5 ms·
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, typic
by 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 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.