8 ms·

At 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 go

At 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 ago
Office 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 ago
  In 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Meanwhile I black out my windows because I keep a weird schedule and am normally bothered by sunlight indoors.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    You 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 ago
  Actually 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 ago
    Rent 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 ago
      It'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 ago
        Ya. 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 ago
  My building in SF is this. They rent to both businesses and residential, one and two bedroom lofts. They're nice!
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Is 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 ago
      Designed like that. Indeed, it works well in the way you describe.
- polynomial 5y ago
  So, 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 ago
    Sounds 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 ago
  i'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.
  - a-dub 5y ago
    would definitely have to do something about unopenable windows though.
    - Redoubts 5y ago
      See 100 Van Ness for an example
colechristensen 5y ago
I'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 ago
  How 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 ago
Why 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 ago
  Do 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 ago
    faang 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 ago
      At 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 ago
  I'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 ago
I 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 ago
Unlikely. Everything about Bay Area governance is aligned to make doing projects of any type as slow, expensive, and as difficult as possible.

hadlock 5y ago

Office 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 ago
In 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 ago
The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Meanwhile I black out my windows because I keep a weird schedule and am normally bothered by sunlight indoors.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  You 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 ago
Actually 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 ago
  Rent 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 ago
    It'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 ago
      Ya. 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 ago
My building in SF is this. They rent to both businesses and residential, one and two bedroom lofts. They're nice!
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Is 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 ago
    Designed like that. Indeed, it works well in the way you describe.
polynomial 5y ago
So, 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 ago
  Sounds 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 ago
i'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.
- a-dub 5y ago
  would definitely have to do something about unopenable windows though.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    See 100 Van Ness for an example

colechristensen 5y ago

I'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 ago
How 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 ago

Why 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 ago
Do 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 ago
  faang 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 ago
    At 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 ago
I'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 ago

I 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 ago

Unlikely. Everything about Bay Area governance is aligned to make doing projects of any type as slow, expensive, and as difficult as possible.