9 ms·

I had heard that office buildings were unsuitable for converting to apartments. But it looks like they're completely gutting the interiors.

WaxProlix 4y ago
Agreed, I'd be much more interested in the How than the Why.
jnwatson 4y ago
I am interested in the engineering of such a conversion. The biggest issue has got to be plumbing.
- gwbrooks 4y ago
  That's the biggest issue once you get to conversion. Before conversion? The two biggest obstacles are: * Commercial mortgages make it nearly impossible to change a property in this manner, so you're usually limited to buildings owned free and clear. * In most cities, zoning/planning would push back on this; I suspect the most interesting part of the Texas story is how they routed around that.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Zoning generally can be modified either by the local planning department, or by ballot measure.
    - dan-robertson 4y ago
      In practice it seems very hard to make such changes happen in US cities. I think Texas doesn’t really do zoning the same way so there’s not so much of an issue.
  - chii 4y ago
    > Commercial mortgages make it nearly impossible to change a property in this manner that's a contractual issue, rather than an engineering issue. This can be fixed with a stroke of the pen.
    - gwbrooks 4y ago
      They can - but that requires both parties to the contract to agree on modification. If I'm a bank holding a commercial mortgage, it's very finely honed to minimize my risk; as part of that, I contractually limit what can be done with the building. Why would I, as a lending institution, throw that security away for something much riskier? If the emptying out of commercial buildings that we saw during the pandemic accelerated, that might have provided the incentive. But it seems like that trend line isn't going to continue in force. I think converting high density commercial properties to residential is a great idea in a lot of cities. But ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free.
      - ThrustVectoring 4y ago
        Far more likely than a mortgage modification is a straightforward sale of the property to new ownership (who then goes on to refurbish as residential and sell or lease the units). The banks have a specific dollar amount that pays off their obligation in full, at which point it's the buyer's problem (and their financing).
      - positr0n 4y ago
        Instead if changing the terms, couldn't the owner of the building refinance with a new bank that does residential property mortgages?
      - conductr 4y ago
        > ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free. Not at all. Your commercial mortgage lender will always help you increase the productivity of your asset. Phone call. Excel docs. Talk terms. Lawyers. Done. If you don't know this, nobody loaned you $#,#00M and you'll never need this advice
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    The other issue is that a 20-30% vacancy rate still means you need the other 70% of tenants to leave, and commercial leases are multiyear affairs.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    In the UK the change in need has for years (ie even before COVID) driven planning changes so that it's easy to get an OK to convert say an office building into residential. The results definitely vary, between "This is legal but nobody should have to live like this" (e.g. far too much light from floor to ceiling windows in some rooms while others are dark, not enough bathrooms, poor heat and noise insulation) to actually rather nice places to live. Most tend to be rental units for young people, rather than family homes, but it all helps. Where bureaucrats actually get to just make the decisions at a high level, rather than everything being second guessed by NIMBYs it's just really obvious what you have versus what you need. If you know your city has an inventory of empty mid-size office buildings sat on the market for months, yet apartments within walking distance of the city centre go for crazy money, it's a no brainer to authorise conversions. Whereas if the last office building was snapped up an hour after going on the market, while residential sales are crawling, a conversion from office to residential is nonsense, tell them to go away.
    - gnfargbl 4y ago
      There are a few conversions like this where I live (also in the UK) and I agree that the results definitely do vary. Where the conversion is in the heart of the city, it seems to work pretty well -- sometimes even better than knocking down and rebuilding, because the existing offices usually have stand-off space around the building that would be lost in a high density redevelopment. And from an environmental perspective, keeping all of that 1950s/1960s poured concrete in place has got to be a good thing. What really doesn't work is the partial conversion of offices on industrial/commercial parks out of town. It seems to lead to completely incongruous buildings, dumped essentially in the middle of parking lots, without basic amenities such as verges and pavements. Those buildings tend to be flimsy, and it's hard to see the environmental argument for keeping them. I would rather see those sites razed and rebuilt as better quality housing.
    - LightG 4y ago
      I've seen many situations where: 1) Office building and space is in demand but the market rate is much lower than the residential rate. 2) The owner of the office building will 'pretend' there is no interest in the property (sometimes for more than a year), so they can plead to the planners that they want to convert th building to residential. The planners authorise the conversion and the owners make a tonne of dough. There is no free market in real estate.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    In the "old" part of Houston there is no zoning. 2016 Main was converted from a hi-rise motel into condos years ago, they are pretty nice but there is always the feeling that it's not a complete domestic environment. At least the plumbing was there. There's a couple more of these nearby that were left over from the oil crash of the 1980's, which were eventually abandoned after years of reduced energy travel. Looks like one of them has been gutted recently and might be under conversion now.
- jfim 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, why would it be plumbing? There should be enough capacity to handle both fresh and black water, considering the high occupancy of typical office buildings.
  - grp000 4y ago
    You need to run plumbing through the floors to every unit. The floors are structural.
    - quickthrowman 4y ago
      You can drill dozens of 10” holes through a concrete floor in a commercial office tower. The structural part of the floor are the tensioned cables inside the concrete, as long as you dont’t sever those, you can drill a ton of holes without impacting the structural integrity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestressed_concrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestressed_concrete
      - grp000 4y ago
        I used to work in concrete construction, doing post tensioned and SOMD for elevated slab. Coring might be simpler for SOMD, but post tensioned has such a high density of cables that I don't think it would work.
        loonster 4y ago
        Commercial buildings tend to have very high ceilings. Maybe build a raised floor and put the plumbing under there.
    - tzs 4y ago
      Could you run vertical pipes on the outside in back of the building, and run horizontal pipes through space between adjacent apartments that you specifically leave for that purpose when converting the interior? If you need intermediate pumping stations or holding tanks due to the height of the building, those could be inside adjacent to the outside pipes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- greenyoda 4y ago
  There's also the issue of windows. High-rise office buildings frequently have large floors with windowed offices around the perimeter and huge windowless areas filled with cubicles in the interior. However, residential buildings are generally required by building codes to have a certain number of windows per apartment (or even per room).
  - quickthrowman 4y ago
    You solve this by making sure every unit has part of it along the curtain wall, the units might need to be more narrow vs more rectangular, but most office towers have a 20k sq ft floor plate where the curtain wall is never more than 50-70 ft from the building core (elevators and mechanical/electrical rooms)
- quickthrowman 4y ago
  You just add more plumbing risers and put point of use water heaters in the units. You might need to upgrade the building water service to accommodate higher water usage, but it’s literally just adding pipes and pumps in an existing mechanical chase or core drilling thru each floor to add plumbing risers. Some really tall buildings have tanks on top of the building to provide water pressure at the top via gravity. You can add drainage the same way, you just don’t need pumps for the drain stacks.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
FWIW, I've lived in a converted office building in Seattle. It was actually pretty nice, much nicer than most purpose-built apartment buildings. When they did the conversion, they re-engineered the interior pretty heavily and re-purposed some existing elevator shafts for other purposes that weren't required prior to the conversion. Some office buildings will be more amenable to conversion than others, so part of this would likely be selecting buildings for conversion where the conversion is both straightforward and will produce nice apartments. You want buildings that have many floors but relatively small area per floor.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >and re-purposed some existing elevator shafts for other purposes that weren't required prior to the conversion. Like....
  - bdavis__ 4y ago
    I live in a 12 story office building, built in 1932. When the interior was converted to living space, 2 of the elevator shafts were re-purposed to provide additional floor space. They simply but in a "floor" where once was a "hole". that extra space is a closet in my specific case.
    - pharmakom 4y ago
      Think I would prefer a slide!
twelvechairs 4y ago
Floorplate depth is usually the big issue. Residential generally doesn't like being much deeper than around 20m/65ft. Most tall office buildings built after the 70s or 80s will be deeper and maybe impossible to design into comfortable residences. Services is the other big one. Many more rooms needing hot and cold water and wastewater connections, more AC outlets and customisation, etc. Even if you have the space to do so (as office floor to floor heights are typically higher than residential). Plus remodelling facades to give more residential style windows etc. And does your basement have enough space for the cars residents will demand? Its an expensive business to add this all in and sometimes may be cheaper to just knock it down and start afresh.
- 7952 4y ago
  What do you mean by floor plate depth?
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    How deep/wide a building is. Residential buildings tend to be a donut hole shape or an H to keep distances to windows about 20m. Office buildings are usually big, deep squares or rectangles.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      yep, plus many countries regulate what can be called a "room", and most "rooms" need to have a window, so this means either huge rooms (so they can have windows and go deep inside the building to use the space), or the rooms in the central part of the buildings used for non-livin rooms (eg, storage).
      - jaclaz 4y ago
        It surely depends on the country, but it is not like "a window" is enough, usually construction codes ask for "windowed surface" being not less than 1/8 or 1/12 of the area of the room (so you cannot make bigger than this limit), in order to classify the room as "suitable to permanent stay of people", in practice - as you say - all the rest becomes "non-living", storage, or window-sless (mechanically ventilated) bathrooms.
bontaq 4y ago
I heard similar things, mostly from HN and reddit. It's good to see that in reality it's doable.
nvarsj 4y ago
I lived for a few years in a converted meat packing factory in west Chicago. The apartments were really nice, except for the giant house centipedes that would occasionally migrate inside when it rained and would drop from the ceilings. It was essentially a long warehouse type building, so they put apartments/windows on each side with walking corridors down the middle and multiple floors, and a parking garage in the basement.
- gnfargbl 4y ago
  > giant house centipedes would drop from the ceilings That sounds like quite a significant inconvenience. Didn't it put people off, in a "holy shit I'm not staying here for another second" kind of a way?
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Pretty sure the only living spaces in the world without house centipedes are in Antartica.
    - ralferoo 4y ago
      I'd never even heard of a house centipede, so I googled it. I've never seen one before and I live in the UK. Apparently they occasionally sneak into the UK in imported food packaging, but they're not native or common here.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        > but they're not native or common here Nearly all instances go unrecorded, so precise frequency of distribution in England is impossible to determine. But they have spread across the globe to all countries and all continents except Antarctica, so chances are nearly certain you've got them in your home, even in England.[1] They're a little startling, but harmless to humans, and help keep your spider population in check. Even though I have probably only seen 5 of them in the last 20 years in places I have lived spanning the Eastern Seaboard of the US, I have no delusions about they being there regardless of spotting them. Unless they're disoriented and dying, like most "bugs," these things are supremely sneaky. >> S. coleoptrata is indigenous to the Mediterranean region, but it has spread through much of Europe, Asia, North America and South America.[2] [1] https://records.nbnatlas.org/occurrences/search?q=lsid:NBNSYS0000011447&fq=&nbn_loading=true https://records.nbnatlas.org/occurrences/search?q=lsid:NBNSY... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata#Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata#Distribu...
cm2187 4y ago
If you have seen a residential tower and an office tower being built side by side, you know why. The residential tower is built with concrete layers separating every floor (not always every flat within the same floor unfortunately). An office building has no separation between floor, only a thin sheet of metal. I would never live in a converted (purpose built) office building office, except perhaps if it is to live on the top floor.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  That’s the opposite of my experience. Office buildings are built to last and residential seems to have been built exclusively with clearance items at Home Depot.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    It changes when they get taller. Apartments up to 5 stories are generally optimized to maximize tax benefits.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  I'll guess that it's a very upscale residential tower (the rich don't want to hear the upstairs neighbor stomp across the floor), and/or a local fire code requirement for anything tall and residential.
- ggcdn 4y ago
  This isn’t correct. You probably saw a concrete residential building and a steel office building by chance. It does not follow that every single office building is built this way. There are concrete office buildings all over the place, usually with thicker slabs than a residential building, because the office building actually needs to be designed for much higher loads. By the way, the thin steel deck you saw gets concrete poured on it too once installed.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
The building codes are likely very different. Think about a shopping mall and the idea of converting it to cheap housing. All of the plumbing and electrical is for stores - maybe 1 sink per small store and department/anchor stores have 8 bathroom stalls all in one area. Then you have the fact that these buildings were likely constructed using asbestos in various ways. Gutting the interiors entirely is necessary, maybe they even need to gut major areas of the building to support more utilities as well. It’s probably not cheap so affordable housing may not be in the equation afterwards because of the renovation costs.
andsoitis 4y ago
Downtown Manhattan did a lot of it after 9/11.
dhdurrrgh 4y ago

WaxProlix 4y ago

Agreed, I'd be much more interested in the How than the Why.

jnwatson 4y ago

I am interested in the engineering of such a conversion. The biggest issue has got to be plumbing.

gwbrooks 4y ago
That's the biggest issue once you get to conversion. Before conversion? The two biggest obstacles are: * Commercial mortgages make it nearly impossible to change a property in this manner, so you're usually limited to buildings owned free and clear. * In most cities, zoning/planning would push back on this; I suspect the most interesting part of the Texas story is how they routed around that.
- simfree 4y ago
  Zoning generally can be modified either by the local planning department, or by ballot measure.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    In practice it seems very hard to make such changes happen in US cities. I think Texas doesn’t really do zoning the same way so there’s not so much of an issue.
- chii 4y ago
  > Commercial mortgages make it nearly impossible to change a property in this manner that's a contractual issue, rather than an engineering issue. This can be fixed with a stroke of the pen.
  - gwbrooks 4y ago
    They can - but that requires both parties to the contract to agree on modification. If I'm a bank holding a commercial mortgage, it's very finely honed to minimize my risk; as part of that, I contractually limit what can be done with the building. Why would I, as a lending institution, throw that security away for something much riskier? If the emptying out of commercial buildings that we saw during the pandemic accelerated, that might have provided the incentive. But it seems like that trend line isn't going to continue in force. I think converting high density commercial properties to residential is a great idea in a lot of cities. But ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free.
    - ThrustVectoring 4y ago
      Far more likely than a mortgage modification is a straightforward sale of the property to new ownership (who then goes on to refurbish as residential and sell or lease the units). The banks have a specific dollar amount that pays off their obligation in full, at which point it's the buyer's problem (and their financing).
    - positr0n 4y ago
      Instead if changing the terms, couldn't the owner of the building refinance with a new bank that does residential property mortgages?
    - conductr 4y ago
      > ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free. Not at all. Your commercial mortgage lender will always help you increase the productivity of your asset. Phone call. Excel docs. Talk terms. Lawyers. Done. If you don't know this, nobody loaned you $#,#00M and you'll never need this advice
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  The other issue is that a 20-30% vacancy rate still means you need the other 70% of tenants to leave, and commercial leases are multiyear affairs.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  In the UK the change in need has for years (ie even before COVID) driven planning changes so that it's easy to get an OK to convert say an office building into residential. The results definitely vary, between "This is legal but nobody should have to live like this" (e.g. far too much light from floor to ceiling windows in some rooms while others are dark, not enough bathrooms, poor heat and noise insulation) to actually rather nice places to live. Most tend to be rental units for young people, rather than family homes, but it all helps. Where bureaucrats actually get to just make the decisions at a high level, rather than everything being second guessed by NIMBYs it's just really obvious what you have versus what you need. If you know your city has an inventory of empty mid-size office buildings sat on the market for months, yet apartments within walking distance of the city centre go for crazy money, it's a no brainer to authorise conversions. Whereas if the last office building was snapped up an hour after going on the market, while residential sales are crawling, a conversion from office to residential is nonsense, tell them to go away.
  - gnfargbl 4y ago
    There are a few conversions like this where I live (also in the UK) and I agree that the results definitely do vary. Where the conversion is in the heart of the city, it seems to work pretty well -- sometimes even better than knocking down and rebuilding, because the existing offices usually have stand-off space around the building that would be lost in a high density redevelopment. And from an environmental perspective, keeping all of that 1950s/1960s poured concrete in place has got to be a good thing. What really doesn't work is the partial conversion of offices on industrial/commercial parks out of town. It seems to lead to completely incongruous buildings, dumped essentially in the middle of parking lots, without basic amenities such as verges and pavements. Those buildings tend to be flimsy, and it's hard to see the environmental argument for keeping them. I would rather see those sites razed and rebuilt as better quality housing.
  - LightG 4y ago
    I've seen many situations where: 1) Office building and space is in demand but the market rate is much lower than the residential rate. 2) The owner of the office building will 'pretend' there is no interest in the property (sometimes for more than a year), so they can plead to the planners that they want to convert th building to residential. The planners authorise the conversion and the owners make a tonne of dough. There is no free market in real estate.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  In the "old" part of Houston there is no zoning. 2016 Main was converted from a hi-rise motel into condos years ago, they are pretty nice but there is always the feeling that it's not a complete domestic environment. At least the plumbing was there. There's a couple more of these nearby that were left over from the oil crash of the 1980's, which were eventually abandoned after years of reduced energy travel. Looks like one of them has been gutted recently and might be under conversion now.
jfim 4y ago
Out of curiosity, why would it be plumbing? There should be enough capacity to handle both fresh and black water, considering the high occupancy of typical office buildings.
- grp000 4y ago
  You need to run plumbing through the floors to every unit. The floors are structural.
  - quickthrowman 4y ago
    You can drill dozens of 10” holes through a concrete floor in a commercial office tower. The structural part of the floor are the tensioned cables inside the concrete, as long as you dont’t sever those, you can drill a ton of holes without impacting the structural integrity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestressed_concrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestressed_concrete
    - grp000 4y ago
      I used to work in concrete construction, doing post tensioned and SOMD for elevated slab. Coring might be simpler for SOMD, but post tensioned has such a high density of cables that I don't think it would work.
      - loonster 4y ago
        Commercial buildings tend to have very high ceilings. Maybe build a raised floor and put the plumbing under there.
  - tzs 4y ago
    Could you run vertical pipes on the outside in back of the building, and run horizontal pipes through space between adjacent apartments that you specifically leave for that purpose when converting the interior? If you need intermediate pumping stations or holding tanks due to the height of the building, those could be inside adjacent to the outside pipes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
greenyoda 4y ago
There's also the issue of windows. High-rise office buildings frequently have large floors with windowed offices around the perimeter and huge windowless areas filled with cubicles in the interior. However, residential buildings are generally required by building codes to have a certain number of windows per apartment (or even per room).
- quickthrowman 4y ago
  You solve this by making sure every unit has part of it along the curtain wall, the units might need to be more narrow vs more rectangular, but most office towers have a 20k sq ft floor plate where the curtain wall is never more than 50-70 ft from the building core (elevators and mechanical/electrical rooms)
quickthrowman 4y ago
You just add more plumbing risers and put point of use water heaters in the units. You might need to upgrade the building water service to accommodate higher water usage, but it’s literally just adding pipes and pumps in an existing mechanical chase or core drilling thru each floor to add plumbing risers. Some really tall buildings have tanks on top of the building to provide water pressure at the top via gravity. You can add drainage the same way, you just don’t need pumps for the drain stacks.

jandrewrogers 4y ago

FWIW, I've lived in a converted office building in Seattle. It was actually pretty nice, much nicer than most purpose-built apartment buildings. When they did the conversion, they re-engineered the interior pretty heavily and re-purposed some existing elevator shafts for other purposes that weren't required prior to the conversion. Some office buildings will be more amenable to conversion than others, so part of this would likely be selecting buildings for conversion where the conversion is both straightforward and will produce nice apartments. You want buildings that have many floors but relatively small area per floor.

InCityDreams 4y ago
>and re-purposed some existing elevator shafts for other purposes that weren't required prior to the conversion. Like....
- bdavis__ 4y ago
  I live in a 12 story office building, built in 1932. When the interior was converted to living space, 2 of the elevator shafts were re-purposed to provide additional floor space. They simply but in a "floor" where once was a "hole". that extra space is a closet in my specific case.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    Think I would prefer a slide!

twelvechairs 4y ago

Floorplate depth is usually the big issue. Residential generally doesn't like being much deeper than around 20m/65ft. Most tall office buildings built after the 70s or 80s will be deeper and maybe impossible to design into comfortable residences. Services is the other big one. Many more rooms needing hot and cold water and wastewater connections, more AC outlets and customisation, etc. Even if you have the space to do so (as office floor to floor heights are typically higher than residential). Plus remodelling facades to give more residential style windows etc. And does your basement have enough space for the cars residents will demand? Its an expensive business to add this all in and sometimes may be cheaper to just knock it down and start afresh.

7952 4y ago
What do you mean by floor plate depth?
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  How deep/wide a building is. Residential buildings tend to be a donut hole shape or an H to keep distances to windows about 20m. Office buildings are usually big, deep squares or rectangles.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    yep, plus many countries regulate what can be called a "room", and most "rooms" need to have a window, so this means either huge rooms (so they can have windows and go deep inside the building to use the space), or the rooms in the central part of the buildings used for non-livin rooms (eg, storage).
    - jaclaz 4y ago
      It surely depends on the country, but it is not like "a window" is enough, usually construction codes ask for "windowed surface" being not less than 1/8 or 1/12 of the area of the room (so you cannot make bigger than this limit), in order to classify the room as "suitable to permanent stay of people", in practice - as you say - all the rest becomes "non-living", storage, or window-sless (mechanically ventilated) bathrooms.

bontaq 4y ago

I heard similar things, mostly from HN and reddit. It's good to see that in reality it's doable.

nvarsj 4y ago

I lived for a few years in a converted meat packing factory in west Chicago. The apartments were really nice, except for the giant house centipedes that would occasionally migrate inside when it rained and would drop from the ceilings. It was essentially a long warehouse type building, so they put apartments/windows on each side with walking corridors down the middle and multiple floors, and a parking garage in the basement.

gnfargbl 4y ago
> giant house centipedes would drop from the ceilings That sounds like quite a significant inconvenience. Didn't it put people off, in a "holy shit I'm not staying here for another second" kind of a way?
- Maursault 4y ago
  Pretty sure the only living spaces in the world without house centipedes are in Antartica.
  - ralferoo 4y ago
    I'd never even heard of a house centipede, so I googled it. I've never seen one before and I live in the UK. Apparently they occasionally sneak into the UK in imported food packaging, but they're not native or common here.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > but they're not native or common here Nearly all instances go unrecorded, so precise frequency of distribution in England is impossible to determine. But they have spread across the globe to all countries and all continents except Antarctica, so chances are nearly certain you've got them in your home, even in England.[1] They're a little startling, but harmless to humans, and help keep your spider population in check. Even though I have probably only seen 5 of them in the last 20 years in places I have lived spanning the Eastern Seaboard of the US, I have no delusions about they being there regardless of spotting them. Unless they're disoriented and dying, like most "bugs," these things are supremely sneaky. >> S. coleoptrata is indigenous to the Mediterranean region, but it has spread through much of Europe, Asia, North America and South America.[2] [1] https://records.nbnatlas.org/occurrences/search?q=lsid:NBNSYS0000011447&fq=&nbn_loading=true https://records.nbnatlas.org/occurrences/search?q=lsid:NBNSY... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata#Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata#Distribu...

cm2187 4y ago

If you have seen a residential tower and an office tower being built side by side, you know why. The residential tower is built with concrete layers separating every floor (not always every flat within the same floor unfortunately). An office building has no separation between floor, only a thin sheet of metal. I would never live in a converted (purpose built) office building office, except perhaps if it is to live on the top floor.

parkingrift 4y ago
That’s the opposite of my experience. Office buildings are built to last and residential seems to have been built exclusively with clearance items at Home Depot.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  It changes when they get taller. Apartments up to 5 stories are generally optimized to maximize tax benefits.
bell-cot 4y ago
I'll guess that it's a very upscale residential tower (the rich don't want to hear the upstairs neighbor stomp across the floor), and/or a local fire code requirement for anything tall and residential.
ggcdn 4y ago
This isn’t correct. You probably saw a concrete residential building and a steel office building by chance. It does not follow that every single office building is built this way. There are concrete office buildings all over the place, usually with thicker slabs than a residential building, because the office building actually needs to be designed for much higher loads. By the way, the thin steel deck you saw gets concrete poured on it too once installed.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

The building codes are likely very different. Think about a shopping mall and the idea of converting it to cheap housing. All of the plumbing and electrical is for stores - maybe 1 sink per small store and department/anchor stores have 8 bathroom stalls all in one area. Then you have the fact that these buildings were likely constructed using asbestos in various ways. Gutting the interiors entirely is necessary, maybe they even need to gut major areas of the building to support more utilities as well. It’s probably not cheap so affordable housing may not be in the equation afterwards because of the renovation costs.

andsoitis 4y ago

Downtown Manhattan did a lot of it after 9/11.

dhdurrrgh 4y ago