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Turn the office buildings into affordable housing.
by zxexz 4y ago
Turn the office buildings into affordable housing.
- tasuki 4y agoI know nothing about the topic, but someone who does told me this is not easy to do.
- recursive 4y agoWe do this not because it is easy, but because it gives us somewhere to live.
- complianceowl 4y agoI see what you did there...
- pessimizer 4y agoThere are any number of difficult ways to give people somewhere to live that we're not doing. I would assume the reason to mention converting commercial property into residential is because the person suggesting this (usually wrongly) thinks it is easy.
- nxm 4y agoIt’s rarely that easy or financially viable. Major changes to the building’s core systems are required.
- carlosjobim 4y agoAt this point it doesn't matter anymore. We have whole generations of young professionals who are forced into life long debt to have a shack to live in. Your argument is like arguing against letting people have bicycles and continue walking, because cars are better. People need to escape rent feudalism first, then we can talk about other stuff.
- Kalium 4y agoI believe the point being made is that converting office buildings into affordable housing is more difficult and expensive than building that housing from scratch. If we want to help people escape rent feudalism first, we might consider what the most effective way to go about it could be instead. Which, perhaps coincidentally, gets at what's been a major question in American cities for quite a while now: what are we going to do about how hard it's become to build affordable housing to help people escape rent feudalism? We're talking about California in this particular case. That's a place where one of the organizing principles of politics for generations has been preventing new housing. If you want to enable people to escape from being serfs on rent farms, you'll need to grapple with that.
- carlosjobim 4y ago> Which, perhaps coincidentally, gets at what's been a major question in American cities for quite a while now: what are we going to do about how hard it's become to build affordable housing to help people escape rent feudalism? As I see it, there is not any lack of housing in Western society. There are a ton of unused or underutilized housing and a on the other side a ton of employed people who are denied access because of hyper inflation in real estate prices. In the past the elder generation would pass on their real estate to their offspring when they were making families. Then there was a period in the 20th century with high wages, were people could buy property with their wages, so that tradition stopped. Today it is not realistic for a working person to buy property without the life long debt, and that is according to plan.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- liketochill 4y agoI randomly chose Kansas City Kansas and there are houses there for less than 200k that looked ok. Living in San Francisco is not necessary. Live somewhere cheaper and stop complaining that desireable places to live are more expensive.
- fundad 4y agoRebuilding in flood zones isn’t financially viable either but government pays for that.
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoOnly in swing states.
- ericd 4y agoMy understanding is that office buildings usually don't have enough plumbing or ventilation ductwork to make this reasonable to do, let alone cheaply enough to make it viable to make it into "affordable housing". Unless you're suggesting that the government take on a bunch of debt on everyone's behalf to do this as a public service for those who are having trouble with rent, without regard for it being a financially viable project by itself. idk how it compares to the other options for doing that.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoCouldn’t they do dorm style with shared bathroom facilities? Usually office buildings have much better ventilation than private residences.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoWould you want to live in that?
- xboxnolifes 4y agoDepends on the price point. And it doesn't really matter what any one person would or wouldn't want to live like. I wouldn't want to live in a 200sqft apartment in NYC, but apparently a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money to do so.
- FrontierPsych 4y agoThat's not the correct question. The correct question is if homeless people sleeping on the concrete - would they want to live in that. And probably a good many of them wouldn't.
- ericd 4y agoThey do have a good amount of ventilation, since they’re high occupancy, but you would need to run vents to all the units, at least, rather than large ducts to larger, more open spaces.
- 4y ago
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe rezoning alone would take a decade at best.
- Cshelton 4y agoOn properties like this, that is still possible, BUT.. It wouldn't happen with the same borrower on the same deal/loan. It would go into a whole new construction type of loan (which is usually some sort of short term "mezz" financing for the transition period), and then get underwritten on maybe a 10 year. The issue with the above now though is the transition to multi family costs a lot. Many will try and get cities/states to subsidize it. And then getting a good loan to make the deal work in unknown. Nobody makes deals like that happen when there is this much uncertainty in the CRE market. If you can't secure financing post construction to make the cap rate work.. you're done. Deal is dead.
- slaw 4y ago> Turn the office buildings into affordable housing. Or homeless shelters.
- berkle4455 4y agoHow about we move jobs to somewhere cheaper instead of trying to figure out how to retrofit high-end office buildings into cheap apartments?
- xnx 4y agoTurn the office buildings into whatever the market wants: lofts, warehouse, light industrial, retail, recreational space, housing, etc. The one thing we know the world doesn't want is the status quo (otherwise they wouldn't be empty), so we should not do anything that keeps it from finding its best use.