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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors.
This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations.
You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside.
I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it.
Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away.
I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep.
At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains.
It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics.
Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes offices are empty because banks that own them dictate the lease rates and building managers can't adjust price to fit the market rate. I sometimes think city councils and codes get too much heat on this issue and the 800lb finance gorilla in the room is politely ignored.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
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!
I really appreciate your perspective. We as a society really are too fixated on keeping up with the Jonses, and it really sucks from a mental health standpoint I think. The city life can exacerbate this feeling considerably too.
Rural is a completely different beast and the limited infrastructure makes for a more sustainable setup, the issue is that the low density makes it unobtainable for most people. I also love the countryside, but it doesn't work as a general rule. It would work better if developments were designed with an urban mindset, but in the US you end up with unsustainable suburban sprawl that never aligns with the tax base.
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.
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!
Strong towns is not a good source. They keep stating "facts" that don't check out. Lanes do not need to be replaced every 20 years. On the busy streets they do, but on the not busy streets they can last a lot longer. They make lots of other mistakes like that in other analysis. Pipes last 60-100 years in the ground, but Strong Towns likes to calculate as if they need to be replaced every 20.
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.
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.
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.
This is how it works in Japan. I thought it was quite nice when I visited. You just enter the elevator at the ground floor, and every button has a store name next to it. You get some pretty nice views when dining on the 15th floor of a building in Akihabara.
Sharing a wall with a neighbor is something I happily to pay a premium to avoid. Hearing a neighbor beat her son or listening to top volume manufactured R&B beats at 2AM when I needed to be at work at 530AM are not fond memories. It was powerful motivation to take my career more seriously.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
>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.
Addressed in the article! Apartment buildings need less elevators than offices since residents tolerate longer waits. There's still elevators, just less.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
Agree. Most office plates have plumbing for the equivalent of four bathrooms, max, all centered near stairs, etc. Figure you would need to 4x the existing number of toilets to make a floor residential and also link to existing central sewage lines. I don't even know what building code even looks like for that in most states.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm arguing it's a good thing California will let humans choose to man make a house wildfire trap (forest didn't pick you to put a house there) and they should apply their standard of "die in a fire if you like" to everything. I believe, counterintuitively, it will save lives.
Of course the building inspector sees the charred bodies he didn't prevent, but he doesn't see the frozen and exposed ones he created through his policies that handicap supply. The incentives of code and inspection are horribly perverse.
The point of building codes and code inspection is so that people don't put others in danger. And in the places that there is a shortage of housing, it is hardly fire code that is limiting supply. It's not as if we could leave out sprinklers and fire escapes from buildings, and all of a sudden, housing would be cheap. The limiting factors of building housing are not this.
Have you ever built a house? It would not even be possible for me to build one with inspections, I would lose my day job. And my house was 40k to diy, do you have any idea how burdensome an up to code contractor installed sprinkler system would be against such frugal costs.
Having built my house the price and accessibility absolutely spirals out of control with code inspections. Remove this madness and let the masses do what I've done.
No US codes are going to require sprinklers in your single family home. But if someone is building a new medium-rise apartment building with hundreds of people sleeping in it, sprinklers are not a limiting factor in construction, and it is too much of a risk to build it without.
Our regulations often treat different structures in different places differently because they have different risks. That's okay. Your custom tiny home shouldn't be treated the same as an urban high rise.
It's not as if we could leave out sprinklers and fire escapes from buildings, and all of a sudden, housing would be cheap.
There's a lot more to fire codes than just sprinklers and fire escapes. If you could ignore all fire codes (and related requirements) then it would definitely be possible to build both more and cheaper apartments than you can now. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, and they almost certainly wouldn't be nice places to live. But a lot of people would take unsafe, uncomfortable and affordable over safe, comfortable and completely unaffordable.
They absolutely are. Building to code costs a lot of extra money, and for good reason, because we don't want people to die. If we didn't have codes one could build a capsule hotel style lodging and easily fix the housing situation.
Most forests today kind of are, in as much that the way a forest is 'designed' is down to a whole collection of active choices made by the forest owners to intervene or not intervene in different ways. There are lots of things that one can do to mitigate the risks of forest fires, and doing or not doing those things is a choice they make.
Yes, I'm aware, but you know what I mean. Trees don't have to file for a permit before they germinate. The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans.
My point is that there is probably almost as much that can be done to mitigate forest fire risks as there is to mitigate house fire risks. We know which forests have a high risk of forest fire and we know various techniques that can be used to lower that risk. If we choose to let forests close to where people live become an unnecessarily high danger for forest fires (or let people live close to 'dangerous' forests), then that is a choice.
The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans
The vast majority of trees close to large number of humans are however owned by someone who responsible for them and gets to decide if they grow up and become big trees or not.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
...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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.
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).
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.
If you've ever handled a fire axe, you'd realize it makes a lousy weapon. It has a long handle, with a heavy head. The idea is it can build up a lot of momentum to crash through things like doors and walls.
But the long handle makes it difficult to swing in a melee, and slow to swing, and once the swing starts it will be very hard to change its arc. Hence, your target can easily sidestep it. I suppose it would be good against plate armor, but not many villains wear plate armor these days. You also have to be careful with a fire axe to not chop your foot if you miss. I don't think I've ever seen a war axe/hatchet/tomahawk anywhere near that size.
For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.
"For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal."
Eh, not really. That's still a lot of unbalanced mass and potentially excessive length. There's a reason batons and other strike weapons aren't made like bats.
A gun is a terrible close quarters weapon. A gun is so good at long range that you can typically ensure you never get into a close quarters fight, but once it becomes close quarters you want something else. (with a gun you do have to keep the muzzle pointed away from you - but one hit with the bat will damage the barrel enough that it isn't safe to fire)
>For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.
Wielding a baseball bat, you have to constantly worry about the opponent's getting his hands on the bat and wrestling it away from you: a screwdriver is better.
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.
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).
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.
Which is why buildings higher than fire trucks can reach have different fire codes. Stairways are often a separate building within the building with a firewall between them - if the building starts on fire you can get down one of the stairs.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, that's fairly clear and concise, at least for the locations you noted.
It does appear to be that in New York it might be required though[1], so it's possibly still a problem depending on area. I'm not going to act like I'm an expert on reading building codes or that one in general though, so I could be misinterpreting it. SF had what clearly seemed like a mechanical ventilation exception in it when I just looked, but SF and Manhattan are the only things I looked up to compare to see if I could find whether it seemed fairly universally allowed or not.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It's simple: if working for 8 hours with many people is not a problem for the ventilation system, then sleeping with less (residential) people should be no issue at all.
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.)
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?
Every big building I ever lived in in Chicago had this system but for residential use. I am sure it is expensive when it breaks, but it is also amortized across hundreds of units. I'd go so far as to say it's "industry standard" so isn't going to be much of an obstacle for converting office buildings to residential spaces.
(In NYC, we all agreed to believe that there is no such thing as residential air conditioning that is not in the form of a window unit, however.)
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.
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).
> 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.
I saw a video of a daredevil who decided to film himself hanging on to the roof of a skyscraper with his fingertips. He did a couple of pullups, but exhausted himself and could not pull himself up back onto the roof. Finally, he let go.
Pulling oneself up onto something by one's fingertips takes a lot of strength. Should have tried that beforehand. (It looks easy in the movies, but those stunt people are very fit.)
Those stunt people also use special effects to make it look like they are on a building but really a padded floor is just below their feet. If you only can see their upper body it may be they are standing on a stool or someone is pushing them up (though in this case I would expect they are actually pulling themselves up with brute strength). They also do this stunt a dozen times and then in editing choose the cut that looks best.
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 Gödel: "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."
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).
> 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
When we were looking for a new house we toured one that had a bit of remodeling done. What was done was the back patio was enclosed to turn it into a room. The detail was that there was an existing bedroom that had a window onto the patio.
The solution, which I have to assume passed code, was simply to retain the bedroom window, even though it did not lead to the outdoors. So this house had an interior window.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
In Germany they're called "hofs" and incredibly common. Many apartments only have one view out over the hof, facing someone else's apartment 5m away. You get used to it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you read the OP you will see that in one example that’s exactly what they do do - in order to reclaim the space occupied by HVAC and turn into more apartments!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You jest, but if someone makes a decent enough full-spectrum daylight simulator, and then get a stamp of approval from FDA (or whichever the authority is relevant here), they stand to make a lot of money by enabling residential use of windowless spaces.
(Cue arguments on how dystopian this is. But hey, if the daylight simulator was to-spec, it wouldn't be the worst of things.)
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.
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.
>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.
it's also possible for offices to be doing poorly but also still make more money than as a residential property. while vacancy rates are high, those vacancies are spread around, so some people are still renting in these office buildings. if you want to redevelop them you have to get the existing tenants out.
They also contain lot less people. Average person generates 70-100W at rest. Add that to what ever screens, computers, extra lighting. And it is not that big difference in load.
HVAC has to account for the BTUs produced by all equipment. An office might have one or two refrigerators per floor, maybe a dishwasher. Apartments will have one in every apartment. Ditto for ovens, dryers. Even computers and TVs.
Offices have a lot more people per m² all of them using computer equipment continuously for 7hrs/day so in my experience they tend to have considerably higher cooling loads. I know from experience that a typical high rise office building in London, UK will have no heating requirement for most of the year; it is in cooling mode most of the time.
You have to account for peak usage, not median. At 7AM and 6PM, everybody has their stove or ovens going to make dinner, plus the washing machines and dryers.
Building codes and practices are different for commercial and residential for good reasons.
I've never seen a high-rise office elevator bank smaller than a residential one.
Dishwashers are negligible; microwaves are a souped-up gaming PC and run a lot less; ovens and dryers are more of a concern, but as with HVAC, I'd like proof that an office's draw (with all its attendant equipment) is more than the what you'd have with a dozen (tops) condos. Plumbing and sewer are the only legitimate concerns I've seen yet. And yet: will, way.
>you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again
These numbers never include externalities like the carbon and refuse footprint of demolishing and rebuilding. How many million metric tons of steel and concrete do we need to dispose of if this becomes a de-facto national policy?
Most non-mechanical equipment electric loads in standard office buildings are receptacles. This is small. Per NEC, I think it's counted as 180VA/receptacle. So the 208/120V panels are sized for that.
Also, the lighting is probably 277V in an office. This precludes any owner-installed fixtures, the super has to do all of that. Moving it to 120V means more transformers, for which there isn't room without sacrificing rentable space.
HVAC, assuming CW/HW to VAV boxes, has the pumps sized for the number. Which may be less or more in residential, depending. It also precludes (or at least makes very difficult) the ability to meter HVAC usage per apartment.
The point isn't that is is impossible. It's just expensive. That expense has to be borne by somebody.
I vote for the construction companies to be held liable. That way any future office buildings they construct will be more easily converted to housing.
Tearing down good buildings and building new is wasteful and causes more pollution then repurposing. These for profit corporations externalized these costs upon us repressing.
Planning for those who plan to use planned obsolescence to generate a profit.
Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.
In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.
What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.
Interestingly, he's not all that far off in a sense. Many commercial buildings used to be built to be multi-functional. The old school classic 3-story brick, with a shop on the bottom, maybe a workshop above, maybe residential (plus rentable space) on the third.
But once you choose high-density, you don't get much in the way of do-overs. For much the same reason that once you choose thinness as a positive metric for laptops, you lose a lot of flexibility.
Yes it's all about tradeoffs, but I think it's useful to accept (e.g.) in the laptop case that having thin and portable devices isn't necessarily a bad thing and it's likely that a good chunk of consumers will want that even if we create economic incentives and policies to encourage recycling and reuse.
I personally don't think it'd be bad to have a larger chunk of buildings be more versatile but you'd lose some of the economic efficiencies (agglomeration effects and positive spillovers) from the concentration of firms in business districts etc.
In every scenario you win some and lose some, and it's not always clear to me we should go all in on any of the bets.
In any modern building there should be raceways where new electric can be run vertically and then through hallow drywall walls. Very easy. The big problem will be plumbing. While you can get wall mounted toilets, I don’t think you can avoid having to trench each shower drain into the existing, likely concrete, floor.
Damn, that sounds like an ideal place to live for me. I live in an apartment but also play music. I would love to be able to set up a drum kit (and maybe store an e-bike) and still be in my walkable area for cheap ish rent.
Old warehouses were built very differently compared to modern office buildings. Specifically, office buildings are made to the load requirements of office spaces, with their symbolic walls and furniture. You may have trouble putting even bathtub into an apartment converted from an office.
Note that things such as arcades may need additional power demands that the area isn't sized for (fire risk). Workshops may need added ventilation and woodsheds would require additional power too. A theater type area could have issues with fire codes and occupancy.
>If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.
In St Louis, the largest building in the state, which is 1.4M square feet and 44 stories, recently sold for $3.5M. It sat empty for several years despite being offered basically for free. The new owners have not announced plans for it.
It's a pretty pure test of your claim. I guess we'll see what happens.
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.
I don't buy it. Pipes are IMPOSSIBLE to increase the size? Or at some point you hit some city service with no motivation to actually provide service/infrastructure and fix the problem at that end?
I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff.
Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster.
Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in.
And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper.
These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it?
Here is another idea:
R R R R R R R R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R R R R R R R R
You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.
I love HN so much that we've been able to reduce this serious problem to an easy matrix representation that can be used to both demonstrate the problem and show solutions so easily.
If you read the article carefully, you'll see clues to why this developer can make it work in spite of conventional wisdom:
1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates.
2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.
> Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing.
I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall.
I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.
I think a big benefit would be reworking code to make a way to safely allow interior units. They wouldn't be nice without natural light but it's a way to make a lot of units available cheaply.
Most offices already have break rooms. Sinks and dishwashers are fairly common in them. Make them a common area with a shared stove... Odds are the residents will pitch in and buy some cookware and set a policy of clean up after yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
“ 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.
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).
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
First off, St. Louis isn't empty because of muh car centric infrastructure, it's empty because of deindustrialization. Secondly, parking lots are in fact a better use of space than empty, dilapidated office buildings.
Lots of buildings across the country have actually been torn down to become parking, I'm not an expert on St. Louis urban development but it seems like many buildings were torn down there and replaced with parking lots that make the area worse. Then there's fewer people, and the cycle of dilapidation and abandonment continues.
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-seekinghttps://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.
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.
You also don't know anything about co-ops. Frankly I think you are completely uneducated on any of this stuff.
Go look up GHI in Greenbelt, Maryland. It's one of the oldest and largest co-ops in the USA. Housing in GHI is a fraction of the cost of the surrounding neighborhood, and the cause is that you cannot rent out GHI units. Only owners can live in their own units, which means speculators and landlords are simply banned from bidding up the costs. As a result, the cost to buy a unit there is a fraction of what it is right next door, maintenance on the units is better, crime is lower, services are better. It's a 100% walk able community that is run democratically. It's really a model for how housing could be built all across the country, but I guess you are the expert, we should keep doing what we do now and just let a couple billionaires complete a monopoly on having a roof, and hope that they only ask for 100% of our income and not more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My office is a former slab-on-grade warehouse that was converted into offices, laboratories, and manufacturing halls.
They installed eight multi-stall bathrooms where once there was a single room in the corner with one toilet through the revolutionary act of running PEX and digging a trench in the slab for sewage.
It is trivial to do the same in a high-rise. If anything it will be easier because instead of digging a trench you can punch holes in the floor and route plumbing and ventilation through the plenum (or whatever is up there).
Water supply and power isn't a problem because here's a secret: commercial spaces almost always use more power than residential, especially in the extremely esoteric and rare cases where workers have computers and copiers. Hell all of these buildings have phat 3-phase service. A dude watching Netflix and using his microwave in a space that once housed a dozen workers, half of which had space heaters under their desks because the HVAC was set to 70 in the summer will be a break for the transformer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Well, what's available in large parts of the world are unsustainable settlements, some due to their place, too prone to floods, wildfires, ... many with subsidence problems, many with aging and irreplaceable infra and so on. So what's available are raw materials, industries and knowledge to start building something new. On the table we have the smart cities, natural evolution of present dense cities and distopic nightmares like the original Fordlandia. You can read about Google Sidewalk labs or Arkadag, Innopolis, Prospera, ... to form an idea of the near future. I prefer something else.
Personally I left the big city for mountains in a not too far area, with enough services and there I see the green new deal working, in kWh terms I consume much less (considering I do not consume gas, diesel, petrol etc anymore), my life quality is improved much, local economy works better than many others so... I propose this as a model.
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."
"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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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!
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Offices are great for in person meetings. A group of people in a room with a whiteboard can discuss things much better than the same people on zoom. If you are just on zoom meetings all day then in person isn't useful at all.
That's the one thing missing from all online right now but it's completely killed because the team I'm on doesn't have any other developers on my team in my city so any whiteboarding has to take place online and we don't have smartboards or something like that that can do whiteboarding well online. The closest we use is Mural but that's not quite as easy or good.
If you don't have everyone in the same room then in person is meaningless. Even one remote person means everyone needs to be remote. The benefits of in office only apply if every person needed for a meeting/decision is in the same room at once. One person missing and you lose all benefits.
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.
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.
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.
As stated, you'd need to purchase the expensive land and then turn it into housing. This is done in Los Angeles, but the property that is built isn't cheap affordable housing.
He didn't say it would be cheap affordable housing. He said it "will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing". Which makes sense. Normally new buildings are the luxury housing and over time, as they become outdated, they become the affordable housing. Building new "affordable housing" is a fools errand, since it costs almost as much to build as luxury housing. You just build more housing period and let nature take its course over the decades.
Yep. And don’t we have to wait for the new expensive housing to trickle down and become cheap. If enough new housing is built, the older housing becomes cheaper almost immediately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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 =)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 429 ms ] threadOr what could go right. Service and civic workers would finally have housing that wasn't 2 hours away from their city jobs.
So it's not working well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But you know what does increase crime rates? Vacant buildings.
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.
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
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.
And failing this: - displaced urban wildlife - tear it down and make space for plants
What?
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?
Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written the way it was for a reason.
And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors.
This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations.
You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside.
I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it.
Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away.
I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep.
At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains.
It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics.
Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.
Skyscraper windows aren’t usable for egress. This is a solved problem.
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.
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.
The government will give you a bunch of free money to leverage an investment in real estate. This isn't true of other investments.
Yes, but for most of them you need to convince someone else that giving you the money is a good idea.
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. :(
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!
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.
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!
Lots of recently-built suburbia is a money pit [1].
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...
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.
Delivery costs could also be super cheap.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
...they could be used as home-offices perhaps?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plumbing work is not cheap.
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_london/1...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course the building inspector sees the charred bodies he didn't prevent, but he doesn't see the frozen and exposed ones he created through his policies that handicap supply. The incentives of code and inspection are horribly perverse.
Having built my house the price and accessibility absolutely spirals out of control with code inspections. Remove this madness and let the masses do what I've done.
Our regulations often treat different structures in different places differently because they have different risks. That's okay. Your custom tiny home shouldn't be treated the same as an urban high rise.
There's a lot more to fire codes than just sprinklers and fire escapes. If you could ignore all fire codes (and related requirements) then it would definitely be possible to build both more and cheaper apartments than you can now. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, and they almost certainly wouldn't be nice places to live. But a lot of people would take unsafe, uncomfortable and affordable over safe, comfortable and completely unaffordable.
But given the demand inelasticity for housing, it's not even guaranteed it would be cheaper.
Most forests today kind of are, in as much that the way a forest is 'designed' is down to a whole collection of active choices made by the forest owners to intervene or not intervene in different ways. There are lots of things that one can do to mitigate the risks of forest fires, and doing or not doing those things is a choice they make.
The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans
The vast majority of trees close to large number of humans are however owned by someone who responsible for them and gets to decide if they grow up and become big trees or not.
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.
Punching through a new set of pressurized, fire rated stairwells would be significantly more expensive.
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?
Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of small volumes and poor access.
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.
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.
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.
The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to be 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.
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).
You keep an axe in your bedroom?
But the long handle makes it difficult to swing in a melee, and slow to swing, and once the swing starts it will be very hard to change its arc. Hence, your target can easily sidestep it. I suppose it would be good against plate armor, but not many villains wear plate armor these days. You also have to be careful with a fire axe to not chop your foot if you miss. I don't think I've ever seen a war axe/hatchet/tomahawk anywhere near that size.
For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.
P.S. I am no martial arts expert.
Eh, not really. That's still a lot of unbalanced mass and potentially excessive length. There's a reason batons and other strike weapons aren't made like bats.
The second best is something that you've extensively practiced with, and designed for the purpose.
Wielding a baseball bat, you have to constantly worry about the opponent's getting his hands on the bat and wrestling it away from you: a screwdriver is better.
Most able bodied adults can break drwall between the studs. It’s not a particularly strong material.
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
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
Commercial building windows in general do not open at all.
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.
My friend owns a condo in Vancouver. No windows open.
Also Seattle: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/s2s7bx/cant_open_a...
Also https://www.reddit.com/r/askTO/comments/omdxmp/downtown_unit...
It does appear to be that in New York it might be required though[1], so it's possibly still a problem depending on area. I'm not going to act like I'm an expert on reading building codes or that one in general though, so I could be misinterpreting it. SF had what clearly seemed like a mechanical ventilation exception in it when I just looked, but SF and Manhattan are the only things I looked up to compare to see if I could find whether it seemed fairly universally allowed or not.
1: https://up.codes/viewer/new_york_city/nyc-building-code-2022... and https://up.codes/viewer/new_york_city/nyc-building-code-2022...
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
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.)
(In NYC, we all agreed to believe that there is no such thing as residential air conditioning that is not in the form of a window unit, however.)
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.
Pulling oneself up onto something by one's fingertips takes a lot of strength. Should have tried that beforehand. (It looks easy in the movies, but those stunt people are very fit.)
When we were looking for a new house we toured one that had a bit of remodeling done. What was done was the back patio was enclosed to turn it into a room. The detail was that there was an existing bedroom that had a window onto the patio.
The solution, which I have to assume passed code, was simply to retain the bedroom window, even though it did not lead to the outdoors. So this house had an interior window.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell
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
You're losing 100% of the floor space when it's an unused commercial building.
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.
Oh well.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind...
I know there is an HN thread.
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.
There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?
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.
Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.
Unless they specifically tear it down during redevelopment (why would they?), there should be plenty of air circulation.
I've forgotten of that place for years. Truly magical. Thank you for the memory. I almost shake recalling it.
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.
Conventional wisdom is that there won't be too many windows available to throw conventional wisdom out of :-)
(Cue arguments on how dystopian this is. But hey, if the daylight simulator was to-spec, it wouldn't be the worst of things.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munger_Hall
It was spectacular.
Lots of basement bedrooms that don't meet egress codes.
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.
Would probably make it take more cooling?
Building codes and practices are different for commercial and residential for good reasons.
Dishwashers are negligible; microwaves are a souped-up gaming PC and run a lot less; ovens and dryers are more of a concern, but as with HVAC, I'd like proof that an office's draw (with all its attendant equipment) is more than the what you'd have with a dozen (tops) condos. Plumbing and sewer are the only legitimate concerns I've seen yet. And yet: will, way.
>you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again
These numbers never include externalities like the carbon and refuse footprint of demolishing and rebuilding. How many million metric tons of steel and concrete do we need to dispose of if this becomes a de-facto national policy?
Also, the lighting is probably 277V in an office. This precludes any owner-installed fixtures, the super has to do all of that. Moving it to 120V means more transformers, for which there isn't room without sacrificing rentable space.
HVAC, assuming CW/HW to VAV boxes, has the pumps sized for the number. Which may be less or more in residential, depending. It also precludes (or at least makes very difficult) the ability to meter HVAC usage per apartment.
The point isn't that is is impossible. It's just expensive. That expense has to be borne by somebody.
Tearing down good buildings and building new is wasteful and causes more pollution then repurposing. These for profit corporations externalized these costs upon us repressing.
Planning for those who plan to use planned obsolescence to generate a profit.
Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.
In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.
What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.
But once you choose high-density, you don't get much in the way of do-overs. For much the same reason that once you choose thinness as a positive metric for laptops, you lose a lot of flexibility.
I personally don't think it'd be bad to have a larger chunk of buildings be more versatile but you'd lose some of the economic efficiencies (agglomeration effects and positive spillovers) from the concentration of firms in business districts etc.
In every scenario you win some and lose some, and it's not always clear to me we should go all in on any of the bets.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/cit...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
Note that things such as arcades may need additional power demands that the area isn't sized for (fire risk). Workshops may need added ventilation and woodsheds would require additional power too. A theater type area could have issues with fire codes and occupancy.
In St Louis, the largest building in the state, which is 1.4M square feet and 44 stories, recently sold for $3.5M. It sat empty for several years despite being offered basically for free. The new owners have not announced plans for it.
It's a pretty pure test of your claim. I guess we'll see what happens.
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.
I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff.
Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster.
Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space.
And, you know, incentivize minimal use of water.
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.
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.
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.
Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?
Definitely the classier (and older!) had windows.
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
C = communal space/corridors/elevators.
E = empty
R R R R R R R R
R C C C C C C R
R C E E E E C R
R C C C C C C R
R R R R R R R R
R R R R R R R R
R R R R R R R R
E E E E E E E E
R R R R R R R R
R R R R R R R R
If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in.
And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper.
These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it?
Here is another idea:
R R R R R R R R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R R R R R R R R
You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.
1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates.
2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.
Yes, the wealthy can have apartments with windows around the outer parameter and the poor can live in the center with no natural sunlight.
I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall.
I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.
See https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encam...
The set of laws is different for office buildings and apartments.
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
https://parkingreform.org/parking-lot-map/
https://www.stlmag.com/history/looking-back-over-a-decade-at...
https://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/ipjho8/save_histor...
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.
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.
Go look up GHI in Greenbelt, Maryland. It's one of the oldest and largest co-ops in the USA. Housing in GHI is a fraction of the cost of the surrounding neighborhood, and the cause is that you cannot rent out GHI units. Only owners can live in their own units, which means speculators and landlords are simply banned from bidding up the costs. As a result, the cost to buy a unit there is a fraction of what it is right next door, maintenance on the units is better, crime is lower, services are better. It's a 100% walk able community that is run democratically. It's really a model for how housing could be built all across the country, but I guess you are the expert, we should keep doing what we do now and just let a couple billionaires complete a monopoly on having a roof, and hope that they only ask for 100% of our income and not more.
The idea quickly falls apart once you need a car to get to either social events or to work.
If your work is nearby, that's just chef's kiss, then.
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.
I don’t know how this is sustainable given that Manhattan is an island.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
They installed eight multi-stall bathrooms where once there was a single room in the corner with one toilet through the revolutionary act of running PEX and digging a trench in the slab for sewage.
It is trivial to do the same in a high-rise. If anything it will be easier because instead of digging a trench you can punch holes in the floor and route plumbing and ventilation through the plenum (or whatever is up there).
Water supply and power isn't a problem because here's a secret: commercial spaces almost always use more power than residential, especially in the extremely esoteric and rare cases where workers have computers and copiers. Hell all of these buildings have phat 3-phase service. A dude watching Netflix and using his microwave in a space that once housed a dozen workers, half of which had space heaters under their desks because the HVAC was set to 70 in the summer will be a break for the transformer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Personally I left the big city for mountains in a not too far area, with enough services and there I see the green new deal working, in kWh terms I consume much less (considering I do not consume gas, diesel, petrol etc anymore), my life quality is improved much, local economy works better than many others so... I propose this as a model.
"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/taub...
"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.
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.
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.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-subur....
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.
(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!
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a side benefit, the new housing will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing.
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/how-much-of-your-city-is-...
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.
The residential helps businesses stay open 7 days a week, instead of closing for the weekend when no one is at work.
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.
> 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
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...
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.
Admittedly, it's Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and the adjacent blocks are residential.
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).
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...
The environment needed for maximizing work is often at odds with the environment for maximizing leisure.
Or single family homes with a large yard and a white picket fence 1+ hour outside of the city...
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.
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/
Evolve? Yes.