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Visualizing all the vacant office space in San Francisco
- jeffbee 5y agoYou know it might be nice if rents were to fall and existing companies could just spread out a little. The amount of space that an office worker gets has fallen so much in the last 20 years. The article gives Twitter as an example of high density but I know first-hand that Twitter packs them in much less than Google SF. Maybe people can have some dignity for a change.
- dilyevsky 5y agoA few years ago goog office compaction became so ridiculous that they eventually exceeded osha’s requirements for min restrooms at our campus (the lines were insane). Their solution was to park porta potties.. er i mean “mobile executive restrooms/showers” outside. Edit: this was mountain view not sf though
- hirundo 5y agoAt the same time there's a huge shortage of residential space, where so many more people now work. Clearly mass conversion is necessary. I wonder if the city government can get out of the way of that.
- hadlock 5y agoOffice space doesn't translate well into residential. Each bedroom needs a window (legal requirement in SF), so you end up with weird, deep, narrow lofts, typically
- hirundo 5y agoIn San Francisco you could charge a lot for a weird deep narrow loft, especially compared to the income on vacant office space. And many developers would happily knock down an office building and rebuild an apartment complex, if only they could get past the red tape.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bpodgursky 5y agoThe bathroom situation is even harder to fix, since even if you could find a bunch of tenants willing to share a bathroom across the floor (and you won't) you have to spend a lot of $$ to retrofit showers into the living space.
- jay_kyburz 5y agoI wonder if you could run plumbing through, then a secondary floor just above it so that the apartment floors are a foot above where the office space floor would have been. But the natural light is the biggest issue if you ask me. I would never buy an apartment without morning winter sun shining into every main living area. (North here in Australia)
- lrvick 5y agoMeanwhile I black out my windows because I keep a weird schedule and am normally bothered by sunlight indoors.
- barry-cotter 5y agoYou radically underestimate how many people would like to live in San Francisco. If barracks style dorms were legal they would fill up fast [1]. If Hong Kong style coffins/chickenwire cages with a mattress in them three feet high were legal they would fill up fast. The reason cheap housing doesn't exist is almost always that it is illegal. Banning flophouses, boarding houses, single room occupancy hotels; it's always about keeping property values up and poor people out. [1] These are known as hacker houses, are completely illegal, and actually exist in San Francisco.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoActually office space is not bad for residential retrofits. Why? For one, the heights of those floors are 10 plus feet. You can easyliy hide the plumbing under the subfloor, and end up with 8 plus unit heights. I didn't know about the window requirement. That could be changed overnight. I would happily pay a few hundred less because of a lack of window. Many old SF buildings used to be converted to residential apartments. Now--it's more financially advantageous to demolish the building, and put up residential condos. (Condos are not rent controlled.) We need to get rid of the residential condo Rent Control exemption. Most people will never make enough to afford one, even you tech guys. I worked on many luxury condo projects in SF. As union tradesman, we all knew we could never afford one. They are nice though. If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built? (I don't want to get into a debate on Rent Control. It has helped out many dear friends over the years. SF only has so much land to build on before going farther into the bay.)
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoRent control doesn’t apply if the condo is never rented. Rent control just makes it less likely they will be rented out at all, the market will always go where the money is.
- imtringued 5y agoIt's not like that is surprising. Rent control tells landlords that they should make less of their money from renting out. Just because the government doesn't understand what it is saying doesn't mean it is unfair. When you have options X,Y,Z and the government says stop X then you stop doing X. The fact that you still do Y and Z isn't a loophole, it's what the government told you to do.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoYa. I’m not understanding why someone would think a condo needed to be rented out at all if someone couldn’t afford to buy it outright? Condos aren’t usually rented where I live, just apartment complexes that are managed blanket as rental properties.
- iancmceachern 5y agoMy building in SF is this. They rent to both businesses and residential, one and two bedroom lofts. They're nice!
- SilverRed 5y agoIs it converted or designed like that? A lot of the new buildings I see are built from the ground up to be mixed use. One benefit I see is it helps cafes and such keep consistent customer numbers. Large blocks of office buildings have a lot of foot traffic during the week but become a ghost town during weekends. While large blocks of residential buildings do not have the same peak foot traffic to sustain a store.
- iancmceachern 5y agoDesigned like that. Indeed, it works well in the way you describe.
- polynomial 5y agoSo, buy an office building, convert all the cubicles into long narrow "apartments" with a window at the end, and bam you've got a ready-made work from home office. Bonus, if leave the conference room intact, the company can optionally have meetings in person instead of Zoom!
- babesh 5y agoSounds like many of the so called lofts that people bought in SF. I wonder what the prices are like for those nowadays? It seems that these places were where tech folk parked themselves before getting married and having children and then moving out.
- a-dub 5y agoi've been in buildings in manhattan that were previously office space. i had no idea until people living there told me. specifically downtown/fidi. although i guess floor plate size has grown... either way, convert the skinny buildings to residential and use the big floor plates for biotech/coworking/office space. there's a lot of free square feet and it's easy to shuffle modern offices around.
- colechristensen 5y agoI've always thought a big part of the problem wasn't the amount of this or that kind of space but the ratio. SF has way too much commercial space for the amount of residential space it has. As opposed to many others, I'm fine with residents deciding they don't want to change their city by allowing high density residential... however there's a simple price to pay: no high density commercial. It is one of those fundamental things which should be mandated statewide, the ratios of commercial to residential should be within bounds for each municipality, and the abundance of some should drive prices crazy low and crazy high in some places so that these disparities tend to correct themselves. Instead there are policies that seem exclusively tailored to only do the crazy high pricing part. (and while we're at it, vacancy needs to be taxed to further drive the point home. if you won't lower your prices enough to get occupied, prepare to subsidize those who do)
- mlindner 5y agoHow about you know just letting the market put commercial where customers are, next to residential. The market has no problems nor negative side effects of figuring this out. If we just ban cities from trying to plan their cities in opposition to proper design the problem fixes itself. It’s such a ridiculous self inflicted wound.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago> The market has no problems nor negative side effects of figuring this out. Half the buildings with empty spaces in SF are likely tied up in CMBSs with terms that state that the value of the building is based on the value its renting units out at, and if they lower the rent they have to recollateralize the loan, but they can just apply missed rent from empty units to the end of the mortgage. https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothirds_of_new_york_restaurants_may_have/g49g4c5/?context=2 https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird... The free market is about to create the commercial real estate version of the housing crash.
- unishark 5y ago
- matz1 5y agoWhy don't the faang companies do it then with their own campus? This will attract large number of employee to go back to office.
- Redoubts 5y agoDo what? Where do you think these faang companies are and why do you think those municipalities want more residential space any more than SF does? The bay is chock full of 30k pop municipalities that point everywhere but to themselves and say “this is your problem”
- matz1 5y agofaang companies has huge campus which probably mostly empty right now, why don't they built housing inside their own campus ? This will greatly attract their employee to work in the office.
- UncleMeat 5y agoAt least in mountain view, basically everything on that side of the highway cannot be zoned for residential stuff so the tech companies can't do this. I also suspect that insurance and other regulation for being a housing provider isn't something they are interested in.
- fragmede 5y agoI'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, it's a valid question. In particular, Google has actually proposed doing this in Moffet Field back in 2014. https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-google-is-taking-over-mountain-view https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-...
- abeppu 5y agoI think the problem is too many people benefit from the shortage of residential space. It would only become feasible to convert these if all the right people could be arranged to benefit. Since many in city government already are involved in residential real estate, as are many of their friends and families, why should they facilitate a large sudden increase in housing stock?
- zbrozek 5y agoUnlikely. Everything about Bay Area governance is aligned to make doing projects of any type as slow, expensive, and as difficult as possible.
- flexie 5y agoAdd to that millions of square feet that are not officially vacant but are not in use either, because people are working from home.
- JacobDotVI 5y agoit looks like that's included in the 17M based on the linked article: >With all COIVD-era restrictions on office building occupancy rates having been eliminated last month, the effective office vacancy rate in San Francisco has ticked up to 20.1 percent, representing over 17 million square feet of vacant office space, with 7.76 million square feet of space which is technically leased but sitting vacant and actively being offered for sublet, which is down slightly from 7.99 million square feet of sublettable space in the first quarter of the year, and 9.33 million square feet of un-leased space, which is up from 7.97 million square feet in the first quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield. https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/07/over-17-million-square-feet-of-vacant-office-space-in-san-francisco.html https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/07/over-17-million-squa...
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoI think there is a difference in what the post you replied to was implying. "Leased but offered for sublet" means the leaseholder is actively trying to offload that space, but there is a ton of additional space that is currently way underutilized because many people are still at home, but the company hasn't reached the point of trying to get rid of their space yet.
- dsign 5y agoThe mention of "life sciences" connected with that huge amount of space caught my eye. What exactly is going on? A new super boom? Or is "life sciences" an euphemism for hydroponics now?
- brutusborn 5y agoI'm guessing that commenter has a very specific definition since the term "life sciences" seems to mean almost anything biology related (from a quick google).
- iancmceachern 5y agoIt usually means medtech, pharma, medical devices, etc.
- refurb 5y agoIt’s usually commercial space with attached lab space and all the infrastructure. Lab space has been at a premium for a decade now. Most of the new buildings in SSF are all lab space and it goes fast.
- dsign 5y agoThanks for the data point. Then there is a boom, good to know.
- poorjohnmacafee 5y agoTangentially related I have no idea how WeWork isn't gone at this point. It's like the laws of physics are broken.
- blhack 5y agoI rent an office in a competitor to wework and it's full of people.
- notsureaboutpg 5y agoThe largest competitor to WeWork (Knotel) filed for bankruptcy this year, so I wonder which you are talking about...
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoI’ve heard of people going to WeWork because their employer closed the office but they don’t want to work from home.
- dheera 5y agoI could totally imagine that. Lots of people who would normally have excellent, well-lit offices, have a cramped bedroom at home due to exorbitant rent prices in the Bay Area. When companies went WFH, they didn't give any rent subsidies to people to rent out bigger apartments with proper work space.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- notsureaboutpg 5y agoThe rent subsidy is called moving. My company went full WFH no more offices, sold all the offices. That's when I left the bay, moved to Tennessee and now I have more rooms than I know what to do with for less than I paid before and a higher salary (I was promoted this year)
- 5y ago
- matz1 5y agoHeres and idea: Want me to go back to office ? Convert some of the space into housing/apartment/living space. Rent it to employee for free/cheap as benefit. Not only I'll go back to office, I'll live in the office.
- refurb 5y agoNothing like sharing a bathroom with a dozen other residents. Maybe they can give you exclusive use of a stall?
- matz1 5y agoDoesn't have to be sharing bathroom. It can have private bathroom & private kitchen just like regular apartment/studio.
- refurb 5y agoGo look at all the plumbing in a commercial building. There is a reason why the toilets are all in one location. If you need to plumb all new water sources, sewer, air handling and electrical it’s not going to be all that attractive to retrofit.
- Redoubts 5y ago100 Van Ness seemed like a nice retrofit.
- refurb 5y agoWell that looks god damn luxurious. I have no doubt it can be done, it's probably just not cheap so not a great solution to the housing crisis. And, like your example, depends on location and such to make it financially viable to retrofit. Just as an observation, if you look at the different floor plans, most of the bathrooms and some of the kitchens are located at the immediate entrance to the unit (more towards the center of the building). I assume that's to minimize the cost of running plumbing from the center out to the edge. But that's a guess, it would depend on the original layout. But it does look like a consistent feature.
- Rd6n6 5y agoIn one of the most expensive places to live and operate on earth, there is roughly 3x as much vacant office space after a year of lockdowns vs before. Wouldn’t it be weird if this wasn’t the case? You would think it would be a slightly higher multiple
- mleonhard 5y agoIs there a coworking space in SF with low-distraction desks?
- scrubs 5y agoSF? I wanna see it for NYC. I swear there's lot of space out there not on market.
- RobKohr 5y agoIf they can be rezoned residential, it could turn san francisco and other cities into wonderful cheap places to live. If everyone stays remote, we won't need offices anymore! As it is, with office workers, society has to double the amount of living space needed.