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As someone who knows nothing about commercial real estate business but lived in NYC for a long time. Why can't they convert to residential? Is the cost of conve

by aynyc 3y ago

As someone who knows nothing about commercial real estate business but lived in NYC for a long time. Why can't they convert to residential? Is the cost of conversation so prohibitive that it is a non-starter?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Is the cost of conversation so prohibitive that it is a non-starter? Having asked the same question of developers, it's a combination of cost and code. Many office buildings are old, with tiny windows surrounded by load-bearing walls. They're also laid out with an office, not home, in mind. (Think: plumbing.) This combination means extensive renovation, retrofitting and–if you find a previously-unseen problem–rebuilding. That said, it's New York City. My first two apartments were illegally subdivided and subletted, the first having no window. There are people who will happily take an apartment with a tiny (or non-existent) window in exchange for cheaper rent. We just need to update the code to remove aesthetic requirements while ensuring that doesn't mean skimping on safety.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Aesthetic requirements aren’t the big issue, things like plumbing are. Office buildings don’t need to distribute water infrastructure the way residential buildings do.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > things like plumbing are There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.)
    - IIAOPSW 3y ago
      I think on average we can do better than literally hell.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > think on average we can do better than literally hell Sure. But not with the existing CRE stock. Not for cheap. My prediction is code won't be compromised. We'll raze the buildings and construct new housing. It will never be as cheap as the alternative could have been, or, more pointedly, than what tens if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers endure. But it's an easier sell on the lectern.
      - AJ007 3y ago
        In the US they force people to live in the tents after demolishing the slums and call it progress.
        hgsgm 3y ago
        Then they demolish the tents.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.) You're talking about prewar walk-ups that have been converted to de facto SROs. Also, those are mostly downtown, not in Hell's Kitchen. They're cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price. Some number are also rent-stabilized and occupied by longtime residents, for the same reasons. There is no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding. There's a reason no new construction uses this model except for dedicated affordable housing (to the extent that's even built anymore). People simply do not want to live like that, and the market reflects that.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1]. > no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding The buildings' owners are screwed. Their leverage constrains them. The question is whether the structures have positive value. Retrofitting to current code leaves most with negative value, i.e. it's cheaper to abandon. The question I was answering is if it's possible to economically convert these to housing for somebody. Under current code, the answer is no. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-population-share-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-populati... 20 to 24 [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
        chimeracoder 3y ago
        > Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1]. You can't just link to the age distribution and cite the number of "20-24 year olds in NYC" as evidence that there are half a million people in NYC who can't afford to live in anything other than an SRO.
  - hedora 3y ago
    High rises are designed to have reconfigurable floorplans. So, very few internal walls are going to be load bearing. In the absolute worst case (low fixed ceilings that prevent drop ceilings), you can always go for the industrial look + expose upstairs' plumbing to downstairs, and/or add fixed internal walls for vertical plumbing runs.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > We just need to update the code to remove aesthetic requirements while ensuring that doesn't mean skimping on safety. There are very few "aesthetic requirements" that prevent an office building from being converted to residential. Most of issues with building code - including the window issue - are in fact motivated by safety concerns.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Most of issues with building code - including the window issue - are in fact motivated by safety concerns Office buildings are fireproofed in ways residential units are not. One can also replace windows with proximity to a fireproof stairwell without compromising safety. I'm winging this. The point is there are places we can make tradeoffs. They're just not the kind Manhattan voters like.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > Office buildings are fireproofed in ways residential units are not. One can also replace windows with proximity to a fireproof stairwell without compromising safety. You can't, really. The way that emergency exits are laid out in office buildings is different from the way that they're laid out in residential buildings, and that's done because the safety needs of residential buildings are different from the typical safety needs of office buildings. It would be more expensive to build office buildings with those requirements from the get-go, so few dedicated office have them (particularly the larger skyscrapers that we're talking about). You can either retrofit the core of the building (very expensive) or you can redesign the unit size and shape to conform to the existing building core (less expensive, but results in layouts that cannot be sold at the price the building owners require - the exact problem discussed in the article). > The point is there are places we can make tradeoffs. They're just not the kind Manhattan voters like. To make that claim, you'd have to point to actual tradeoffs that could be made without significantly compromising safety, and which aren't being done because "Manhattan voters" have rejected them. And as someone who probably has a much better understanding of NYC commercial and residential building codes than the typical HN reader, I'm really only aware of one, and even that is only really being advocated for smaller and mid-size buildings, not the tall skyscrapers discussed in this article. > I'm winging this. Yes, I can see that.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Windows aren't for aesthetic reasons. They are required in bedrooms by most codes for fire egress purposes.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Windows aren't for aesthetic reasons. They are required in bedrooms by most codes for fire egress purposes Commented on this elsewhere [1], but egress into a fireproofed stairwell is a safety-neutral compromise. It's against code, however. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989503
    - TuringNYC 3y ago
      Egress is also insane for high-rises, but it is still code.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Egress is also insane for high-rises, but it is still code That's the point. It's vestigial code that could be loosened to promote housing supply.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - yuppie_scum 3y ago
    Pretty hard to egress from the window of the 30th floor of a skyscraper anyway innit
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Have you ever pondered what the big ladders on firetrucks are for?
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- milsorgen 3y ago
  We're already deep in a mental health crisis, particularly among the city folk, I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea. People aren't widgets even if they themselves don't realize that.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea Nobody says to ignore it. Just not to make specific expressions of it a red line. Windows are a great example. New Yorkers get emotional about windows. Guess what: nobody is egressing from the 57th story of a burning building via the window. Yet go to a community board meeting and every numpty who Ctrl + F'd the fire code will pull up photos from 1911 to argue for windows an aircraft carrier can fit through. You know what you can provide the residents of a building with tiny, tiny windows? A rooftop garden. Modern heating and fresh, filtered air. Potted plants in the hallways, community spaces, warmer lighting et cetera.
- cmonagle 3y ago
  > Many office buildings are old, with tiny windows surrounded by load-bearing walls. Just a nit-pick: older buildings with windows and load-bearing walls are actually better candidates for residential conversion than newer buildings with glass curtain walls and structural columns. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...]
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > older buildings with windows and load-bearing walls are actually better candidates for residential conversion than newer buildings with glass curtain walls and structural columns Structurally, yes. Politically, community boards will claim they're hellscapes and then trot out studies on the health benefits of open air and sunlight and whatnot.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      Not that I expect NIMBYs to make sense but that's all nonsense. The buildings already exist, so there's no issue of open air and sunlight for surrounding buildings. Older office buildings actually have windows that open to let in fresh air unlike to newer glass towers.
- aynyc 3y ago
  I used to worked by FIDI, most the apartments there are old converted office buildings. Visited a lot of friends and coworkers in those buildings, I felt fine inside. But I supposed midtown buildings are a bit different in terms of girth versus old brick and stone buildings.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  NY has already begun changing the code to facilitate conversions.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > They're also laid out with an office, not home, in mind. (Think: plumbing.) Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine. The real challenge is air conditioning: showers create lots of humid, warm air - introduce that into your building's HVAC and you'll get issues with rust and mold - and cooking isn't much better, people generally don't want to smell the curry that someone at the other end of the building is cooking. Or they don't want to hear their neighbors having sex through the air vents.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    IIRC, the issue with plumbing is often sewage volume from cooking + showers and the like. There's a certain amount of load expected per floor of commercial space that is lower than for residential, and often commercial buildings literally don't have a hookup to the main sewer line large enough to accommodate residential use, and adjusting that can be immensely expensive. It's also a question of what the trunk water/sewer line can handle. There's places in some cities where larger apartment buildings have to hold sewage in a tank and pump it out at night because the city pipes can't handle a normal load during normal hours.
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    >Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine. The bigger problem is finding space for pipes. Many commercial buildings have specialized vertical tunnels for plumbing. The bathrooms in these buildings are usually adjacent to these tunnels, and there are no provisions for expanding plumbing to other areas of the floor in order to separate the floorspace into apartments with their own bathrooms. The vertical tunnels are also designed to contain some number of main pipes with capacity based on N bathrooms per floor that you'd typically find in an office, with no room for expansion to handle N*10 bathroom capacity.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Is that a problem though? Office toilettes are used way more often then residential. You can just put more residential toilettes in series than you could put office toilettes. Pipes dimensioned for an office floor is surely enough for flats.
jasonjei 3y ago
I’ve heard to do plumbing work to convert office to residential would be so ridiculously expensive it would be easier in some cases to tear the building down and start anew
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > plumbing work to convert office to residential would be so ridiculously expensive If you require plumbing to every apartment. Dorm-style lay-out would sidestep this problem.
  - Bellyache5 3y ago
    Who would want to live in a dorm?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Who would want to live in a dorm? Younger me. Lots of people. If you don't work from home it's just a crash pad. Saving a few hundred bucks a month is a good bargain for having to walk a few feet to pee.
    - nprateem 3y ago
      The tories wouldn't mind asylum seekers living in them
    - mperham 3y ago
      People who are on the street or living in their car today. We have a desperate need for affordable housing all over this country. SROs and hostel-style residences are perfectly reasonable as a step to keep people stable and off the streets.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    What's old is new again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment
yellowstuff 3y ago
Basically. There are a ton of logistical problems, but a major one is that the big office buildings in Midtown have a lot of interior space with no windows, and apartments need windows. A recent study in NYC found: "Most conversion projects would only become financially feasible if buildings could be acquired at significant discounts, in many cases at prices that valued the structures as having negative value." https://cbcny.org/research/potential-office-residential-conversions https://cbcny.org/research/potential-office-residential-conv...
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  If the trend in office usage keeps going, it's not long before these white elephants in the middle of cities will be considered of "negative value". Empty monoliths in very valuable lots, that you have to spend money to make useful? Sounds like negative value to me.
- hedora 3y ago
  Negative value isn't really possible in this scenario. I'll buy a floor of one of these buildings for $1, and promise to pay for its upkeep. I'm sure I can find someone willing to rent a 10,000+s.f. downtown manhattan apartment for more than the cost of maintenance (and the property tax on the $1 the floor of the building is apparently worth).
  - mkmk 3y ago
    Will you also take on the debt payments?
  - kgwgk 3y ago
    > prices that valued the _ structures_ as having negative value You are ready to pay $1 for a floor in the structure and how many millions for your share of the plot?
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    Pinky swear you’ll pay for the upkeep, all of it? It’s not just day-to-day maintenance (which I promise costs more than you’d expect) but also long-term building integrity and lifespan assurance. There are about 100 condo residents in Miami who kicked that can down the road to disastrous consequences and paid with their lives. Plus, negative value to equity is absolutely possible in this scenario. Let me know how far you get in the commercial real estate world without signing a personal guaranty.
jamies 3y ago
Plumbing is a big one. Most commercial floors only have a few hookups and drains. Each apartment typically has at least 6. Building layout is another. You could only reasonably put apartments on the outside with windows. There would be a lot of wasted space in the core of the building. It's all possible, but the question becomes is it desirable to live there? Will the rents justify the cost to convert? I doubt it...
nickthegreek 3y ago
In Columbus, Chase is doing just that. Converting 23 of the 25 floors into 253 residential units. https://columbusunderground.com/office-to-residential-conversion-planned-for-another-downtown-tower-bw1/ https://columbusunderground.com/office-to-residential-conver...
rco8786 3y ago
> Why can't they convert to residential? They can, and will, but it is not an easy process (yet). I would guess that within 1-3 years we see major cities changing their codes and zoning processes specifically to fast track commercial -> residential conversions.
nyc_data_geek1 3y ago
It's not, they're just dragginf their feet hoping they can pressure the workforce to stuff the genie back in the bottle. It ain't happening. Financial district has a number of converted office buildings, which are now residential. If anything, that area is now more vibrant and cool, certainly not an apocalyptic thing.
noughtme 3y ago
Floor plate size. Offices are very deep and the elevators are far from the windows. Condo towers are small so that natural light can penetrate. You can’t just convert an office tower to condos. Also, office towers don’t have the plumbing to put in a shower and drain for every 500 sqft.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Many things can be converted to office space. Old hotels for instance - they have common bathrooms, small rooms, lots of doors. Pretty compatible with offices. The opposite is harder. Adding bathrooms, combining rooms, adding kitchens and drains and individual utilities costs maybe more than the building is worth.
potatolicious 3y ago
Looking beyond the regulatory hurdles (others have covered that, plus it's being worked on), there are some real practicality problems: 1 - Windowless rooms are heavily undesirable in residences but pretty normal in office settings. In many areas they are also illegal (all bedrooms must have natural light) - but regardless of legality they are shunned by most buyers/renters. Offices however have lots of windowless rooms in the form of supply closets, utility rooms, freight elevators, conference rooms, storage rooms, etc. This combined with the popularity of open floor plan offices means that office buildings are really deep dimensionally. You can easily find modern office buildings where a desk is 50+ feet from the nearest window. This makes them nearly impossible to divide into residences, because the resulting apartments are dungeon-like, with only the very outer reaches getting any significant natural light. 2 - Cost of conversion is high but the resulting product is worse than purpose-built. Keeping in mind the natural light factor above, a lot of office-converted apartments are less pleasant to live in than purpose-built residential apartments, but the conversion costs are very high, and the two opposing dynamics cannot be reconciled. The cost of converting an office demands a level of rent that it cannot achieve in competition with actual residential buildings. 3 - Utility usage increases in residential buildings. A lot. Electrical, water, and sewer needs in residential buildings are much more intense than in commercial buildings. This is non-trivial to retrofit - since additional conduit and piping has nowhere natural to go. Conversion projects often have to punch through the concrete floor plates in order to create new top-to-bottom shafts to run all of the additional utilities. This is intensely expensive. 4 - Commercial buildings have over-built elevators relative to residential buildings. Office workers move from floor-to-floor a lot more than residents, and so for the same floor area commercial buildings would have more elevators. They take up valuable floor space that can otherwise be rented, and removing them to recover the floor area for residential use is incredibly costly. Many modern commercial buildings are in fact built around their elevator cores, so removal may not even be feasible. There are some successful conversions - but as others have brought up, they tilt towards conversion of pre-war office buildings where, because they didn't have powered HVAC, there are more windows and no office is too far from a window, creating good opportunities to convert into actually pleasant spaces. Modern offices with their gigantic floor plates are a whole different story.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Apartments are quite difficult in the footprint, I think. Depending on the size of the unit, it becomes impossible to give everyone a window, and not have some overly narrow floorplan. And that's not even taking into consideration the need to build out the plumbing to some x10 or x50 scale of what it currently is. Every unit needs a wet wall for kitchen and bath. Evacuation routes suffer. Retrofitting should certainly be possible, but neither cheap nor quick, and you either run into the problem of the resulting monthly being too high (and having trouble getting occupancy up above 95% where you want it), or it goes too low and you can't make back what you spent,
lvl102 3y ago
After 9/11, they tried doing this in downtown NYC because no one wanted work there. It was not good at all.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  That just sounds misguided from the start. No one wants to work there but they’d be willing to live there?

by aynyc 3y ago

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> Is the cost of conversation so prohibitive that it is a non-starter? Having asked the same question of developers, it's a combination of cost and code. Many office buildings are old, with tiny windows surrounded by load-bearing walls. They're also laid out with an office, not home, in mind. (Think: plumbing.) This combination means extensive renovation, retrofitting and–if you find a previously-unseen problem–rebuilding. That said, it's New York City. My first two apartments were illegally subdivided and subletted, the first having no window. There are people who will happily take an apartment with a tiny (or non-existent) window in exchange for cheaper rent. We just need to update the code to remove aesthetic requirements while ensuring that doesn't mean skimping on safety.

dragonwriter 3y ago
Aesthetic requirements aren’t the big issue, things like plumbing are. Office buildings don’t need to distribute water infrastructure the way residential buildings do.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > things like plumbing are There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.)
  - IIAOPSW 3y ago
    I think on average we can do better than literally hell.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > think on average we can do better than literally hell Sure. But not with the existing CRE stock. Not for cheap. My prediction is code won't be compromised. We'll raze the buildings and construct new housing. It will never be as cheap as the alternative could have been, or, more pointedly, than what tens if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers endure. But it's an easier sell on the lectern.
    - AJ007 3y ago
      In the US they force people to live in the tents after demolishing the slums and call it progress.
      - hgsgm 3y ago
        Then they demolish the tents.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.) You're talking about prewar walk-ups that have been converted to de facto SROs. Also, those are mostly downtown, not in Hell's Kitchen. They're cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price. Some number are also rent-stabilized and occupied by longtime residents, for the same reasons. There is no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding. There's a reason no new construction uses this model except for dedicated affordable housing (to the extent that's even built anymore). People simply do not want to live like that, and the market reflects that.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1]. > no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding The buildings' owners are screwed. Their leverage constrains them. The question is whether the structures have positive value. Retrofitting to current code leaves most with negative value, i.e. it's cheaper to abandon. The question I was answering is if it's possible to economically convert these to housing for somebody. Under current code, the answer is no. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-population-share-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-populati... 20 to 24 [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
      - chimeracoder 3y ago
        > Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1]. You can't just link to the age distribution and cite the number of "20-24 year olds in NYC" as evidence that there are half a million people in NYC who can't afford to live in anything other than an SRO.
- hedora 3y ago
  High rises are designed to have reconfigurable floorplans. So, very few internal walls are going to be load bearing. In the absolute worst case (low fixed ceilings that prevent drop ceilings), you can always go for the industrial look + expose upstairs' plumbing to downstairs, and/or add fixed internal walls for vertical plumbing runs.
chimeracoder 3y ago
> We just need to update the code to remove aesthetic requirements while ensuring that doesn't mean skimping on safety. There are very few "aesthetic requirements" that prevent an office building from being converted to residential. Most of issues with building code - including the window issue - are in fact motivated by safety concerns.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Most of issues with building code - including the window issue - are in fact motivated by safety concerns Office buildings are fireproofed in ways residential units are not. One can also replace windows with proximity to a fireproof stairwell without compromising safety. I'm winging this. The point is there are places we can make tradeoffs. They're just not the kind Manhattan voters like.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > Office buildings are fireproofed in ways residential units are not. One can also replace windows with proximity to a fireproof stairwell without compromising safety. You can't, really. The way that emergency exits are laid out in office buildings is different from the way that they're laid out in residential buildings, and that's done because the safety needs of residential buildings are different from the typical safety needs of office buildings. It would be more expensive to build office buildings with those requirements from the get-go, so few dedicated office have them (particularly the larger skyscrapers that we're talking about). You can either retrofit the core of the building (very expensive) or you can redesign the unit size and shape to conform to the existing building core (less expensive, but results in layouts that cannot be sold at the price the building owners require - the exact problem discussed in the article). > The point is there are places we can make tradeoffs. They're just not the kind Manhattan voters like. To make that claim, you'd have to point to actual tradeoffs that could be made without significantly compromising safety, and which aren't being done because "Manhattan voters" have rejected them. And as someone who probably has a much better understanding of NYC commercial and residential building codes than the typical HN reader, I'm really only aware of one, and even that is only really being advocated for smaller and mid-size buildings, not the tall skyscrapers discussed in this article. > I'm winging this. Yes, I can see that.
willcipriano 3y ago
Windows aren't for aesthetic reasons. They are required in bedrooms by most codes for fire egress purposes.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Windows aren't for aesthetic reasons. They are required in bedrooms by most codes for fire egress purposes Commented on this elsewhere [1], but egress into a fireproofed stairwell is a safety-neutral compromise. It's against code, however. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989503
  - TuringNYC 3y ago
    Egress is also insane for high-rises, but it is still code.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Egress is also insane for high-rises, but it is still code That's the point. It's vestigial code that could be loosened to promote housing supply.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yuppie_scum 3y ago
  Pretty hard to egress from the window of the 30th floor of a skyscraper anyway innit
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Have you ever pondered what the big ladders on firetrucks are for?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
milsorgen 3y ago
We're already deep in a mental health crisis, particularly among the city folk, I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea. People aren't widgets even if they themselves don't realize that.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > I don't think ignoring the aesthetic experience of where one lives is a wise idea Nobody says to ignore it. Just not to make specific expressions of it a red line. Windows are a great example. New Yorkers get emotional about windows. Guess what: nobody is egressing from the 57th story of a burning building via the window. Yet go to a community board meeting and every numpty who Ctrl + F'd the fire code will pull up photos from 1911 to argue for windows an aircraft carrier can fit through. You know what you can provide the residents of a building with tiny, tiny windows? A rooftop garden. Modern heating and fresh, filtered air. Potted plants in the hallways, community spaces, warmer lighting et cetera.
cmonagle 3y ago
> Many office buildings are old, with tiny windows surrounded by load-bearing walls. Just a nit-pick: older buildings with windows and load-bearing walls are actually better candidates for residential conversion than newer buildings with glass curtain walls and structural columns. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > older buildings with windows and load-bearing walls are actually better candidates for residential conversion than newer buildings with glass curtain walls and structural columns Structurally, yes. Politically, community boards will claim they're hellscapes and then trot out studies on the health benefits of open air and sunlight and whatnot.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    Not that I expect NIMBYs to make sense but that's all nonsense. The buildings already exist, so there's no issue of open air and sunlight for surrounding buildings. Older office buildings actually have windows that open to let in fresh air unlike to newer glass towers.
aynyc 3y ago
I used to worked by FIDI, most the apartments there are old converted office buildings. Visited a lot of friends and coworkers in those buildings, I felt fine inside. But I supposed midtown buildings are a bit different in terms of girth versus old brick and stone buildings.
skippyboxedhero 3y ago
NY has already begun changing the code to facilitate conversions.
mschuster91 3y ago
> They're also laid out with an office, not home, in mind. (Think: plumbing.) Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine. The real challenge is air conditioning: showers create lots of humid, warm air - introduce that into your building's HVAC and you'll get issues with rust and mold - and cooking isn't much better, people generally don't want to smell the curry that someone at the other end of the building is cooking. Or they don't want to hear their neighbors having sex through the air vents.
- noirbot 3y ago
  IIRC, the issue with plumbing is often sewage volume from cooking + showers and the like. There's a certain amount of load expected per floor of commercial space that is lower than for residential, and often commercial buildings literally don't have a hookup to the main sewer line large enough to accommodate residential use, and adjusting that can be immensely expensive. It's also a question of what the trunk water/sewer line can handle. There's places in some cities where larger apartment buildings have to hold sewage in a tank and pump it out at night because the city pipes can't handle a normal load during normal hours.
- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  >Plumbing is easy, pressurized pipes and pumps can deal with that just fine. The bigger problem is finding space for pipes. Many commercial buildings have specialized vertical tunnels for plumbing. The bathrooms in these buildings are usually adjacent to these tunnels, and there are no provisions for expanding plumbing to other areas of the floor in order to separate the floorspace into apartments with their own bathrooms. The vertical tunnels are also designed to contain some number of main pipes with capacity based on N bathrooms per floor that you'd typically find in an office, with no room for expansion to handle N*10 bathroom capacity.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Is that a problem though? Office toilettes are used way more often then residential. You can just put more residential toilettes in series than you could put office toilettes. Pipes dimensioned for an office floor is surely enough for flats.

jasonjei 3y ago

I’ve heard to do plumbing work to convert office to residential would be so ridiculously expensive it would be easier in some cases to tear the building down and start anew

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> plumbing work to convert office to residential would be so ridiculously expensive If you require plumbing to every apartment. Dorm-style lay-out would sidestep this problem.
- Bellyache5 3y ago
  Who would want to live in a dorm?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Who would want to live in a dorm? Younger me. Lots of people. If you don't work from home it's just a crash pad. Saving a few hundred bucks a month is a good bargain for having to walk a few feet to pee.
  - nprateem 3y ago
    The tories wouldn't mind asylum seekers living in them
  - mperham 3y ago
    People who are on the street or living in their car today. We have a desperate need for affordable housing all over this country. SROs and hostel-style residences are perfectly reasonable as a step to keep people stable and off the streets.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  What's old is new again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

yellowstuff 3y ago

Basically. There are a ton of logistical problems, but a major one is that the big office buildings in Midtown have a lot of interior space with no windows, and apartments need windows. A recent study in NYC found: "Most conversion projects would only become financially feasible if buildings could be acquired at significant discounts, in many cases at prices that valued the structures as having negative value." https://cbcny.org/research/potential-office-residential-conversions https://cbcny.org/research/potential-office-residential-conv...

TremendousJudge 3y ago
If the trend in office usage keeps going, it's not long before these white elephants in the middle of cities will be considered of "negative value". Empty monoliths in very valuable lots, that you have to spend money to make useful? Sounds like negative value to me.
hedora 3y ago
Negative value isn't really possible in this scenario. I'll buy a floor of one of these buildings for $1, and promise to pay for its upkeep. I'm sure I can find someone willing to rent a 10,000+s.f. downtown manhattan apartment for more than the cost of maintenance (and the property tax on the $1 the floor of the building is apparently worth).
- mkmk 3y ago
  Will you also take on the debt payments?
- kgwgk 3y ago
  > prices that valued the _ structures_ as having negative value You are ready to pay $1 for a floor in the structure and how many millions for your share of the plot?
- nocoiner 3y ago
  Pinky swear you’ll pay for the upkeep, all of it? It’s not just day-to-day maintenance (which I promise costs more than you’d expect) but also long-term building integrity and lifespan assurance. There are about 100 condo residents in Miami who kicked that can down the road to disastrous consequences and paid with their lives. Plus, negative value to equity is absolutely possible in this scenario. Let me know how far you get in the commercial real estate world without signing a personal guaranty.

jamies 3y ago

Plumbing is a big one. Most commercial floors only have a few hookups and drains. Each apartment typically has at least 6. Building layout is another. You could only reasonably put apartments on the outside with windows. There would be a lot of wasted space in the core of the building. It's all possible, but the question becomes is it desirable to live there? Will the rents justify the cost to convert? I doubt it...

nickthegreek 3y ago

In Columbus, Chase is doing just that. Converting 23 of the 25 floors into 253 residential units. https://columbusunderground.com/office-to-residential-conversion-planned-for-another-downtown-tower-bw1/ https://columbusunderground.com/office-to-residential-conver...

rco8786 3y ago

> Why can't they convert to residential? They can, and will, but it is not an easy process (yet). I would guess that within 1-3 years we see major cities changing their codes and zoning processes specifically to fast track commercial -> residential conversions.

nyc_data_geek1 3y ago

It's not, they're just dragginf their feet hoping they can pressure the workforce to stuff the genie back in the bottle. It ain't happening. Financial district has a number of converted office buildings, which are now residential. If anything, that area is now more vibrant and cool, certainly not an apocalyptic thing.

noughtme 3y ago

Floor plate size. Offices are very deep and the elevators are far from the windows. Condo towers are small so that natural light can penetrate. You can’t just convert an office tower to condos. Also, office towers don’t have the plumbing to put in a shower and drain for every 500 sqft.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Many things can be converted to office space. Old hotels for instance - they have common bathrooms, small rooms, lots of doors. Pretty compatible with offices. The opposite is harder. Adding bathrooms, combining rooms, adding kitchens and drains and individual utilities costs maybe more than the building is worth.

potatolicious 3y ago

Looking beyond the regulatory hurdles (others have covered that, plus it's being worked on), there are some real practicality problems: 1 - Windowless rooms are heavily undesirable in residences but pretty normal in office settings. In many areas they are also illegal (all bedrooms must have natural light) - but regardless of legality they are shunned by most buyers/renters. Offices however have lots of windowless rooms in the form of supply closets, utility rooms, freight elevators, conference rooms, storage rooms, etc. This combined with the popularity of open floor plan offices means that office buildings are really deep dimensionally. You can easily find modern office buildings where a desk is 50+ feet from the nearest window. This makes them nearly impossible to divide into residences, because the resulting apartments are dungeon-like, with only the very outer reaches getting any significant natural light. 2 - Cost of conversion is high but the resulting product is worse than purpose-built. Keeping in mind the natural light factor above, a lot of office-converted apartments are less pleasant to live in than purpose-built residential apartments, but the conversion costs are very high, and the two opposing dynamics cannot be reconciled. The cost of converting an office demands a level of rent that it cannot achieve in competition with actual residential buildings. 3 - Utility usage increases in residential buildings. A lot. Electrical, water, and sewer needs in residential buildings are much more intense than in commercial buildings. This is non-trivial to retrofit - since additional conduit and piping has nowhere natural to go. Conversion projects often have to punch through the concrete floor plates in order to create new top-to-bottom shafts to run all of the additional utilities. This is intensely expensive. 4 - Commercial buildings have over-built elevators relative to residential buildings. Office workers move from floor-to-floor a lot more than residents, and so for the same floor area commercial buildings would have more elevators. They take up valuable floor space that can otherwise be rented, and removing them to recover the floor area for residential use is incredibly costly. Many modern commercial buildings are in fact built around their elevator cores, so removal may not even be feasible. There are some successful conversions - but as others have brought up, they tilt towards conversion of pre-war office buildings where, because they didn't have powered HVAC, there are more windows and no office is too far from a window, creating good opportunities to convert into actually pleasant spaces. Modern offices with their gigantic floor plates are a whole different story.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

Apartments are quite difficult in the footprint, I think. Depending on the size of the unit, it becomes impossible to give everyone a window, and not have some overly narrow floorplan. And that's not even taking into consideration the need to build out the plumbing to some x10 or x50 scale of what it currently is. Every unit needs a wet wall for kitchen and bath. Evacuation routes suffer. Retrofitting should certainly be possible, but neither cheap nor quick, and you either run into the problem of the resulting monthly being too high (and having trouble getting occupancy up above 95% where you want it), or it goes too low and you can't make back what you spent,

lvl102 3y ago

After 9/11, they tried doing this in downtown NYC because no one wanted work there. It was not good at all.

the_only_law 3y ago
That just sounds misguided from the start. No one wants to work there but they’d be willing to live there?