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It's quite hard to turn modern office builds into housing. Recently-built offices have huge floors, so natural light can't penetrate into the interior. Those sp

• toomuchtodo 3y ago
  But this is good. It means no new office buildings need to be built. The existing ownership and debt will simply be juggled and fought over, numbers on a spreadsheet. The buildings will still exist and be available for office needs at reduced costs (after debt takes a haircut). New urban construction can now focus solely on residential needs, and with housing unit shortages, this natural reallocation of construction effort (due to demand destruction) should be welcomed.
  • pradn 3y ago
    I'm with you - there'll be a long term re-allocation. It might take decades, though. It's a larger scale version of the problem of empty storefronts. Store owners would keep buildings empty than reify the financial cost of reducing rents. There's large numbers of empty stores on Broadway in NYC, of all places - perhaps the most famous street in the country!
  • ghaff 3y ago
    If people aren't working in cities, it remains to be seen what that does to housing demand. There are a bunch of cities that aren't great from an employment perspective and, in general, they're not a big draw for people to live there either.
    • mywittyname 3y ago
      Especially in cities which don't have "vibrant" downtowns; the downtowns full of Subways and McDonalds that close up at 5PM, leaving a desolate urban landscape reminiscent of zombie movies. What's going to happen to cities with downtowns that are nothing more than a collection of office buildings and the businesses that support the people who work there?
      • kibwen 3y ago
        Even if a given downtown becomes a ghost town, the benefits of proximity to pre-existing infrastructure mean that the nearby urban areas will still benefit, and activity will just shift around slightly. Pittsburgh, PA is a good example of a city where the collapse of the downtown just moved all the activity to the surrounding neighborhoods, and now that those are thriving (though some more than others, naturally) that's starting to result in increased reinvestment in revitalizing downtown.
  • jupp0r 3y ago
    I don't get your point. If there's no demand for office space anymore, who will have offices in these buildings? If nobody has offices in them (or if rent is not enough to maintain the buildings), what will happen to them?
• marcosdumay 3y ago
  > But then your rent/sqft number goes down Yeah, that's the issue. I'm sure there's plenty of demand for commercial space on a lower rent. Commercial space is much more than offices, but those things are priced so that only high-margin artificially high-density knowledge work can afford them. Our modern cities are clearly not economically viable (proof of that is that people can't afford to live in them), so yeah, something will break sooner or later.
  • vkou 3y ago
    > Our modern cities are clearly not economically viable (proof of that is that people can't afford to live in them) No, that's not sufficient proof. You'd need unaffordability, and high rates of rental vacancies to prove that. Most of the unaffordable cities have near-zero vacancy rates. "That place is too crowded now, nobody goes there anymore."
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, you can only have high rates of vacancies if you have plenty of housing.
      • vkou 3y ago
        If the cities were net-negative economically, there'd be a net outflow of people from them (As anyone who can't make ends meet on the margins would pack up, leave, and create those vacancies.) Yet, that's not the case. There's an economic pull to cities, the are, on the net, more productive than the countryside (Because the proximity of people makes the cost of bringing goods and services to market very, very low.) The cost of land, in the long-term, rises to meet the economical productivity of an area. The reason that cities are so damn expensive is because they are productive.
• klyrs 3y ago
  > "Just turn it to housing" isn't an easy answer. Well, rent/sqft is dropping rapidly, like it or not. The housing crisis felt across north america has never had easy answers. But we're seeing a possibility for incentives to come into alignment with increasing the supply of housing. Even if that means tearing down buildings -- because if you don't, you get squatters.
• mlyle 3y ago
  Older-but-otherwise viable office stock, though, is a decent candidate to turn into housing. In a perfect world: * Lots of companies still using office space migrate to new office towers. * Older office towers get turned into housing. Will that get us there? I'm not sure. Of course, banks will still not be so happy, because a lot of this newer stock that would have rented at premium commercial rates is going to have to go a fair bit cheaper. (The other thing is-- if some of the older office stock gets turned into housing, the demand for commercial should go up, too, because it's easier for your work force to live close to work... but unfortunately, all of these corrections are on a timescale of 5+ years).
• giantrobot 3y ago
  The other major issue is that commercial space has much different plumbing requirements than residential. Commercial plumbing is mostly centralized with low flow pipes for sprinkler systems. That's not sufficient for residential space and it would take significant construction to add in that plumbing. Some commercial space will have similar issues with air conditioning and power. I'm often amazed when Big Brains trot out the "turn offices into residential!" without for a second wondering where people will shit.
• kibwen 3y ago
  I highly encourage people to read that NYT link, the diagrams are excellent. That said, the article also shows how you address the problem of no natural light: you punch a hole through the center of the building (and in New York City's case, this permits the developer to "move" that lost floorspace into newly-built units on top of the building). Far from a trivial solution, but also far from impossible.
  • nradov 3y ago
    That "solution" is literally impossible for most office buildings where the core is structural and contains most of the building machinery. For those it's cheaper to demolish and rebuild.
    • kibwen 3y ago
      The article shows an example of a building where one structural column had to be moved in order to accommodate the hole, and where the hole itself is off-center in order to disturb as few structural elements as possible. Indeed, every building converted in this way will probably need its own bespoke solution (e.g. if the elevator shaft is dead-center, you might cut two smaller holes on either side), but even then it seems like it would be hard for it to be more expensive than starting over from scratch.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    I'd need to be convinced the punch a hole is actually a good solution. I've stayed in lower-floor hotel rooms on a light well and they weren't great. (Of course, a lot of Manhattan hotel rooms aren't great from a natural light perspective--but I'd almost certainly have higher standards for something I was going to live in full-time.)
  • jupp0r 3y ago
    You could also have mixed use of buildings, putting residential on the outside and commercial on the inside.
• jareklupinski 3y ago
  why is everyone dreaming of turning offices into 2 bedroom 2 bathroom family units? most of these buildings are in very dense, tourist heavy areas, usually with booming nightlives and social scenes it's become a dirty word, but turning these buildings into SROs / low-cost rental units might bring back the artists and musicians that have been sorely missed from these areas, while providing people who don't have a credit history or first month + last month + security deposit a place to stay in a place that charges by the night instead of by the month much easier to turn an office into a coliving space with communal bathrooms, dorm style accomodations, and large cafeteria kitchens anyway