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So, what is the solution? Force everyone back into the pointless office at enormous cost to employees and employers just to keep the status quo for landlords. T

So, what is the solution? Force everyone back into the pointless office at enormous cost to employees and employers just to keep the status quo for landlords. The bottom line is downtown is a place where people work with information. Since it is possible to work with information anywhere, this place isn't needed (and hasn't been for a long time). Downtown obsolete.

Rovanion 4y ago
Walkable cities with mixed use development. Change the use of downtown.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  To what?
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    Walkable cities with mixed use development.
  - MSFT_Edging 4y ago
    A place where people live.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I'm not from the US - what is downtown used for today?
      - osigurdson 4y ago
        Manipulating information (i.e. editing bytes) mostly.
      - uuddlrlrbaba 4y ago
        Corporate hellscape mostly
      - ericmay 4y ago
        In many, probably almost all US cities any downtown areas is used for "business" - i.e. commercial offices. The living pattern is you wake up, drive anywhere from 10-40 miles, 10 minutes to 2 hours, and you park your car in a parking garage and then walk a block to a skyscraper where you go up into an office area. After World War II the US built highways that destroyed most cities. Take a look at the 1949 image and then the 1981 to get an idea [1]. The root cause of many of America's continued problems, ranging from racism and classism, to oil and car dependency are linked to what we did over the years. [1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/24/7-photos-show-how-detroit-hollowed-out-during-the-highway-age/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/24/7-photos-show-how-det...
      - kodyo 4y ago
        Homeless encampments.
      - alistairSH 4y ago
        Depends how you define "downtown"... Most US cities have a central business district that is majority commercial office space, with just enough retail/dining to let workers take lunch breaks. These are the areas that are dying. No workers, so the surrounding retail/dining is failing. Back in the 50s/60s, white flight was a problem for cities - most of the middle class, white families moved to the suburbs. Most cities didn't have a large tax base that lived inside the city. That started to change over the last 20 years or so. Couple that with off-shoring or moving of heavy industry out of city cores and cities will struggle financially without white-collar/knowledge workers commuting in and spending money. Western Europe doesn't have the same level of suburban sprawl. Edit - the white flight I mention is closely related to the inner-city highways mentioned in the sibling comment. Suburban workers needed to get downtown, so (usually minority) neighborhoods were split in two or destroyed to built highways from the outskirts into the CBD.
      - cratermoon 4y ago
        I grew up in Houston, Texas. As a kid I remember downtown as being 1. Big office buildings with parking garages. 2. Concert halls & auditoriums. 3. City and county facilities. 4. Restaurants catering to the visitors of the above. 5. Sears & Roebuck department store. Nobody lived downtown, and most of it was dead after working hours. Most of the office buildings had no street-level retail shops at all – there was no reason to go there except to work, or in the case of 2-3 of them, to visit the observation deck on the upper floor. The small area where (2) were concentrated didn't even have much in the way of restaurants or shops open. If you worked there, you drove downtown in the morning, came home in the evening. If you wanted to a concert, play, or ballet, you drove downtown, enjoyed the show, then drove home. There was, and is, one unique thing about Houston. The tunnels. There is a network of underground walkways and areas connecting many of the buildings. There are some restaurants and shops, and during the lunch hour the area was packed. But you couldn't get to those tunnels without going into one of the office buildings, and they were only open working hours. Most of the stuff in the tunnels opened at 10am and closed at 2pm.
      - yardie 4y ago
        Predominantly, downtowns will have a financial, medical, and government district. Government: police, city hall, courthouse, administration for city, county, state, and federal agencies. Medical: usually a major or university hospital with various outpatient services in nearby. Financial: banks, banking services, property and financial services. Typically, just these 3 things were enough to compromise over 50% of commercial downtown properties. We're not even approaching cities that have a major HQ or specialty (manufacturing, tech, media, print). For a lot of cities once a major tenant moved out, they really only had government and medical as the city's economic engines. My city I've watched transform from being a violent, crack infest dump to a very desirable, fair weather place to be. And because of the loss of so much commercial business in the 90s they managed to avoid the glut of commercial properties. We pivoted to residential/mixed-use development in 2003 and it's really paying off now. Our downtown doesn't do anything in particular (except maybe crypto) except be a place for socializing.
      - ar_lan 4y ago
        I'm confused (and I'm from the US). People do live in downtown areas, so I'm not sure what the posters are getting at.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Someplace people want to live, work, and play. Some of the existing high-rise offices should be repurposed into housing, retail, etc.
    - muttled 4y ago
      Mixed-use high-rises are really cool. You can go to the mall, the gym, the pool, see a movie, go to the dentist, or go grocery shopping just by taking the elevator. They almost feel like resorts you can live in.
- seydor 4y ago
  change use of the suburbs?
brookst 4y ago
There isn’t a mechanism to “force” anyone. With few exceptions, companies lease their office space. A few companies may try to force employees to sit in a leased office to feed the sunk cost fallacy, but that won’t last. Only the most incompetent management will renew leases to support employees who don’t want to be there in the first place. The actual solution is large scale conversion of commercial real estate to residential. Some people like being downtown, with population density, ability to walk to lots of restaurants, etc. And converting ~60% of office space to residential will drive costs down, reducing financial motivations to move out of the city. Property owners are fucked, and will see much lower returns than they expected. Some will go bankrupt. Buildings financed by banks may see foreclosure/auction, and some banks will lose money. That’s what interest is for. But eventually these buildings will have new owners that bought them at appropriate prices, and new purposes as residences, and downtown will probably be an even better place to live, with a population that doesn’t go home to the suburbs every night. tl;dr: probably a good thing for downtown; invest in office-to-apartment conversion companies.
- showerst 4y ago
  Hopefully! Keep in mind that other alternatives are possible, including “St. Louis and Detroit in the 80s-2000s” style downward spiral into blight. I have no interest in bailing out billion dollar property holding companies, but we need to do everything possible to encourage positive development. It does seem like many cities get it, the high line in particular seems to have spawned a dozen imitators which is awesome.
- ethagknight 4y ago
  Large office towers just do not convert to residential very well. It can be done, it can be tolerated, it's just not a very good or competitive product, while also being very expensive to implement. One example, People walk a few blocks from the parking garage to their place of employment, but in most cities, people will not walk a few blocks from the parking garage to their home. Adding insult to injury, office towers that have been constructed in the last 50 years are very expensive to maintain, mechanical systems are expensive and complicated, requires a full-time staff to run. They were built for utilization at very different price point.
tootie 4y ago
Convert offices to apartments to alleviate the housing supply shortage.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  That turns out to be surprisingly hard. Offices and housing look similar from the outside, but are quite different on the inside, and both practical and regulatory problems are quite large.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    I guess it's all up to the next best alternative. If you've got offices that can't lease, the only thing left to do is sell it at a price a developer thinks they can turn a profit
  - tootie 4y ago
    I'm sure it's not simple. It would have to be backed by some public policy.
- DanCarvajal 4y ago
  My city has a few neat adaptive reuse projects right now converting office building to residential buildings. I really hope the concept works out.
- favflam 4y ago
  I bet Americans, especially those <30yrs old, will appreciate having a sub 600 USD a month apartment in a big city with no parking, shared kitchen, and share bathroom. Because the alternative is having a roommate and paying 1000 USD+.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog 4y ago
There is no need to "solve" every change.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  In fact, there's a need to roll with every change and use the opportunity to improve. We can repurpose old office towers for housing - Houston does it all the time. We can narrow streets that don't see daily commuter crushes - we can use this opportunity to build a better world.
bin_bash 4y ago
Half of the article talks about solutions. The last 2 sections are: "It's about new housing, stupid" and "The birth of the central social district"

Rovanion 4y ago

Walkable cities with mixed use development. Change the use of downtown.

robertlagrant 4y ago
To what?
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Walkable cities with mixed use development.
- MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  A place where people live.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I'm not from the US - what is downtown used for today?
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      Manipulating information (i.e. editing bytes) mostly.
    - uuddlrlrbaba 4y ago
      Corporate hellscape mostly
    - ericmay 4y ago
      In many, probably almost all US cities any downtown areas is used for "business" - i.e. commercial offices. The living pattern is you wake up, drive anywhere from 10-40 miles, 10 minutes to 2 hours, and you park your car in a parking garage and then walk a block to a skyscraper where you go up into an office area. After World War II the US built highways that destroyed most cities. Take a look at the 1949 image and then the 1981 to get an idea [1]. The root cause of many of America's continued problems, ranging from racism and classism, to oil and car dependency are linked to what we did over the years. [1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/24/7-photos-show-how-detroit-hollowed-out-during-the-highway-age/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/24/7-photos-show-how-det...
    - kodyo 4y ago
      Homeless encampments.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      Depends how you define "downtown"... Most US cities have a central business district that is majority commercial office space, with just enough retail/dining to let workers take lunch breaks. These are the areas that are dying. No workers, so the surrounding retail/dining is failing. Back in the 50s/60s, white flight was a problem for cities - most of the middle class, white families moved to the suburbs. Most cities didn't have a large tax base that lived inside the city. That started to change over the last 20 years or so. Couple that with off-shoring or moving of heavy industry out of city cores and cities will struggle financially without white-collar/knowledge workers commuting in and spending money. Western Europe doesn't have the same level of suburban sprawl. Edit - the white flight I mention is closely related to the inner-city highways mentioned in the sibling comment. Suburban workers needed to get downtown, so (usually minority) neighborhoods were split in two or destroyed to built highways from the outskirts into the CBD.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      I grew up in Houston, Texas. As a kid I remember downtown as being 1. Big office buildings with parking garages. 2. Concert halls & auditoriums. 3. City and county facilities. 4. Restaurants catering to the visitors of the above. 5. Sears & Roebuck department store. Nobody lived downtown, and most of it was dead after working hours. Most of the office buildings had no street-level retail shops at all – there was no reason to go there except to work, or in the case of 2-3 of them, to visit the observation deck on the upper floor. The small area where (2) were concentrated didn't even have much in the way of restaurants or shops open. If you worked there, you drove downtown in the morning, came home in the evening. If you wanted to a concert, play, or ballet, you drove downtown, enjoyed the show, then drove home. There was, and is, one unique thing about Houston. The tunnels. There is a network of underground walkways and areas connecting many of the buildings. There are some restaurants and shops, and during the lunch hour the area was packed. But you couldn't get to those tunnels without going into one of the office buildings, and they were only open working hours. Most of the stuff in the tunnels opened at 10am and closed at 2pm.
    - yardie 4y ago
      Predominantly, downtowns will have a financial, medical, and government district. Government: police, city hall, courthouse, administration for city, county, state, and federal agencies. Medical: usually a major or university hospital with various outpatient services in nearby. Financial: banks, banking services, property and financial services. Typically, just these 3 things were enough to compromise over 50% of commercial downtown properties. We're not even approaching cities that have a major HQ or specialty (manufacturing, tech, media, print). For a lot of cities once a major tenant moved out, they really only had government and medical as the city's economic engines. My city I've watched transform from being a violent, crack infest dump to a very desirable, fair weather place to be. And because of the loss of so much commercial business in the 90s they managed to avoid the glut of commercial properties. We pivoted to residential/mixed-use development in 2003 and it's really paying off now. Our downtown doesn't do anything in particular (except maybe crypto) except be a place for socializing.
    - ar_lan 4y ago
      I'm confused (and I'm from the US). People do live in downtown areas, so I'm not sure what the posters are getting at.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Someplace people want to live, work, and play. Some of the existing high-rise offices should be repurposed into housing, retail, etc.
  - muttled 4y ago
    Mixed-use high-rises are really cool. You can go to the mall, the gym, the pool, see a movie, go to the dentist, or go grocery shopping just by taking the elevator. They almost feel like resorts you can live in.
seydor 4y ago
change use of the suburbs?

brookst 4y ago

There isn’t a mechanism to “force” anyone. With few exceptions, companies lease their office space. A few companies may try to force employees to sit in a leased office to feed the sunk cost fallacy, but that won’t last. Only the most incompetent management will renew leases to support employees who don’t want to be there in the first place. The actual solution is large scale conversion of commercial real estate to residential. Some people like being downtown, with population density, ability to walk to lots of restaurants, etc. And converting ~60% of office space to residential will drive costs down, reducing financial motivations to move out of the city. Property owners are fucked, and will see much lower returns than they expected. Some will go bankrupt. Buildings financed by banks may see foreclosure/auction, and some banks will lose money. That’s what interest is for. But eventually these buildings will have new owners that bought them at appropriate prices, and new purposes as residences, and downtown will probably be an even better place to live, with a population that doesn’t go home to the suburbs every night. tl;dr: probably a good thing for downtown; invest in office-to-apartment conversion companies.

showerst 4y ago
Hopefully! Keep in mind that other alternatives are possible, including “St. Louis and Detroit in the 80s-2000s” style downward spiral into blight. I have no interest in bailing out billion dollar property holding companies, but we need to do everything possible to encourage positive development. It does seem like many cities get it, the high line in particular seems to have spawned a dozen imitators which is awesome.
ethagknight 4y ago
Large office towers just do not convert to residential very well. It can be done, it can be tolerated, it's just not a very good or competitive product, while also being very expensive to implement. One example, People walk a few blocks from the parking garage to their place of employment, but in most cities, people will not walk a few blocks from the parking garage to their home. Adding insult to injury, office towers that have been constructed in the last 50 years are very expensive to maintain, mechanical systems are expensive and complicated, requires a full-time staff to run. They were built for utilization at very different price point.

tootie 4y ago

Convert offices to apartments to alleviate the housing supply shortage.

BurningFrog 4y ago
That turns out to be surprisingly hard. Offices and housing look similar from the outside, but are quite different on the inside, and both practical and regulatory problems are quite large.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  I guess it's all up to the next best alternative. If you've got offices that can't lease, the only thing left to do is sell it at a price a developer thinks they can turn a profit
- tootie 4y ago
  I'm sure it's not simple. It would have to be backed by some public policy.
DanCarvajal 4y ago
My city has a few neat adaptive reuse projects right now converting office building to residential buildings. I really hope the concept works out.
favflam 4y ago
I bet Americans, especially those <30yrs old, will appreciate having a sub 600 USD a month apartment in a big city with no parking, shared kitchen, and share bathroom. Because the alternative is having a roommate and paying 1000 USD+.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BurningFrog 4y ago

There is no need to "solve" every change.

throwayyy479087 4y ago
In fact, there's a need to roll with every change and use the opportunity to improve. We can repurpose old office towers for housing - Houston does it all the time. We can narrow streets that don't see daily commuter crushes - we can use this opportunity to build a better world.

bin_bash 4y ago

Half of the article talks about solutions. The last 2 sections are: "It's about new housing, stupid" and "The birth of the central social district"