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Last I heard there was a housing shortage. Obvious solution would be to turn commercial properties into residential ones.
by fny 4y ago
Last I heard there was a housing shortage. Obvious solution would be to turn commercial properties into residential ones.
- iancmceachern 4y agoOur building in SOMA did this.
- jedberg 4y agoIt's obvious but not easy. Oftentimes commercial spaces don't have a lot of plumbing. They usually just have the one bathroom and kitchen space per floor usually in the middle. A large office space would need walls and a lot of plumbing work to convert to apartments (and probably a lot more electricity to power multiple kitchens full of appliances).
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoAnd it can rather easily be added on the outside in some isolated ducts. The problem is cutting it down to appartments that correspond to fire safety codes. CAL demands you have two exits, which a office building easily fullfills with two staircases. But how do you do that in a converted apartment building, without loosing tremnedous amounts of space to hallways.
- anigbrowl 4y agoEveryone said the same thing about lofts/industrial spaces. Going by other contexts, the greatest profits will flow to people who Just Do It and make people happy, later seeking forgiveness instead of permission.
- function_seven 4y agoSo what makes converting existing structures to residential use harder than building new residential buildings on empty land? I view this as an "outrunning the bear" situation. I.e. you don't need to run faster than the bear, just run faster than your poor friend. The cost to convert an office tower into apartments is high I'm sure, but is it higher than building a similarly-sized apartment tower from scratch? A lot of money goes into the foundation works and soils engineering.
- mcguire 4y agoThe first thing you would have to do would be to remove much of the internal walls and structure, followed by running new electrical and plumbing. The latter two are very skilled-manual-labor intensive.
- coding123 4y agoSo make that kind of residential space... different.
- nilsbunger 4y agoMany of them aren't well-suited to it. Everything from plumbing to window coverage is not designed for it. Zoning also doesn't allow it - have you tried to get a zoning change through SF? Anyway, you can convert some of them, but it's not an easy journey!