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Uber attempting to reduce office space in SF / 31% of office leases open
- sokoloff 3y agohttps://archive.is/Owzg2 https://archive.is/Owzg2
- awaythrow483 3y agoThis shouldnt be a problem due to the massive demand for office space in SF... I wonder at what point it will be cheaper to lease out an entire floor of a corporate office and throw an air matress in it then to rent a 3 bedroom house.
- georgyo 3y agoFrom the article > About 31% of downtown San Francisco’s office space is now available for lease or sublease. In early 2020, the vacancy rate was around 4% Demand is gone
- awaythrow483 3y agoOh weird. Well, no biggie. Im sure SF will figure something out and it will all be fine
- jnwatson 3y agoManhattan is at 22% now.
- ghaff 3y agoThe situation in Boston isn't quite so dire but still record availability. What still puzzles me though is commuting traffic is as bad as ever. I assume some is reduced transit/rail schedules and usage but I wouldn't have thought that would account for the whole thing. (And a coworker was telling me it's the same thing in Phoenix which barely has a transit system.)
- ilc 3y agoThe T is SEVERELY fucked right now. Anyone who can drive will in Boston, at the moment.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoWhat's going on with it? I have to be in Boston next week and was planning to use the T...
- ghaff 3y agoThere have been some major (overdue) maintenance projects that have caused service cutbacks on, I think, the red and orange lines in particular. I also saw just a couple days ago there were delays on my commuter rail line due to rail work. But the parent is being a bit hyperbolic. There is still a mostly functioning subway system. You can check the mbta.com website. As I look now there are delays but probably nothing too awful for someone in the city for a few days.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoUgh, I will be needing to get from Revere Beach to Harvard Square, so Blue/Orange/Red was the plan. Perhaps Blue/Green/Red is better? I'd really prefer to avoid a ride share or rental car. Edit - it appears that it's less than a 10 minute walk from Govt Center (blue) to Park St (red). That's better than waiting for a train and taking for a single stop, right?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zdragnar 3y agoOffices are built to different standards than residential use. The amount of effort to add new plumbing and wiring, to separate out utilities, etc is very seriously underestimated. There's an old office building near where my parents live that got converted to residential units. The contractor who did the conversion said it would have been cheaper to tear the building down and rebuild, but the owner felt there was some historic value to the building. Either way, the only way to make the transition feasible was to price the units at a luxury level. Mind you, this isn't even California, but the Midwest, where zoning, regulations and construction costs are more sane. I don't know how viable the same project would have been out there.
- bilbo0s 3y agoConversions are always attractive in real estate because they are nearly always luxury. When I was active in that business, the main problem my bosses had Was rezoning. If they got over that hurdle, they always made a killing. Even before my time, conversions were enormously profitable. In NYC, long ago, converting warehouses and factory spaces to luxury lofts was enormous business. I don't think people should dismiss the amount of money to be made on conversions. The main drawback is that the areas the conversions are in become even less affordable. Which may be more than offset by affordability increases elsewhere in the city.
- f1yght 3y agoIt's much easier to convert older buildings than newer ones, just due to them being designed differently. You lay out structures different if you're designing a small building for PI style offices than you do if it's a huge open floor plan. It's just more difficult to break out those big spaces into smaller apartments while making sure people have enough light.
- bsder 3y ago> converting warehouses and factory spaces Maybe not a warehouse, but a factory is a very different conversion than a gigantic open-floor office--especially if the building is old enough that it existed prior to electricity.
- makestuff 3y agoI can see the next "disrupting" startup now. Sublease a bunch of office space, skirt regulations and convert it into "apartments" that are more like hostels, and finally lease it out at a loss. Maybe that is why adam neumann raised 300m for a housing startup.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoDidn’t WeWork do some communal housing at some point? Honestly not a bad idea in this market
- makestuff 3y agoYeah it was called WeLive.
- darth_avocado 3y ago>massive demand for office space in SF There is no demand in SF. The whole commercial real estate sector is in a downward doomsday spiral, something that was easily predictable and preventable, but the city didn’t care. 30% of office space is vacant (not rented), a number that will only go up because the other 70% may be rented, but a lot of it isn’t actively utilized. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-office-vacancy/3204043/?amp=1 https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-office-v... In fact a lot of commercial real estate owners are realizing this and trying to minimize losses. Some selling entire buildings at 75% discounts. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/this-downtown-s-f-building-sold-bargain-price-18088504.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/this-downtown-s-f-bui... Anyone still holding a real estate lease at the ridiculous historical prices right now is only going to try and shed them even if they actually are using the space.
- awaythrow483 3y agoIts a joke. Sf is a basket case
- RC_ITR 3y agoSome interesting stray observations about this: 1) SF actually has a hard cap on the amount of new office space it can develop in a given year. [0] A lot of people pre-pandemic called it one of the worst NIMBY laws in America, but in retrospect, what a smart policy move. 2) Depending on how much you believe Apartments.com, there are c. 5k apartments available for rent in SF proper (a city of 800k) vs. c.31k in Dallas proper (a city of 1.3mn). 3) SF currently has 35mn square feet of vacant office space and needs to (by law) build 80k units in the coming decades. That's about 500sqft of vacant space per necessary unit... It will be interesting to see if SF can transform itself into the world's foremost 'people live here because they want to, the jobs are virtual' city. I certainly wouldn't bet on other cities slightly lower office vacancy rates as a long-term structural advantage. The only problem I see with the above is the amount of doom-and-gloom SF residents have bought into. [0]https://sfplanning.org/office-development-annual-limitation-program https://sfplanning.org/office-development-annual-limitation-...
- tristanb 3y agoI live here because I want to.
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoWhat demand for office space?
- awaythrow483 3y agoI know a guy who said he wants to work there
- diebeforei485 3y agoThe city's zoning code won't allow this, nor do the mortgage terms of the office building, nor does the insurance contract for the building.
- TomK32 3y agoJust call Sam Altmann, he sure will be happy to spend money to rent all the available space, now that he just called remote work to be over...
- paxys 3y agoThere are two factors at play here: - Tech companies are moving to remote/hybrid work (whether by choice or not) and don't need the office space. - Tech companies rode the bubble and made wild headcount projections between 2018-2021 and leased space accordingly. Now after the freezes and layoffs the exponential growth stopped and they realized they don't need as much of it anymore. So while covid/remote work is partially to blame, it doesn't tell the full story. Companies in Uber's cohort have just never been sustainable at all. Now that VC money (including tens of billions from Softbank/Saudi Investment Fund) has stopped flowing in and the market demands actual profit, they are having to face reality and cut spending wherever they can.
- hackernewds 3y ago[flagged]
- Convolutional 3y agoDo you mean the entrepreneur who killed the angel investor, or the fire chief who sprayed a homeless man (the last in a series) and the homeless man fought back in self-defense?
- LewisVerstappen 3y ago“Fought back in self-defense” Ah okay, so you’re just going to blatantly lie about what happened?
- mrits 3y agoWe know what he meant. Just 10 years ago SF, Seattle, and Vancouver were my favorite cities and all 3 have undergone very unfortunate changes.
- paxys 3y agoI have lived in SF for close to a decade, and the only thing that has really changed is the amount of politically-charged media coverage the city receives.
- zackangelo 3y agoEvery time stories like this get posted, the first question is typically "when will they convert these buildings to residential?". And, like clockwork, there's always someone there to point out that residential conversion is prohibitively expensive and it would be cheaper to just tear the building down and start over. My question is: is it possible to design high rise buildings in the future that can flex between residential and commercial? What's the extra upfront cost in plumbing, etc to build in this optionality from the start?
- bombcar 3y agoThere is a good NYT article on it - old buildings are easier to convert but modern office buildings are huge and you have to literally punch a hole in it. But it could certainly be designed to be easier to convert, as the older one was easier. The problem you may run into is that the people who want office buildings won't want the easily convertible building; so you might have to legislate that it be convertible. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office... https://archive.ph/gQiQW https://archive.ph/gQiQW
- 0zemp2c 3y ago> Every time stories like this get posted, the first question is typically "when will they convert these buildings to residential?" HN needs some AI to just autofill "asked and answered N times already - see here:..."
- noughtme 3y agoFloorplate size. Floorplate size. Floorplate size. If you required all new office buildings to have the same small floorplate size of a residential building, then they would be convertible, but thay would significantly change the economics of commercial real estate.
- epicureanideal 3y agoMaybe build a new kind of housing that is INSIDE the large open place office, and doesn't need to have the same structural integrity, but focus on noise reduction and being secure from external entry? Like a bunch of tiny homes inside an open plan office.
- spamizbad 3y agoSeems like all that bluster from mayors and certain business leaders to get people back into the office isn't working.
- 0zemp2c 3y agoit will eventually call centers, tax prep sweatshops, data entry, cold-call sales i.e. people who can't just say "no" to RTO orders SF government will brag about low vacancy rates, but the towers will be filled with minimum wage workers
- renewiltord 3y agoThere seems to be a market opportunity here for someone like WeWork because it's hard to find competitive smaller offices currently, though the big spots are cheap / sq.ft. Look on LoopNet and the 1.5k sq.ft. section is still competitive with before. Unless someone here knows where I can find that size with high-speed internet, good power, and temperature control close to BART.