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Ask HN: What should companies be doing with all their empty office space?

2 points by gooob ↗ HN
My employer has a large office building. Ever since the pandemic, 95% percent of the desks are empty. most of the floors have nobody working on them. it's like the backrooms. i was thinking of indoor gardening. bring in some lights and plant trays of seeds. what are your ideas?

15 comments

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cratermoon
Housing for the houseless.
jvm___
An office only needs one central water/sewer connection for the bathroom and kitchen. Renovating concrete floors to add additional water/sewer connections - and renovating the main water intake and sewer lines to handle the additional volume makes office -> housing renovations more expensive than flattening the building and starting over from scratch (which is obviously horrible for the environment)
gooob
or maybe some type open community work/art space? you'd have to do it in a way that doesn't distract the employees who do choose to work in office though.
retrac
If only it were that easy! If offices could be easily converted to residential, then the current market conditions would be incentivizing owners of all these vacant office spaces to be pressuring for re-zoning and conversion right now. Unfortunately, many office spaces are ill-suited for residential conversion.

There's often not enough plumbing. Often very literally, as in the main sewer, and municipal infrastructure, are undersized for residential use. Also, once you add adequate walls and dividers to separate the units, plus furniture, packed into typical apartment sizes, the weight is usually much more than for an office, often more than the structure is rated for.

controversial97
Also, office buildings that are more than a few floors tall usually have sprinkler systems.

Dividing an open plan office into lots of rooms is an expensive nightmare of adding and moving air conditioning ducts and outlets, fire detection sensors and sprinkler pipes and heads.

It can be done but it's not cheap.

LinuxBender
This sound like an opportunity to optimize the business costs. Assuming they can get out of their lease or other contracts, cut the loss and write-off any early cancellation contract penalties if possible in their state. Their finance department and tax consultants should be able to help with this. Let a philanthropist or co-founder lease the old/big building in a separate LLC and turn it into something cool if there is a desire to do so, keeping that burn rate out of the public numbers.

Lease a much smaller building with some good parking and put in "hotel space" desks, wifi, healthy snacks. Keep it as lean as possible and keep the contracts to 1 or 2 years. This gives people a chance to mentor in person and for people that need socialization to do so. The smaller building should have some meeting and training rooms and also some private/quiet rooms so people can focus. There should be a few sound-proof booths for phone calls to keep distractions to a minimum. Ensure that all levels of management have bi-annual training to make the best of remote-work and to ensure their employees are productive, healthy and happy.

gooob
well, yeah, that might be the default business choice. but it still leaves the question: what to do with the office space? what is the philanthropist going to do? should we completely renovate the building? demolish and rebuild? or is there an actual good use case for an old office building?
LinuxBender
That's harder to answer. The building's zone may have existing restrictions that limit what may be done. For example, a common idea is to provide housing but that may not be an option depending on city ordinance and zoning regulations which means that philanthropist may first need to lobby the city to provide exemptions. If they donate or invest heavily in the city then they may get unfettered options or at least more options. Whether your company owns or leases the building is also a major limiting factor.

- One example would be to make the first floor a branch office for the local police department.

- If there is garage space then perhaps part of it could be sub-divided out to the fire department. Investing in the city buys a lot of power and exemptions from rules.

- One floor could be turned into a public library that provides internet access, selling coffee and snacks. Accept donations of old PC's to be iPXE booted into windows or linux, users-choice, nfs/cifs diskless.

- If the building is big enough, perhaps part of the first floor could be turned into a city civic center that people can rent out for events.

- If the building already has a decent security system then perhaps one floor could be converted into a museum for the city. Local historians should enjoy this.

- If there is a big parking garage it could sub-divided and become low-cost or free public parking, assuming the insurance company is down with this idea.

Zoning regulations aside, all of these things have tax and insurance implications.

controversial97
In lots of places in the USA zoning laws prohibit agriculture in urban areas where an office building is likely to be located. Growing plants in an office building may not be permitted.
gooob
well that's silly
napolux
Social coworking. A space where for a monthly subscription people can study, work, surf the internet with their computers and socialize. A place for meetups, hackatons, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, art, etc...

Like a library or a gym, but for your mind.

And if there's already a gym, bingo!

This is for a full building, but you can also do something social for many smaller places.

gooob
yeah i like that idea
kwertyoowiyop
Belko Experiments, obviously.
gooob
now i have a new movie to check out. thank you
mamonster
Serious answer: Check the lease.

Unless your company outright owns the building, your lease contract will usually have pretty severe restrictions about what you can or cannot do with the space.

If your company outright owns the building, chances are that your management may already be looking into selling it but can't find a buyer at a price they like.