use more places like City Museum,
| which would never have happened otherwise.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| St. Louis has paved 27% of its downtown core, maybe we stop
| designing our cities for cars and design them for people, if
| we want them to not be empty.
|
| https://parkingreform.org/parking-lot-map/
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| What you are advocating for is the system that has gotten us
| to the point where nobody can afford housing.
|
| You let rich interests create a situation where they make
| more and more money for doing nothing. In this case, sitting
| on downtown real estate. They use the money to manipulate the
| system to tilt the economy more and more in their favor. They
| kill off attempts to introduce rail. They fight against
| increasing capacity for housing or office space, because when
| demand goes up and supply stays the same they get higher rent
| for doing literally nothing but continue to own the same
| properties. They bribe politicians to force you back into the
| office downtown for no reason.
|
| _This is literally called rent-seeking_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Landlords have
| been doing this for thousands of years to the point it is a
| fundamental economic principle.
|
| Then, when they get in trouble, and they might lose some
| money, you _have_ to bail them out or they will ruin your
| cities. They are going to ruin the cities either way. If you
| bail them out they will take the money and then do none of
| the things they were supposed to do in exchange. They are
| only going to do whatever puts the most money in their
| pocket, and they play a long game.
|
| Here is a counter proposal:
|
| - Tax any vacant building at a rate high enough that any
| owner will be forced to put the building into use or sell it
| to someone who will. This applies both to buildings that are
| 'abandoned' as well as just sitting empty due to lack of
| tenants.
|
| - Tie property tax rates directly to the rate of supply.
| Whenever an action is taken that artificially increases
| property values, increase the rates to offset that increase.
| If the planning commission kills a new apartment building
| that would increase the number of beds in part of the city by
| 1%, increase tax rates by 1% (1% of the current rate). This
| will penalize existing landlords (and homeowners) for rent-
| seeking and NIMBY. This can be done at the state level and
| the funds can be earmarked for low income housing and job
| programs, or parks.
|
| - Offer tax incentives for things that lower property values
| but increase quality of life. These would include housing
| programs, railroads and stations, high density housing, etc.
| This would help balance out the rent seeking behavior of
| landlords and de-align their group interests. For example, if
| I own a large apartment complex and there is a proposal to
| build another large complex next door to mine, I am opposed
| to it. More housing will lower my rents. However, if I get a
| permanent tax cut when the new complex is built, it will not
| take much of a difference in tax rate for my profits to
| increase (since the lowering of marginal rents will very
| small from one building and spread over a wide area, whereas
| the tax benefit is concentrated in the area where I benefit).
| Landlords would then be forced to use their influence to try
| to steer new development to be near their own properties,
| rather than using their combined influence to kill all
| development.
| mycologos wrote:
| I think there's a lot more pent-up demand to live in New York
| than (even pre-decay) St. Louis.
| tensor wrote:
| What an utterly hostile and naive view. We need rental
| buildings and thus we need landlords. There are many many
| scenarios where one may want to rent instead of buy. You need a
| place only for a few years, you need a place while you explore
| to decide where to buy, you don't have the money to buy yet,
| etc.
|
| If your next suggestion is that all landlords be government run
| or run as a coop, no freaking thanks to the first and while
| coops are great I don't think only coops is a good solution. If
| you want only wealthy homeowners and the rest of the population
| living in communism style housing, very hard disagree.
| jmathai wrote:
| I don't see how downtowns without offices would thrive. The main
| attraction of downtowns where people live are that they don't
| need cars because work and social lives are within walking
| distance.
|
| The idea quickly falls apart once you need a car to get to either
| social events or to work.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| You're overthinking it. The equilibrium is that there would be
| fewer offices, not no offices.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Remember the reason that offices are empty is because people
| are working from home. So there is no "commute to work." Social
| and shopping needs would still be met inside the city.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Work that isn't in an office?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The main attraction of living downtown is there's lots of life
| with the people around: plentiful meetups for whatever you
| like, more neighbors for friends, more people to socialize.
| There's a large, living, breathing, constantly-changing
| ecosystem that's self-rearranging of bars for all tastes
| (including non-alcoholic); chain stores and indie ones; parks
| for to frolic; restaurants and food trucks of all shapes and
| flavors; entertainment venues; parades to savor; sports games,
| stand-up, concerts and shows; city festivals, conventions,
| expos; all that and more within walkable distance.
|
| If your work is nearby, that's just chef's kiss, then.
| kumarsw wrote:
| Back when I worked out of an office in an industrial park in
| the suburbs of Boston, a number of the younger/single folks
| would reverse-commute in from the city. Since it was against
| the prevailing flow of traffic it was a pretty easy drive for
| them.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| No
| jmyeet wrote:
| A big issue is _what_ we 're building rather than _how much_ we
| 're building or what we're converting.
|
| There is way too much ultra-luxury buildings getting built in
| NYC. It's simply too profitable and there's little to no
| incentive to build (or convert) apartments normal people can
| afford.
|
| Another problem for NYC in particular, a lot of the buildings
| that exist already would be illegal to build now. I get the
| desire to avoid streets being in constant shadow from surrounding
| buildings but large footprint buildings are simply a more
| efficient use of space once you factor in things like elevators,
| fire escapes and electrical/mechanical ducting.
|
| The NYC government works at the behest of property developers so
| this is unlikely to change.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I lived in Manhattan for 10 years from late 90s into the late
| 2000s, live in NJ now. A major trend I have seen is NYC skewing
| more and more towards the rich/ultra rich and ignoring the rich
| and middle class. We recently visited NYC for the first time in
| a couple of years, and it seemed like everything was
| transformed into Gucci and YSL and Bulgari etc etc.
|
| I don't know how this is sustainable given that Manhattan is an
| island.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| they just opened a Chanel in the Upper West Side
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| The reason why it's more profitable to do ultra-luxury is that
| regulations increase fixed costs, which make it less profitable
| to do projects that would have had lower expected returns, like
| affordable apartments.
| esafak wrote:
| This is an interesting argument. Can we quantify the harm
| done by regulation? Which regulations should be repealed
| first?
| __float wrote:
| Why do you think the luxury buildings are a "big issue"? People
| who _can_ move into those buildings will move into them. This
| frees up the lower priced apartments they previously (or
| otherwise would have) inhabited.
| delfinom wrote:
| Because many are used as vacation homes or just money
| laundering. With wealth inequality at historical world
| records, the rich can just buy both, and they do. Lol
| VancouverMan wrote:
| I wouldn't make the assumption that the people buying luxury
| units will be moving out of lower-priced units.
|
| In Canada's major cities, for example, we see such luxury and
| non-luxury units being bought as stores-of-value by wealthy
| foreigners trying to avoid risk or capital controls, rather
| than as something to be actively lived in by them or anyone
| else. Supply is consumed, without any being relinquished.
|
| Even when the owner might reside in such a unit, it ends up
| being more like a dedicated hotel room for them. They'll
| simultaneously own luxury residences in other cities and/or
| countries, and travel between them. Again, supply is consumed
| (in multiple markets), without any being relinquished.
|
| The luxury market really isn't like the broader housing
| market.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| They aren't living in them, and the way zoning and
| development rights work in NYC, it means that fewer high
| rises can be built for normal housing.
| adolph wrote:
| The thesis isn't about "downtowns" across the country but a
| particular developer in NYC. Older buildings have more usable
| space because they aren't subject to the same standards as new
| buildings.
|
| _And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be
| allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking
| towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a
| tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice
| twenty per cent of the rentable space._
|
| The target demographic doesn't care about windowlessness:
|
| _New York remains a place where many ambitious young people go
| to start their careers, if not to stay, and this demographic is
| ideal for the hotel-style conversions for which office towers are
| most suitable. Moreover, Berman said, "young people are social--
| they don't want to sit in the middle of a forest on a Zoom
| call."_
|
| _Renters are now used to the layouts of chain hotels, where
| there's one window by the bed, so Berman's bathrooms and kitchens
| didn't need to be sunny, and the kitchens could have a minimal
| footprint. "Our demographic doesn't cook," he said. He referred
| to the other rooms without windows as "home offices."_
|
| _Avinash Malhotra, an architect who has done several conversions
| with Berman, noted that a single office tower can be carved up
| into hundreds of little units, as in a hotel. "He is not making
| housing for the homeless," Malhotra said. "But I often joke among
| my employees that what we do is slums for the rich."_
| alberth wrote:
| Plumbing (Kitchens & Bathrooms)
|
| The huge issue in conversions is the amount of plumbing needed
| (and associated cost).
|
| It's not uncommon that an entire office floor might only have 1
| restroom area & 1 mini-kitchen.
|
| But that same floor, configured as apartments, might have 10+
| apartments ... which means 10x the plumbing for bathrooms and
| kitchens that didn't exist before.
|
| And having feeder plumbing that can support that 10x (or more)
| increase in water/waste volume.
| user90131313 wrote:
| I think they can use/invent something like dirty water towers
| in NYC. use that for whatever the NYC use it for. Water there
| really proven dirty so it doesn't matter.
| infecto wrote:
| General building/fire code but even be a larger issue. I
| suspect you could probably solve the plumbing side of things
| but meeting building code might be the larger challenge.
| teeray wrote:
| It's not even just the obvious plumbing providing hot and cold
| water, and the drain pipes carrying away waste water. You also
| need vent stacks for all the drains. You also need to put in a
| whole lot of hot water heaters and the associated electrical
| work to handle their demands.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I've seen plenty of "apartments" (really just a room) in NYC on
| Tiktok that don't have proper restrooms (though they do often
| have a small sink)
| Dowwie wrote:
| Frame additional walls within the room that include additional
| plumbing lines, branching from existing lines as needed.
| Granted, you lose space but at least you'll have a fully
| compliant residence, no?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It's not whether or not it's possible, it's the cost of doing
| it.
| havblue wrote:
| Can you run plumbing through the ceiling of the floor below?
| I'd think there's plenty of free space there but it would
| mean you have access to your neighbor's pipes.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| That's how it's done now.
|
| I once had a clogged drain in my apartment. When it was
| fixed, I was politely asked not to run the water until they
| could inspect the ceiling in the unit below. They wanted to
| make sure that it wasn't going to leak on my neighbor
| below.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Absolutely 100%. There is no reason why office buildings cannot
| be rezoned and regulations loosened to allow for all office
| buildings to be changed into affordable housing.
|
| The only problems are a lack of political will with regard to
| zoning and codes. A common retort is, "well some apartments won't
| get access to natural light" or "utilities are in one place".
|
| In many countries where housing security is tight, there are
| people who live inside apartments without windows.
|
| Secondly, share housing where kitchens and bathrooms were used
| communely (aka a dorm) used to exist for many working class poor.
| Again, if the choice is the street versus a share house the
| choice is obvious.
|
| No one said affordable housing needs to provide natural light,
| private bathrooms, and kitchens. Until the political will exists
| to return to what used to be normal for America and in many
| respects the entire world homelessness will continue.
|
| Sometimes a roof over ones head and a place to sleep is all the
| homeless want. Price it accordingly.
| kkfx wrote:
| A simple note: why people should want to live there? If there is
| no more work in cities except for city services, witch happen to
| be more and more bound to some bigger/external entities, so no
| real margins to evolve for any local company, why be there?
|
| Yes, there are many desperate enough to flock anywhere if they
| see a possible accommodation, but how can they survive locally?
|
| After the '80s logistic revolution and then TLC/IT progress
| finally making offices useless in cities there is no viable
| economy anymore. The new right density for the economy of scale
| are single-family homes and small buildings spread enough to have
| room to change but not too far, intermixed with homes enough to
| avoid the US suburbs error. We can't have a new deal in dense
| cities.
|
| P.v. works best for self-consumption only and we heading toward
| cheap enough batteries to make almost-autonomous homes the norm
| in a large slice of the inhabited world (30kWh capacity per home
| at minimum), we can collect and store and clorate enough water to
| make semi-autonomous homes and various shops. It start to be
| cheaper than creating large aqueducts. We start to being able to
| treat sewers enough to been able to have local treatment instead
| of a sewerage network, we are not there, but near enough. The
| world change and we have to change accordingly meaning we can't
| keep up the immense infra we have made for cities while people
| move around to escape too frequently flooded areas, too hot areas
| and so on. We need infra for industries, and many industries need
| a certain size to be viable, but the trend it's clear we need to
| produce modern way to live less and less dependent on complex
| services existing on ground networks. We still need roads,
| personal air mobility and last-mile air mobility is still far
| despite certain claims
| https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-...
| but we know where we should go. Smart cities can't work like the
| old Fordlandia can't. Classic cities already not work anymore, so
| we do not have other options so far and we need to evolve anyway.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Because cities are awesome: density gives you choice.
|
| In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly have
| several options for what school to send them to, many probably
| within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have one, unless
| they want an hour-long bus ride.
|
| Same goes for restaurants, and social activities -- and people!
| (i.e., potential friends)
|
| Cities are drastically more efficient. PV does -not- work best
| for personal consumption, that's actually the hardest way to go
| because you're not sharing available resources. Same goes for
| almost everything else you listed.
|
| What's not awesome are cities defined by gridlock and huge
| highways, something that is itself addressed by increasing the
| amount of residential space relative to office space.
| kkfx wrote:
| Well, choice to consume, but nothing more. I was living in a
| big dense EU city, after others big&dense, now I'm living in
| the French Alps, at a short-range from the see, but high
| enough to have good climate, nature, still having services
| not like in a big city, but still enough, including good
| enough FTTH, roads, grocery with drive services and so on.
| Before?
|
| Well, before I can choose restaurants from all over the
| world, some fitness centers, some events, always and only
| services to consume and no real personal activity. Traffic
| congestion, lack of space and so on complete the game. no,
| thanks.
|
| In social terms my social life here with FAR LESS people
| around is IMPROVED because being less we are more social, we
| meet much more with different people instead of being in
| bubble if friends, very isolated from all others humans
| around. Surely mean cultural level is far lower, but due to
| the general cultural degradation these days to find
| interesting people for interesting dialogues internet is the
| sole means, we are too rarefied to meet IRL casually.
|
| Schools? Here every school have large green space and plenty
| of outdoor activities, yes not at walking distance but who
| care? Primary schools are normally in 30km radius on good
| roads, high schools are more rare, but not that far away and
| if young start to going out of home to study is a good thing
| for them. Universities became a bit more costly since you
| must be around them but again it's not that special.
|
| Cities IMO are SOLD to be efficient, and they are
| definitively not. Starting from the office model where you
| have a place to live, almost unused during the day, and a
| place to work almost only used during the day, and we build
| such mid/high rise buildings to use them only a bit less than
| half a day, wasting time for commuting, how efficient.... Oh,
| sure, to farm humans is efficient, to live farmed inside
| definitively not.
|
| P.a. actually work ONLY for self-consumption because on scale
| sharing energy is a nightmare for the grid, we do not have
| superconductive links, sharing means sharing locally, so have
| a locally very unstable demand for big power plants, the
| worst scenario for network stability, they can't keep the
| frequency with significant p.v. on grid. Instead IF we focus
| on self-consumption p.v. offer options to heat large quantity
| of water to have them in the night, when needed, to have
| geothermic heat pumps, heating the ground in summer to
| balance the heat get in the winter and so on.
|
| BTW cities can't exists without much highways: there anyone
| eat, and the food came from outside.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Can you accept that different people have different
| preferences? Yours are valid of course, why cant the city
| dwellers prefer what the city offers? You seem to
| understand the advantages the city has but just reject them
| as if everyone feels the same way as you do.
| kkfx wrote:
| Of course, but preference and efficiency are different
| things: people who like living in cities have all the
| rights to clearly state that, as a personal preference,
| as I state mine, but they can't describe their life as
| efficient or ecological since that's definitively not the
| case.
|
| We do many inefficient things just because we like them,
| just think how absurd is smoking tobacco. Smokers have
| all the right to state "it's a pleasure for me", but a
| pleasure does not means automatically a good, sustainable
| and efficient thing. Personally I really like smoked
| salmon, however I life far from salmons natural
| environment, I still buy it because I can, but of course
| I know it's a very inefficient and absurd practice
| (specially since I know a bit the supply chain).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| My understanding is that carbon output per capita is far
| lower in nyc than in american suburbia. American suburbia
| is a pretty unique place, hard to say how it compares to
| europe, but at least in the US city livers generally are
| more ecological at least by some definitions.
|
| I dont think many people value efficiency as highly as
| you do. Tons of people are fine with being inefficient,
| they certainly wouldnt call their actions absurd. To me
| there's nothing wrong with transporting salmon, and Im
| honestly not really sure why you think there is. Most lox
| is factory farmed so not like its threatening the
| species.
| kkfx wrote:
| Well, this is a counter example
| http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-
| and-... and another one
| https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-
| news/domestic/2... beware the model I'm talking about is
| NOT the USA Suburbs model where there are ONLY
| residential settlements and ONLY commercial one well far
| away, I'm talking about the EU "Rivieras" model, where
| commerce and homes are mixed. Like a kind of large,
| spread, set of small villages.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Preferences are one thing, but you're factually wrong
| about the efficiency of cities vs suburbs.
|
| "Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than
| suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly
| large in older areas, like New York."
|
| https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/t
| aub...
|
| "In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times
| the household emissions of their urban cores. While
| households located in more densely populated
| neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the
| national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice
| the average. In metro areas such as New York, GHG
| emissions in these outlying jurisdictions are readily
| apparent: Emissions in Manhattan average lower than 38
| tons per household annually, but in exurban jurisdictions
| such as Sussex County, N.J., these emissions exceed 66
| tons per household annually."
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-
| subur...
|
| You're radically under-estimating the efficiency gains of
| sharing infrastructure. Consider a simple metric like
| paved road-miles per person, or electricity-line-miles,
| or distance to school, etc.
|
| It's absolutely fine to have a preference for a rural
| environment - I grew up in the foothills of the mountains
| and I miss them terribly - but efficiency is a measurable
| metric, and cities win, for better or worse.
| kkfx wrote:
| As answered below that's not what others have observed
| and more relevant is the capacity to evolve. A NEW mid-
| rise building and a NEW set of single family homes
| matching the number of apartment show that the mid-rise
| new building consume less in operational terms than the
| single family homes. Though it demand more raw materials
| to be built, and more infra around it to operate, and
| typically waterproofs the soil for a large area, killing
| soil humus, meaning consuming soil, while single family
| homes do not but the real difference arrive at the end of
| their useful life: rebuild single family homes it's a
| common task. Rebuild a mid-rise building it's another
| story. First of all you have to relocate not a single
| family for a little time but MANY families for a not so
| little time, secondly in most part of the world the
| building owner is not one, they are many and they have to
| agree rebuilt and how to do so, not counting the issue
| such large activity create in the surroundings. Long
| story short: multi story buildings tend to last in
| degrade for a long time, consuming than much more then
| newer homes. Homes can easily built in wood, well, it's
| not pure wood, but it's a self-renewing material in
| nature if we do not harvest too much. Bigger structures
| in wood can be made but they tend to be a nightmare. A
| tall building is not a set of piled containers that
| packed occupy less soil, it have to sustain it's own
| weight, have proper foundations, anti-seismic design,
| fire-safe design etc.
|
| Long story short is like a train: formally is far cheaper
| than a plane, if you just observe a single fully-loaded
| trip. But you have to count all you need to build and
| maintain the train and the relevant infra, and here
| things start to change much, than you have to count the
| flexibility over time: a plane can go from any A to B in
| a certain distance range, a train need rails and
| build/change rails take an enormous amount of work.
|
| Long story short again: yes FORMALLY under specific
| windows of observation the city is far more efficient,
| but in TCO terms is definitively not.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _but they can 't describe their life as efficient or
| ecological since that's definitively not the case_
|
| This is absolutely true.
|
| Problem is living in a suburb is even less efficient and
| even less ecological than living in a city. That's kind
| of the issue.
|
| It's kind of like what they say about democracy. Living
| in a city is the worst way to live on this planet, except
| for all the others.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| The urban-suburban sprawl situation in the US, which is the
| focus of this article, is far removed from the EU.
| Metropolitan areas in the US are characterized by having
| hundreds of kilometers of inefficient low density suburbia.
| In the US, the highways you mentioned are mostly utilized
| for inefficiently shuttling of people back and forth across
| the suburban sprawl. As mentioned in the below linked
| article, in the US metropolitan areas, urban city areas
| have 2x to 4x less carbon footprint per capita than the
| suburbs.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-
| subur....
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| > In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly
| have several options for what school to send them to, many
| probably within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have
| one, unless they want an hour-long bus ride.
|
| I don't think you know what you're talking about. I live in
| about as suburban of a town as you could imagine and there
| are 2 public elementary schools, a charter school, and a
| private Christian school within about a 15 minute walk.
| Within a 5-10 minute drive there are probably 5 more high
| quality charter schools, a few more private schools and who
| knows how many more public schools.
| dgacmu wrote:
| hashtag not-all-suburbs. First of all, your description of
| a "suburban town" may be different from what I mean when I
| say "sparse suburb" (which is kind of the opposite of a
| town). Second, some suburbs immediately next to large
| cities have great schools because they're the place a lot
| of upper-middle class folks fled to 50 years ago. But there
| are also many like I describe. In the Pittsburgh area, if
| you're wealthy and move to the Fox Chapel suburban area,
| you'll have what you describe. If you move a bit farther
| out to Cranberry, you'll have what I described.
|
| (Now, that said, from my spot in the city, there are about
| 10 different elementary schools within a 2 mile radius.)
|
| I suspect we're using the terms in different ways because
| the term itself is a little .. messy:
| https://medium.com/pew-research-center-decoded/evaluating-
| wh...
|
| Also, don't confuse my comment about choice with quality --
| many US suburbs have higher quality schools than some of
| the cities they're adjacent to for reasons of historical
| racism and wealth inequality. A very separate issue from
| the benefits of density!
| kkfx wrote:
| In my post I'm talking generically about "why cities in
| 2024" not counting actual cities. Where I live now, is a
| spread area of single family homes and around here I
| still have a supermarket (grocery store) a 1' car,
| elementary school a 5', a golf club and paragliding at
| 7', a canyoning school at 10' alongside a generic store
| for wood, steel, cements, painting etc, at 15' a kind of
| multipurpose center (used as seasonal cinema/theater,
| cultural center, ...) and a medical clinic, at the same
| time distance various other commerce, all immersed in the
| wood.
|
| The point is not what is there now in a specific place of
| the Earth but what we could do in various places on
| Earth. The society and the economy I've found here,
| arranged as described, do works very well. In the region
| there are a significant variety of human settlements
| ranging from the ITER nuclear research center, the
| European Design Center of Toyota, to various sheep farms
| and tourism. All spread in few hours car range in an
| economy that's still flourishing and alive even in the
| current global state of things. There are many different
| people intermixed, only around my home there is a home an
| USA-French top manager working mostly in the middle east
| and aside his home one of a retired chef of a small
| restaurant in Monaco, in the neighborhood at a walking
| comfy distance we are no more than 30 people, with 7
| different nationalities and a variety of expertise and
| wealth. Oh, it's a small place, but there are many small
| places like that and they can thrive as well. From where
| I'm from I barely know my neighbors in the same building.
| Oh sure, I've study at the uni just 1km away from my old
| home, nice, but for what? If I have a child till the high
| school anything is there, for high school there are still
| some local options (but I might not like their quality)
| and I can buy him/her an accommodation elsewhere where
| he/she can star experiencing an autonomous life because
| yes, teenagers nowadays need to be autonomous and most of
| them are totally unable to be due to their glued, iper-
| surveillant parents. After their studies, after having
| started a career and a family they can choose whatever
| they want to live, after parent's death they can choose
| to go back or sell the old settlements and the society
| keep turning.
|
| A day we will have flying cars? No issue, there is space
| for them. We have added p.v.? No issue again, there was
| already space for it. Geothermal heat pumps? No issues
| the tallest home is three story on it's own ground. The
| blacksmith shed 3km from here start to be used by the
| blacksmith and became something else? No issue is just a
| shed with a bit of space around, easy rebuilt and
| converted to something else. In a dense city NOTHING is
| possible or at least it's terribly costly and
| complicated. Just try to look why the USA can't build a
| high speed rail where they need it: it's simply too
| dense, in France was possible simply because a large
| slice of population leave spread in the country. A new
| airport? Good luck in a dense city that growing and
| growing have surrounded the once upon a time very on the
| outskirts. Good luck turning useless office towers in
| apartments. Good luck restoring a new working economy in
| a dense city. Just to get on-line retails delivery is a
| nightmare, while here switching from classic mailboxes
| meant for paper mail to huts-like ones for packages or
| adding remote opening to the entryphone was pretty simple
| and cheap.
|
| That's why I'm saying the city do not work. I understand
| well that some want it, feel the need of it, feel
| depressed outside, I know personally a handful, personal
| or family friends, they have all the rights for their
| preferences but they also should acknowledge that such
| model can't stand anymore in the present changing world.
| It's not a matter of preference, it's a practical fact.
| Like those who love more and more frequently flooded
| zones, they love them, they have all the rights to love
| them, but they can't expect insurances pay an year after
| another big money for after-flood restoration.
| freddealmeida wrote:
| No
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Yes and no. Lots of new residential can save downtowns. Just
| build new residential however. It's not that much more expensive.
| The existing office can continue to be used as commercial real
| estate, especially by the new residents.
|
| Together, this will help create walkable, vibrant downtown with
| no need for a car to commute to work. The only thing preventing
| this is zoning, which currently bans most new residential.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There are a lot of cities that don't have much undeveloped land
| in their downtowns left. Add in things like work from home for
| your traditional office workers and you've got a lot more
| office space than you need so there's a push to find some use
| for these buildings before the bottom completely falls out of
| the office real estate market.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| One of the great NIMBY myths is that there is a lack of
| developable land in urban areas. Without exception, every
| North American city has vast swaths of underdeveloped land
| where shorter, outdated buildings can be torn down and
| replaced with denser, more modern, energy efficient housing.
|
| WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in
| person, and relatively few people have the luxury of an at-
| home office, especially those within urban areas. Perhaps
| you're happy with your employer pushing office costs onto
| you, but I prefer an employer that provides me with an office
| that I can walk/bike to instead.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There are vanishingly few cities in the US where a
| walkable/bikeable commute is even a real option even if
| you're willing to move deep into the downtown and move each
| time you get a new job. The costs of having my own office
| are far offset by not having to drive at all most days and
| I'm only ~15-20 minutes by car from my office.
|
| I work in a large multi-site company so I'm either at home
| on zoom for meetings or in the office on zoom for meetings
| hearing 60 other people also have zoom meetings. There's
| vanishingly small benefits for coming to the office for me
| because the people I could conceivably benefit from in
| person collaboration with are hours away so no matter what
| my day lives on video calls and Teams chats.
|
| > WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in
| person,
|
| I'm increasingly convinced this is simply not true for most
| jobs and it's being pushed by a) middle management who like
| in office because they can wander by and check in on
| everyone easier or b) the real estate arms of companies
| trying to justify extremely expensive leases they can't get
| out of. Personally I think b is the ultimate reason because
| it looks bad to have this cost sitting around with no
| 'justification'.
|
| Anecdotally our leadership was effusive with praise about
| how productive we were during the 2 years+ of complete work
| from home and yet no matter how much feedback they get that
| people aren't happy with RTO we've been slowly ratcheting
| up the number of days required in and increasing the level
| of tracking of adherence to this new policy no one but the
| C-Suite seem to want.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| It's the converse of what you claim. The denser an urban
| area, the easier it is to switch jobs and still maintain
| a reasonable commute. Sprawling metros like Boston have
| already fractured into sub job markets: Someone living in
| the North Shore area cannot switch to a job in Metro west
| without enduring a crushing 3-4 hour daily commute. By
| comparison, someone living in the Back bay can switch
| companies located in the Seaport to the Financial
| District without too much disruption to their commute.
| This becomes more and more true the denser the
| environment and supporting mass transit increase.
|
| Great for you you love WFH. Go move to the burbs and let
| the cities build homes for those who don't. No one is
| forcing you downtown.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Sure, but this is less possible if your downtown is already
| full of commercial real estate in towers already. Yes, you
| could argue further zoning changes on the remaining plots could
| be turned into towers, but it doesn't provide a guarantee the
| office space will get filled.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| No downtown area in North America is full. Every city has
| vast swaths of underdeveloped land that can be turned into
| nice, new housing. Zoning should be changed so developers can
| make the call on what is profitable and not profitable, not
| NIMBY politicians or internet commentators.
|
| As a side benefit, the new housing will relieve price
| pressure on existing, overpriced older housing.
| vondur wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by Full. Here is Los Angeles the
| downtown core is completely built. You'd need to tear down
| existing structures and purchase the land to do so.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| LA is one of the most underdeveloped cities in the US. It
| is ripe for much denser housing in its urban core.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| About 23% of downtown Los Angeles is parking lots.
|
| https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/how-much-of-your-city-
| is-...
| gffrd wrote:
| I think you're ignoring that fact that once you remove the
| commerce function of a city, a lot of the factors that create a
| vibrant culture go away.
|
| If it's not a place where people make money / strive / want to
| make something of themselves, it's either a retirement
| community or a vacation town: just in sustaining mode.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I think BenFranklin100 is implying that new residential would
| be in addition to commerce / office.
|
| The residential helps businesses stay open 7 days a week,
| instead of closing for the weekend when no one is at work.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| That is exactly what I am saying. Lots of new residential
| not only helps drive demand for the currently underutilized
| office space, the increased 24/7 foot traffic will drive
| demand for restaurants and other local businesses.
| gffrd wrote:
| Ah, I see.
|
| What I'm missing: if business scales down, thus population
| and culture scale down (unless populated by people
| independent of these things). This means higher vacancies
| of existing residential, so how much new residential is
| needed?
|
| I guess what I'm ultimately wondering: what's the "critical
| mass" of a city? At what point, does the commerce/social
| engine get small enough that it's no longer sustainable? We
| already saw many US cities were "weekday-only" cities,
| devoid of anything interesting, before the pandemic.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I was recently in Dublin, and tbh, you are right. There's so
| much space that could actually be used for large residential
| buildings, but no, instead people queue and compete for halls
| in the ground.
| quinnquan wrote:
| Will we be able to afford them is the real question.
| throw0101c wrote:
| A few months ago Bloomberg's _Odd Lots_ podcast had an episode on
| this:
|
| > _Big cities like New York have two real estate problems.
| Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least
| under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution:
| turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of
| talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very
| hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then,
| of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need
| to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak
| with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a
| firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and
| long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We
| discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these
| complex projects._
|
| * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-it-really-takes-to-conve...
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk
| burningChrome wrote:
| I've only seen one successful project that was able to convert
| a business office to residential apartments/condos. If I
| remember correctly, the building had been vacant for a while
| (it was built in 1986) and the company who bought it got a
| really good deal and so the conversion was able to happen
| without having a massive amount to overcome in order to be
| profitable. The building just had the perfect layout and
| structure that made it suitable for a conversion. Ironically,
| the developer filed bankruptcy during the 2008 housing collapse
| and several other conversions he was aiming to do also went
| under.
|
| Here's some information about the project: Cloud 9 Sky Flats:
| https://www.homes.com/building/cloud-9-at-sky-flats-minneton...
|
| A recent article about one of the condos going up for sale:
| https://www.startribune.com/corporate-office-turned-condo-in...
| pydry wrote:
| I used to live in one too (not yours). It's weird how often
| people would tell me that this was infeasible and impossible
| to do it at all.
|
| I also almost bought one that was in a converted school. I'm
| sure some people could come up with reasons for why that is
| impossible too.
|
| Zoning is the only absolute impediment I can think of and
| that is a self imposed one.
| nine_k wrote:
| I've seen a conversion done a few years ago, say, 2019, right
| next to where I live, just south of Prospect Park. A blocky
| office building has been converted to a residential building,
| and then has been rented out very quickly. It's not a tower
| though, a relatively easy conversion. Large windows must be
| attractive for some though, especially those facing the park.
|
| Admittedly, it's Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and the adjacent
| blocks are residential.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes certainly, now that people have realized they can work from
| home, the corporate jig is up. Time to convert those offices into
| more residential buildings!
| giantg2 wrote:
| There's lots of stuff in the article about the feasibility of
| turning the buildings into apartments. But I don't see anything
| convincing about it saving the downtown. It seems to me that a
| lot of people who do leave downtown areas are leaving for non-
| housing issues - lack of services (police), high taxes, bad
| schools, etc.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I think you might be conflating two issues. Housing in downtown
| isn't desirable for a populace of people (probably true for
| those who need more space and/or want to think about issues
| like schooling etc.) and downtown isn't being used (even for
| office use).
|
| The idea to turn office towers into apartments tries to address
| the second issue without explicitly trying to solve the first
| (which is make downtown more desirable to live in).
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not conflating them at all. They are two interdependent
| variables in the system. Even TFA says that 20% usage of the
| empty buildings would be extremely optimistic. So you're not
| going to be even close to solving it by focusing on just the
| second.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Nope, absurd property-speculation driven tax burdens and chaotic
| zoning inevitably drive out both residential dwellings and
| business competition.
|
| Cities were traditionally a side-effect of communication hubs,
| trade collocated with rail/shipping locales, and centralized
| labor-driven stable factory lines. Communication is now
| decentralized due to technology changes since the early 90's,
| trade is now settled with online brokerages/logistics, and
| factories were either outsourced or moved into more favorable tax
| districts to maintain competitive posture.
|
| Most modern cities are now running unsustainable theme-park
| service economies. Note municipal districts are never stripped of
| jurisdictional tax boundaries, and this still holds true even for
| areas in economic decline due to mismanagement/arrogance.
|
| Have a wonderfully awesome day, and I thank god it is not my task
| to try and fix these issues =)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| gffrd wrote:
| TL;DR: No.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Large buildings with controlled ventilation offer the prospect of
| better control over air composition, in particular reduction of
| CO2 levels. As CO2 rises this could become very important.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I may be overlooking a downside but it always seemed obvious to
| me office and apartment buildings should be intermixed.
| Separating living, shopping and office into different zones
| always felt strikingly absurd. I am happy to live in a place
| where it's not the case so my office building is less than 15
| minutes walking from my home, as well as a supermarket, a
| swimming pool, a forest, a university and everything else one can
| imagine wanting in their life.
| gffrd wrote:
| I think the separation happens organically, and is driven by
| efficiency.
|
| The environment needed for maximizing work is often at odds
| with the environment for maximizing leisure.
| wuyishan wrote:
| "maximizing" seems to be the problem here.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Well it hurts the efficiency of both when people have to
| spend 2+ hours of every work day commuting.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Unless you're in the business of selling gas or cars...
|
| Or single family homes with a large yard and a white picket
| fence 1+ hour outside of the city...
| beretguy wrote:
| Separation does not happen organically. Rich people and
| governments are in charge of city planning and they make
| wrong decisions based on making profits.
|
| In city where I live some rich dude contributed to our city
| governor's campaign or something. Now governor has to "return
| the favor" by relocating thousands of government employees
| from downtown area which is close to a lot of people's homes
| to outskirts of the city where nobody lives and where that
| rich dude owns office space for rent.
|
| https://www.thestate.com/news/politics-
| government/article281...
|
| Wasting hours in traffic every day/week won't give you any
| time for leisure.
| tuxpenguine wrote:
| It's doesn't happen organically. It is usually designed by
| city planners (or equivalent functions depending on the
| city). It makes most sense to have mixture of residential and
| commercial buildings in the same area so that there is no
| foot traffic vacuum depending on the time of the day. Foot
| traffic vacuum creates space for potential crimes. (e.g, if
| you separate commercial and residential, the commercial area
| will be more likely crime ridden at night and residential
| area will be more prone to crime during the day).
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Here in Oslo, the mixed-use Vertikalen[1][2] recently
| officially opened. Ground floor is a cafeteria and a
| restaurant, followed by a several floors of offices, and the
| rest above is all residential apartments.
|
| While the looks can be argued, the mixed-use seems like an
| interesting idea. Not aware of too many other such buildings
| here, so will be interesting to see how it fares.
|
| [1]: https://www.archdaily.com/1016072/vertikal-nydalen-
| snohetta
|
| [2]: https://vertikalnydalen.no/
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| American cities have developments like this now (Baltimore
| and Philly for example), but it requires acquiring
| gentrifiable land/buildings, the capital to renovate them,
| and demand to pull in the middle-class hipsters to live
| there.
| acdha wrote:
| You're right. What I've heard is that this is basically another
| area with misaligned incentives: for any given project offices
| are cheaper to build, have fewer permitting concerns, and
| cheaper to manage (a few big commercial clients versus hundreds
| of renters), and cities may prefer them if they're tight on
| capacity for things like schools - but if everyone does that,
| your city is unappealing and excessively exposed to the
| business health of a few companies or industries.
| tomrod wrote:
| Save? Absolutely not.
|
| Evolve? Yes.
| vondur wrote:
| Sadly, it's probably cheaper or a similar cost to tear down the
| office buildings and just build new residential housing.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| Are we rapidly brushing past the question "do we want and need to
| save downtowns in the first place?"?
|
| I have not really thought that through; at first blush it seems
| obvious that one would want to save these downtowns. But also
| some of the best innovations arise out of the creation that
| follows destruction.
|
| I'm open to clarifying opinions on the matter
| tylerFowler wrote:
| I do think the simple fact of offering hyper-dense communities
| (especially in cities that lack them otherwise, like many
| midwestern cities, say) makes any downtown attractive as a
| living option to a certain group of people who want the "15
| minute city" experience. Doing so tends to transform downtowns
| into actual communities as well, as opposed to places with many
| low quality vendors that cater to duller, less personable
| 9-to-5 routines.
|
| And then of course there are knock-on effects to placing people
| like that (typically young professionals and artists) together
| like that to rub shoulders, talk about ideas, start businesses
| etc...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| New growth cities have a supreme advantage here, because they can
| redistribute prior growth strategies into their current growth
| models. The faster these newer cities are currently growing the
| less they will be disrupted by loyalty to prior growth patterns.
| Older cities are doomed to empty at their cores unless they have
| something unique and specific that is cause for perseverance.
| There is no illusion to any of this. Wishful thinking and
| nostalgia won't fix it.
|
| Its just economics. The answers to over coming economic
| disruption are always the same: be where you are not expected or
| do that which others cannot.
| tomohawk wrote:
| How would that fix the broken governments, schools, and rampant
| crime?
|
| The cities I live near seem to have no problem attracting young
| singles and couples. Young urbanites I've worked with have all
| moved out when (a) they have kids and realize how bad the schools
| are, (b) when one of them gets mugged, (c) they get married to a
| non-urbanite, (d) they want local governance that is at least
| slightly sane.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| It's insane that so many cities will spare no expense to avoid
| doing things that actually matter, no amount of resources is
| spared to ensure serious drug addiction, homelessness and crime
| runs amok.
| geodel wrote:
| Hasn't RTO (return-to-office) mandate solved the issue of empty
| office towers. Other day I read 90% of employers have forced RTO.
| And for companies with significant downtown real estate they are
| really aggressive with 100% compliance.
| colechristensen wrote:
| No. There is a bit of a crisis with commercial real estate.
| Locally there are several stories of large businesses slashing
| their footprint, say, in half or selling buildings outright.
| geodel wrote:
| Ah good to now. I was thinking about this and come to
| conclusion that city govt, builders, employers which are all
| powerful entities and they all looking to fill office
| buildings. But I do not see a powerful counterbalancing force
| on this issue. Because employees are typically on receiving
| end of this _my way or highway_ policy.
| junto wrote:
| In countries where the news media is largely consolidated,
| there seems to be a campaign of news articles pro-return-
| to-work. My assumption is that the overlap in interests
| between rich connected news and media magnates and
| commercial property ownership is somewhat aligned.
|
| In my opinion we have already crossed the rubicon on this
| topic and the pandemic caused a paradigm shift that means
| it's very hard to put that genie back on the bottle,
| regardless of how many news articles they write.
|
| Organizations are finding it extremely hard to hire if they
| have an in-office policy. Few people want to lose two hours
| a day commuting in cities like London and rammed into busy
| public transport which used to be the case.
| gffrd wrote:
| I know many people whose companies have an RTO mandate, and
| would put themselves in that "90% of employers with forced RTO"
| group ... but where the rubber meets the road, many are not in
| office and enforcement is more of an unspoken agreement with a
| manager about being in from time to time.
|
| So, public face / private face stuff.
|
| Commercial real estate is in a much worse place than they care
| to say.
| Animats wrote:
| That article says "we're building slums for rich people".
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Although fewer people may want to work in Manhattan, more than
| enough still want to live there.
|
| And if you can live closer to work, there's a better chance
| you'll want to show up in person instead of telecommute.
| cpursley wrote:
| No, only safe multi-modal infrastructure and improved safety
| will. Fix that and the highest and best use of properties will
| sort themselves out.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Save from what exactly? This is phrased as if the current state
| of affairs where nearly all real estate is owned by investors
| whose only goal is to milk it for maximum value at the expense of
| the working class and common people. What exactly do we need to
| save these down towns again?
| tylerFowler wrote:
| It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its
| latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it
| comes to this topic.
|
| From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was
| in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying
| historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in
| suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves.
| Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding
| (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new
| stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion
| projects*.
|
| There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity
| Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a
| huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part
| of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power &
| Light Building
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...)
| (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and
| now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has
| similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes
| that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the
| 30-story Commerce Tower
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it
| was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on
| the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office,
| it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking
| buildings have had major success with residential conversions.
|
| These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is
| willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and
| prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've
| lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy
| problem not an economic problem.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I was under the impression that Kansas City was still in a bit
| of a dire situation as far as crime is concerned[1], so I
| appreciate you highlighting some positive developments.
|
| In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit
| free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was
| an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and
| fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving
| around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular
| traffic.
|
| [1]https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-
| dangerous...
| nox101 wrote:
| I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run.
| People generally devalue thing that are free in my
| experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the
| thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free
| just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it
| must be for poor people, not me).
|
| Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless?
| Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me
| up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's
| free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting
| rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if
| they end up in the train system even less people are going to
| use it.
|
| Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is
| always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do
| what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the
| previous two points make the non transit using tax base see
| it as a waste of their taxes.
|
| I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good
| transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore,
| etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making
| things worse for transit that would be bad.
|
| I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train
| system and giving the companies incentives to make the train
| system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses
| (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people
| ride their trains the better these other interests do and
| visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a
| better line run buy a better company. They may not directly
| think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and
| coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that
| is from train company investment so their appears to be a
| positive feedback loop.
| jen20 wrote:
| My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses
| it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC
| for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well
| handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13
| years I've been going.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free
| they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders
| that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when
| given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat
| this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a
| small one. It will be interesting to continue following
| their experiment.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Does Kansas City have a police presence on the tram? I'd
| expect that to be more effective than a fare.
| tylerFowler wrote:
| Ohhh yeah, they definitely do. Usually just on weekends
| or for events but you have fully uniformed & armed
| officers riding the loops.
| jandrese wrote:
| Adding fares just means the nuisance riders will jump the
| fares. It won't stop them from riding.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| If that were the case, the theory is that the issues
| would not have increased after they went fare free. The
| increase may have been due to something else, though.
| Experimentation is probably the only way we will truly
| find out.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| It coincided with opening the new light rail in the most
| popular nightlife areas. Hardly a laboratory setting
| tylerFowler wrote:
| The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they
| rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so
| that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown
| where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new
| developments (a good thing). This was the first public
| transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that
| suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments
| on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent
| sized event it became the smartest way to park and not
| overpay.
|
| They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city
| colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean,
| doing things like putting live music at every stop on
| certain days etc... It became really fashionable really
| fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on
| the weekends.
|
| Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry
| the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for
| making that free as well.
| matt-p wrote:
| I suspect charging a nominal but non zero fee e.g $2 on
| peak $1 off peak per trip probably ends up with the best of
| both worlds. Free ends up with some negative side effects
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Why not just ban the homeless then? They're not hard to
| identify and remove.
| toyg wrote:
| Effective commercialization of station space is indeed a
| positive development, but you don't really need to
| privatize railways to get that (even without going into the
| whole "privatizing in Japan is not the same as here", since
| large private companies and local authorities coordinate
| strongly in ways that we wouldn't consider acceptable in
| the West). Very dense European cities, like London and
| Paris, are getting more and more of that type of
| development too; and even in Tokyo, not all stations have a
| commercial development on top. It's mostly a function of
| density levels, which are sky-high in Japan.
|
| One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations
| are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good
| money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or
| nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system
| more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West,
| where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant
| cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and
| in their remuneration levels.
| tylerFowler wrote:
| Yeah crime post-pandemic there is still a major problem,
| although typically concentrated in poor neighborhoods as
| opposed to downtown. When I first moved there, the inner city
| was considered really dangerous and I saw such rapid
| gentrification that you'd see people walking their dogs in
| the middle night without incident just within 8 months or so.
| So it just sorta.. moved.
|
| I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime
| despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core,
| which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least
| feel safer.
| Zak wrote:
| Crime rates on that site appear to be from 2020.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying
| historic buildings, etc.
|
| That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office
| space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely:
|
| _Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the "doom loop":
| once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and
| restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area
| even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no
| services?_
|
| > every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings
| of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments
|
| Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are
| easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes
| it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in
| many/most/all places).
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact
| connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP
| described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the
| problem
| wernercd wrote:
| The problem is the differences...
|
| IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities.
|
| I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in
| the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current
| differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply
| turning buildings into apartments.
|
| Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over
| because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because
| people aren't there. They care closing because they can't
| afford to have half their wares walk out the door because
| New York is refusing to charge criminals because of
| "justice".
|
| The world we live in is vastly different than it was and
| the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.
| causality0 wrote:
| I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to
| prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you
| stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like
| that crime is happening less on paper?
| pstrateman wrote:
| Yes because the police stop arresting people for it.
|
| If you don't prosecute, it effectively stops being
| illegal.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most of the time. Certain crimes (eg public intoxication)
| often have an arrest followed by letting the person go
| when they've sobered up, so no official prosecution but
| not no arrest.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| If true, maybe. But this very point makes this whole line
| of argumentation unfalsifiable and in that a little
| limp...
| malfist wrote:
| Ah yes, New York, home of "stop and frisk" and it's other
| soft on crime policies.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Citation needed on all of that. It's not just retail
| closing up in NYC -- the rent is ludicrous, and no one
| wants to start renting at a lowe rate lest their
| appraisal goes down and their mortgage lender/city
| coffers start putting the pressure on the landlord
| sifttio wrote:
| Corporate real estate is a different beast. Residential
| real estate and corporate real estate do not mirror each
| other in the market. One can be in high demand while the
| other has excess supply.
|
| Residential landlords are also much different than
| dealing with corp real estate owners. The terms, length
| of lease, laws and many other factors are completely
| different.
| bombcar wrote:
| Perhaps we need to encourage (via taxes?) convertible
| buildings that can either be corporate or residential
| with relative ease, similar to how in smaller towns you
| often have dentists and lawyers operating out of
| obviously converted houses.
| choilive wrote:
| This is primarily a building code issue for residential
| vs commercial construction.
|
| Office generally try to maximize square footage, this
| tends to result in floor plans that are very awkward to
| adopt into residential use, primarily because the
| building code virtually everywhere has some sort of
| "natural light"/window requirement.
|
| This means that purpose built residential high rises tend
| to be "skinnier" to have more windows per sq. ft of floor
| space. Not to mention the very expensive changes (hvac,
| plumbing, etc.) required to support residential use.
|
| If the building code was changed so that the requirements
| for office and residential use buildings were closer then
| it would make future buildings more easily convertible
| between those use cases. It does not solve the problem of
| the existing buildings however..
| hughesjj wrote:
| I don't get how any of that is relevant when my claim is
| that the corporate rental rates is also too high and the
| financing for rentals shares the same concerns w.r.t
| rentable price regardless if it's residential or
| corporate landlords
| tylerFowler wrote:
| Fwiw it's almost exclusively international developers
| running the conversions in Kansas City. I think Greystar
| might be the one with the largest footprint there.
| tylerFowler wrote:
| True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I
| understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was
| more or less static downtown through all of that. Though,
| nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more)
| remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year
| history or so of that city, one could say office space was
| largely unused.
|
| Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would
| have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of
| the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965.
| Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped
| resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".
| masom wrote:
| "older" and "newer" is the construction type.
|
| Think of an old brick building with several stories and a
| window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with
| windows spanning multiple floors.
|
| The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent
| post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer
| buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to
| be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge
| cost.
|
| The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and
| to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around
| the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building
| not purposed for this is challenging (where does the
| "contaminated" air go out?).
|
| It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over
| than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this
| often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep
| a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.
| melenaboija wrote:
| I have seen something similar happen in Birmingham, AL while
| living there since 2015 to 2022.
| justanother wrote:
| To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of
| the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City
| anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large
| portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play
| hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul
| (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but
| we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall
| neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were
| still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are
| taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda
| pleasant place.
|
| Surely this could not have been possible without some civic
| backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful
| and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you
| note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.
| tylerFowler wrote:
| The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the
| artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In
| general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to
| go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms
| is packed with record stores and underground (literally)
| event venues though the Halloween event people still take up
| most of the space that might be good for living/working.
| matt-p wrote:
| I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite
| a while, many apartments were once factories or something else
| 100 years ago.
|
| I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in
| turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually
| really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very
| little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats
| needed to get window access would be really impractical.
| Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and
| locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use
| beyond offices.
| tylerFowler wrote:
| Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was
| Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled
| office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It
| probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had
| centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that
| meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I'm hardly an expert on this, but it seems the exact same thing
| happened to all sorts of cities in the 2010s. Millennials
| wanted to live in cities.
|
| It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but
| still worth pointing out.
| indymike wrote:
| I've looked at the cost of converting office space to
| residential, and every time, it was slightly less costly than a
| tear down and rebuild - and in one case it was a lot more. And
| that's before you deal with parking. The other issue was taxes:
| the city would not get the same tax revenue out of the building
| and wasn't very interested in the project as a result.
| Vvector wrote:
| can you explain why parking would be an issue? Typically
| offices are more people-dense than residential. So converting
| office to residential should reduce the number of parking
| spaces needed.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| why would people want to live there if there are no jobs there
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| How come nobody ever talks about industrializing the suburbs? I
| live 6 minutes by car from the small scale manufacturing concern
| where I work. It's kind of amazing.
| fHr wrote:
| return to office boomer cto policies are in full swing though
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| who bought the office towers during covid and wants to
| sell/repurpose them? ya
| wnc3141 wrote:
| 1) smaller office complexes around the perimeter of downtowns
| make cheap tear downs while businesses concentrate into most
| desirable office space.
|
| 2) older buildings are more viable for residential conversions,
| if subsidized into positive economics
|
| 3) permit + incentivize residential construction - you'd be
| surprised how much of typical US downtowns are made up of parking
| lots/structures which can easily be scraped for housing.
|
| Lastly as people do fill into downtowns, that will naturally
| convert into the ecosystem that serves those people - for all but
| capital intensive projects which will need to be spearheaded by
| municipalities and developers alike.
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