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There was a cool OddLots episode recently where they talked to a guy who does Office to Residential work and some of the complexity. One thing he talked about,

There was a cool OddLots episode recently where they talked to a guy who does Office to Residential work and some of the complexity. One thing he talked about, which I didn't know anyone did, was to actually cut through the ceiling/floorplate of buildings to basically "donut" them. This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either undesirable or illegal apartments due to lack of windows/egress/etc. Apparently they've done it a few times. Of course only some buildings can support this, given the layout of the supports, mechanicals, etc.

aperson_hello 3y ago
Undesirable apartments sound like code for low income/affordable housing to me... Add a few light pipes out to the outside walls and you can even get a bit of outside light inside!
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes my point is that cutting the donut hole in is necessary to make them legal & desirable.
  - aperson_hello 3y ago
    And my point is that desirable doesn't matter much if the goal is to get people housed. Yeah, you'll get less rent for the inner apartments, but that's how you make affordable housing - you make things cheaply and make sacrifices along the way to do so. Unless you don't want to live with the "poors"... Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      The problem is that the rest of the conversion, namely bathrooms and kitchens per unit and the required pipes, are also not cheap, to the point where if you wanted to rent out a lot of cheap units it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew.
      - RC_ITR 3y ago
        > it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew. Idk where this meme started but it’s very far from reality. We as a species have only ever voluntarily demolished like 30 or so building above 35 stories because it’s insanely expensive to do so (most buildings were knocked down to make significantly larger ones in their place). In no world is it ever cheaper to tear down a high rise and start over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_voluntarily_demolished_buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_voluntarily_de...
        ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
        My company used to work with a German startup that was based in Lübeck, one of the oldest towns in Germany[0]. They were in Old Town, which is on an island. The building they originally occupied was over a thousand years old. They then modernized to one that was only eight hundred or so years old, then, eventually, they moved to the mainland, into new construction. Sort of gives new meaning to “reuse.” [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lübeck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lübeck
        bregma 3y ago
        > We as a species have only ever voluntarily demolished like 30 or so building above 35 stories because it’s insanely expensive to do so The designed lifetime of yer typical neopostmodernist glass box office tower is about 25 years. Many of them are 50 years old at this point. They get torn down and replaced all the time.
        RC_ITR 3y ago
        > The designed lifetime of yer typical neopostmodernist glass box office tower is about 25 years. Many of them are 50 years old at this point. They get torn down and replaced all the time. I mean, can you provide a list of all these 1973 high rises that are being torn down (and the commentary that they were built to be torn down in 1998)? I’d be really interested to see that, because any steel building frame should be more durable than that, so I’m curious what these buildings are made out of.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      I dunno I think legal regulations on what is safe housing are pretty good, actually. For example, in the absence of good legal housing, many poor (mostly immigrant) people in NYC live in illegal basement apartments. Every time there's a flash flood warning with a storm in the city, 5x/year, some of them die in their homes. Ideally, poor people would also be able to live in legal apartments, provided we could actually build more.. and you know, die less!
      - aperson_hello 3y ago
        Windows don't make you safe in a high rise. Especially ones in a donut hole in a structure - no way to escape through those!!
        steveBK123 3y ago
        I dunno man, I think people can strawman every which way on housing its kind of tiring. "We should build windowless homes so poor people can afford them" "You can't put poor people in homes you dont want yourself" "Your desire to not build windowless homes is because you dont want to live next to poor people" "I think we should build more housing" "You just want rich people to have more homes" on and on FDNY can ladder rescue up to about the 10th floor. They've rope rescued someone as high as the 20th floor recently. https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/fdny-battling-high-rise-blaze-on-nycs-east-52nd-street/ https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/fdny-battling-high-rise-blaze-... So windows are good, actually.
        aperson_hello 3y ago
        But that's a strawman when you can literally cut a hole down a skyscraper and be legal. There's literally no way for FDNY to get a ladder into that hole to rescue someone. To throw out more strawmen... "I want marble countertops, everyone should have marble countertops" "I want a curbless shower, everyone should have curbless showers" At some point, required amenities and features are preventing people from being housed and causing way more people to literally die because they're not housed vs. the alternative of shitty but safe housing. I'd argue that windows in a high-rise with sprinklers is one of those features.
- golem14 3y ago
  (charlie Munger has entered the chat) https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...
- itairall 3y ago
  [dead]
mlyle 3y ago
> This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either undesirable or illegal apartments due to lack of windows/egress/etc. Couldn't you just wall off the middle? I mean, you do get another set of windows on the inner courtyard, but it seems expensive to perform such major surgery on a building.
- xattt 3y ago
  Donuted buildings will forever remind me of the Ponte Tower building. (1) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/the-south-african-building-that-came-to-symbolize-the-apocalypse/517056/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/th...
  - metadat 3y ago
    The South African Building That Came to Symbolize the Apocalypse https://archive.today/qfZ91 https://archive.today/qfZ91
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Well, we're calling them "donut holes", but they're actually rectangles. :P
    - readthenotes1 3y ago
      Don't be such a square!
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    In Hong Kong, pre-handover, I stayed in a windowless hotel room.
    - alisonatwork 3y ago
      Those still exist in Hong Kong today. And many other places in the world, for that matter. Even apartments without windows aren't that uncommon. In subdivided floors they're cheaper than the street facing ones, but some people prefer them anyway because there is less noise from the road.
pimlottc 3y ago
This looks like the episode of OddLots you're talking about: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-actually-takes-to-turn-an-office-building-into-apartments https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-a... They talk about converting 180 Water St by adding an internal atrium; it's also one of the conversions illustrated in the recent NYT article about the difficulties of office-to-residential conversions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
- tholman 3y ago
  - [1] Bloomberg Article https://archive.is/eTpi5 https://archive.is/eTpi5 - [2] NYT Article https://archive.is/fUtnl https://archive.is/fUtnl
- dc_rog 3y ago
  Related article from the prior day: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/why-converting-new-york-city-offices-to-apartments-is-so-complex https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/why-conve...
- rexf 3y ago
  The NYT article does a really good job explaining the difference between converting a prewar and a modern building. Also, TIL about loss factor: > As offices, these buildings can also rent 100 percent (or even more) of their total square footage, according to the quirky math of commercial real estate. https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies-in-size/ https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies...
  - spjwebster 3y ago
    A well-known UK startup, renting an old building just outside of London, is (or was, as of a few years ago) paying square footage cost for an entire floor that doesn't exist. The previous occupants - a government department - had the floor removed to make for higher, grander internal ceiling heights.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
I wonder if some interior spaces could be preserved for commercial, some reallocated for retail, some set aside for tenant mixed use areas. I don't get why one area can only ever be for one kind of use.
- WJW 3y ago
  If you really want to know, I can't recommend the book "Seeing like a state" enough. TL;DR: For government officials who are charged with supervising regulations over tens of thousands of areas, it's already more than complicated enough if each of those areas has a single use designation. If you allow all of those to have multiple designations, it becomes too complex for humans to administer and so they don't allow multiple designations.
  - another_story 3y ago
    There are so many cities (I'd say it's the majority in the world), with mixed use zoning which work wonderfully. Lower floors are offices or businesses and upper floors are apartments. Why is this so difficult?
    - mc32 3y ago
      I swear, it's impossible to please people. People are complaining that mixed use zoning on Taraval street in SF is wasting space because the street-level floors are wasted and they should be converted into apartments (many business have shuttered and ground floors remain empty in some mixed use buildings).
      - constantly 3y ago
        I checked and it turned out that “people” are a pretty heterogeneous group and regularly different groups want different things.
      - whatatita 3y ago
        It would be terrible loss to convert those business spaces into residential. One or two could be changed, as retail needs change over time, but removing possible retail and third space from near people's homes means less walkable neighborhoods. Where I live, we have short term reuse laws that allow retail spaces to be used for residential, social, or other uses on a fixed basis. Typically a few years. The idea being to review the reassignment when the local needs change. We get a lot of kindergartens that use these spaces, but also pharmacies, social clubs, and offices. Easy to move in and out.
RC_ITR 3y ago
It's against narrative, but this is one of the ways SF's downtown is actually extremely well positioned, assuming the trend of office conversions actually takes off. SF floorplates are usually tiny due to historic biases of our Planning Commission (the dog whistle used to be 'we don't want a skyline of cereal boxes'). In fact, looking at the data [0] most of SF's residential tower floorplates are bigger than SF's office floorplates. [0]https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Map-of-Tall-Buildings/xnf9-cudk https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Map-of-Tall-Bui...
- Arete314159 3y ago
  In addition, as climate change affects more and more places, I think SF will be the winner. It maintains a naturally air conditioned 65 degrees all summer long during a decade that has seen even Portland Oregon go into the high triple digits. Don't sleep on San Francisco.
  - ves 3y ago
    Were we living in the same city? There were multiple heatwaves in the time I lived there, one so severe that Noe Valley got to 107. And this isn’t to mention the wildfires or inevitable water issues.
    - RC_ITR 3y ago
      Apparently not because these are the hottest days in sf history: 1. September 1, 2017 – 106 degrees T-2. June 14, 2000 – 103 degrees T-2. July 17, 1988 – 103 degrees T-4. September 2, 2017 – 102 degrees T-4. October 5, 1987 – 102 degrees T-6. September 14, 1971 – 101 degrees T-6. May 30, 2001 – 101 degrees T-6. June 14, 1961 – 101 degrees T-6. September 16, 1913 – 101 degrees T-6. September 8, 1904 – 101 degrees T-11. October 4, 1987 – 100 degrees T-11. September 8, 1984 – 100 degrees 9 of the next 10 days in Dallas would be on that list. 3 days from last year in Seattle would be in the top 5 days on that list. We are comparable to the extremes of a coastal eastern city, with significantly lower temperatures between the peaks. There’s not many places in the US that have never seen 106. As for water, 80%+ of it in California is used for food that is exported elsewhere. Strawberries in December in New York are much more at risk than humans in CA. As for fires, nowhere in the world is safe from that, as this summer is proving.
bonestamp2 3y ago
For buildings where they can't cut the whole center of the building... maybe cutting more (but smaller) holes part way between the outside and the center would work. Then do vertical gardens up those shafts.
- bloppe 3y ago
  The issue is emergency egress. You need those shafts to be able to support external staircases with many dozens of people rushing down simultaneously in the event of a fire.
  - aperson_hello 3y ago
    Do you? Most newer buildings go without external staircases (typically have two+ internals firewalled apart from each other)
    - acchow 3y ago
      I believe there are two different requirements for residential: 1 is egress (fire regulations), and the other is natural light requirements for each room.
      - aperson_hello 3y ago
        You're not going to egress out of a 60th floor window...
        acchow 3y ago
        No, the natural light requirement is not a fire regulation. It's not about egress.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Do you? No, the window requirement is another housing suppression tactic. In New York, it is common for apartments to be illegally subdivided. It's how a lot of people live because it's affordable. I've done it. It's fine. Stairwells are necessary. But nobody on the 60th story of a high rise is egressing externally, FDNY's ladders don't even go that high. If you're only home at night, the window is a luxury. As evidenced by, when people are given a choice between more cash and a window, many choosing the cash.
INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
Typically switching from office to residential they will remove one elevator per bank and use the empty shaft for pipe/wiring riser
privatedan 3y ago
mmm… donuts…
mkoubaa 3y ago
Seems to me like a failure of imagination to insist that some buildings can not support this
- addisonl 3y ago
  I mean with unlimited money anything is possible of course, but that’s not how these conversions work.
hedora 3y ago
The main advantage of living in a converted factory (there are a lot of these in the rust belt) is that you end up with an absolutely enormous space made out of cool materials. I was finding it hard to imagine that there are inner-city office buildings (high rises) that have floors so large that they couldn't be cut into, say 1/4'ths, with four residences on each floor, and each unit having 50% windows along its perimeter. People build McMansions that are > 10K square feet, so for a building footprint to be too big for this (i.e., so big that buyers would balk at the size), then you'd need a high-rise with ~40K sq ft floors before this became a problem. A standard city block in Manhattan is apparently 237,000 square feet, so if you had a building that took up a whole block, there'd be a big problem. Now I'm wondering how many office buildings there are in a typical city block.
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  I doubt that people in the market for a downtown apartment share the same priorities for selecting a home as people who would buy a McMansion. I also don’t think you can equate 10,000 sq ft over multiple floors with the same area on a single floor. I don’t know how that space would be designed in any practical manner that wouldn’t turn it into a labyrinth. I guess if someone wants a ballroom or a basketball court in their apartment?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Rural areas are replete with relatively average 2k sq ft houses with 10k sq ft+ “workshops” or “barns” - which often are just big areas that never actually did any farming, but are used for storing toys or hobbies.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    > 10,000 sq ft over multiple floors with the same area on a single floor My neighbor's house is, IIRC, 11,000 sq-ft all on a single floor. Just a lot of very big rooms.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Due to fire code, to divide a high-rise into 4 corner units, you need to take up almost ~50% of the space for elevators, stairs and hallways. So you'd probably end up with close to 5k square foot condos - which isn't too ridiculous. You'd probably do 4 corner units and 4 non-corner units for a total of eight, and end up with each being between 2000 and 2500. The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a number of reasons. And when you're paying that much money, you probably don't want to live in a building that wasn't even designed to be lived in...
atkailash 3y ago
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tjmc 3y ago
Why not put edge datacentres in the middle? They could provide heating to perimeter apartments in cold climates and just imagine the ping!
- Arete314159 3y ago
  I love this idea!
  - wavesway 3y ago
    Me too. Make it happen. Free 100 GbE all around.
- smt88 3y ago
  Very few humans live in places that need heat all year round.
  - LUmBULtERA 3y ago
    The heat could be used for water heating as well.
andromeduck 3y ago
We could also just relax the window requirements for conversions.
- ruined 3y ago
  this is how you end up with mass mortality events
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    Aren't we all subject to death though ?
    - pretendscholar 3y ago
      Preferably not all at the same time
    - wavesway 3y ago
      It doesn’t have to be tragic…
    - jonathanlb 3y ago
      If it's in your power to prevent people from dying tragically in a burning building- you wouldn't?
      - jkeisling 3y ago
        Basic economics: The optimal number of people who die tragically in a burning building is not zero. Every person trades off some amount of safety for cost, that’s just part of living. It’s possible that this particular tradeoff isn’t worth it, but human life isn’t infinitely sacred. I assume if it were in your power, you also would rather let some people burn to death than ban wooden houses, for example. This, well, inflammatory emotive rhetoric really doesn’t lead to good discussion, or good policy for that matter.
  - phantom784 3y ago
analog31 3y ago
Maybe I'd think differently if I actually saw the footprint of a large office building, but I'm thinking... My house has a basement and a garage, which are not approved as living space, and don't have proper windows or egress. Would it solve the problem to let the interior portions of buildings be designated as storage and utility space? I'd love to have more space for bikes and musical instruments. ;-)
- petre 3y ago
  They get to make two rows of apartments instead of one if they cut off the interior of the building. So better space usage = more $.
dirtyid 3y ago
Seems like you can trivially get around HVAC issue by just having individual units like in hotels or split units like many parts of the world (new builts and retrofits) and pare back existing HVAC / ducts for hallways/common space which are hooked up anyways. There's ways to do it cheap, but these not retrofitting nice office towers to be cheap units.
alexvoda 3y ago
Of course this is only necessary because someone at some point decided it is ok for modern post-war offices to no longer have natural lighting and ventilation. Why would office workers ever need to see the sun? According to the article, the pre-war buildings are easy to convert.
- IMTDb 3y ago
  It's not about "someone deciding that it is ok for modern post-war offices to no longer have natural lighting and ventilation". It's that the open floor model gained popularity; and the building technique evolved. This allowed huge windows to cast light for everyone in one go, since people were not putting opaque wall everywhere which were restricting whatever light that came through "their" part of the building to reach anyone else. "My window" became "our window". Similarly HVAC system evolved to maintain equal temperature in the whole building; there was no longer a need to bring individual heating/cooling system in every single cell since carefully placing some element would let natural convection do the work. Removing these walls allowed building to be built and heated/cooled with comparatively less material; something that was positive both economically and - dare I say it - ecologically. Converting these shared spaces into private requires to "undo" all these optimisations and will carry a significant cost. Just like converting a bus into several car is not easy because although the seats are there; you are going to need many engines.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > Just like converting a bus into several car is not easy because although the seats are there; you are going to need many engines. This is a great analogy.

aperson_hello 3y ago

Undesirable apartments sound like code for low income/affordable housing to me... Add a few light pipes out to the outside walls and you can even get a bit of outside light inside!

steveBK123 3y ago
Yes my point is that cutting the donut hole in is necessary to make them legal & desirable.
- aperson_hello 3y ago
  And my point is that desirable doesn't matter much if the goal is to get people housed. Yeah, you'll get less rent for the inner apartments, but that's how you make affordable housing - you make things cheaply and make sacrifices along the way to do so. Unless you don't want to live with the "poors"... Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    The problem is that the rest of the conversion, namely bathrooms and kitchens per unit and the required pipes, are also not cheap, to the point where if you wanted to rent out a lot of cheap units it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew.
    - RC_ITR 3y ago
      > it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew. Idk where this meme started but it’s very far from reality. We as a species have only ever voluntarily demolished like 30 or so building above 35 stories because it’s insanely expensive to do so (most buildings were knocked down to make significantly larger ones in their place). In no world is it ever cheaper to tear down a high rise and start over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_voluntarily_demolished_buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_voluntarily_de...
      - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
        My company used to work with a German startup that was based in Lübeck, one of the oldest towns in Germany[0]. They were in Old Town, which is on an island. The building they originally occupied was over a thousand years old. They then modernized to one that was only eight hundred or so years old, then, eventually, they moved to the mainland, into new construction. Sort of gives new meaning to “reuse.” [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lübeck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lübeck
      - bregma 3y ago
        > We as a species have only ever voluntarily demolished like 30 or so building above 35 stories because it’s insanely expensive to do so The designed lifetime of yer typical neopostmodernist glass box office tower is about 25 years. Many of them are 50 years old at this point. They get torn down and replaced all the time.
        RC_ITR 3y ago
        > The designed lifetime of yer typical neopostmodernist glass box office tower is about 25 years. Many of them are 50 years old at this point. They get torn down and replaced all the time. I mean, can you provide a list of all these 1973 high rises that are being torn down (and the commentary that they were built to be torn down in 1998)? I’d be really interested to see that, because any steel building frame should be more durable than that, so I’m curious what these buildings are made out of.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    I dunno I think legal regulations on what is safe housing are pretty good, actually. For example, in the absence of good legal housing, many poor (mostly immigrant) people in NYC live in illegal basement apartments. Every time there's a flash flood warning with a storm in the city, 5x/year, some of them die in their homes. Ideally, poor people would also be able to live in legal apartments, provided we could actually build more.. and you know, die less!
    - aperson_hello 3y ago
      Windows don't make you safe in a high rise. Especially ones in a donut hole in a structure - no way to escape through those!!
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        I dunno man, I think people can strawman every which way on housing its kind of tiring. "We should build windowless homes so poor people can afford them" "You can't put poor people in homes you dont want yourself" "Your desire to not build windowless homes is because you dont want to live next to poor people" "I think we should build more housing" "You just want rich people to have more homes" on and on FDNY can ladder rescue up to about the 10th floor. They've rope rescued someone as high as the 20th floor recently. https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/fdny-battling-high-rise-blaze-on-nycs-east-52nd-street/ https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/fdny-battling-high-rise-blaze-... So windows are good, actually.
        aperson_hello 3y ago
        But that's a strawman when you can literally cut a hole down a skyscraper and be legal. There's literally no way for FDNY to get a ladder into that hole to rescue someone. To throw out more strawmen... "I want marble countertops, everyone should have marble countertops" "I want a curbless shower, everyone should have curbless showers" At some point, required amenities and features are preventing people from being housed and causing way more people to literally die because they're not housed vs. the alternative of shitty but safe housing. I'd argue that windows in a high-rise with sprinklers is one of those features.
golem14 3y ago
(charlie Munger has entered the chat) https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...
itairall 3y ago
[dead]

mlyle 3y ago

> This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either undesirable or illegal apartments due to lack of windows/egress/etc. Couldn't you just wall off the middle? I mean, you do get another set of windows on the inner courtyard, but it seems expensive to perform such major surgery on a building.

xattt 3y ago
Donuted buildings will forever remind me of the Ponte Tower building. (1) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/the-south-african-building-that-came-to-symbolize-the-apocalypse/517056/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/th...
- metadat 3y ago
  The South African Building That Came to Symbolize the Apocalypse https://archive.today/qfZ91 https://archive.today/qfZ91
- kibwen 3y ago
  Well, we're calling them "donut holes", but they're actually rectangles. :P
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    Don't be such a square!
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  In Hong Kong, pre-handover, I stayed in a windowless hotel room.
  - alisonatwork 3y ago
    Those still exist in Hong Kong today. And many other places in the world, for that matter. Even apartments without windows aren't that uncommon. In subdivided floors they're cheaper than the street facing ones, but some people prefer them anyway because there is less noise from the road.

pimlottc 3y ago

This looks like the episode of OddLots you're talking about: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-actually-takes-to-turn-an-office-building-into-apartments https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-a... They talk about converting 180 Water St by adding an internal atrium; it's also one of the conversions illustrated in the recent NYT article about the difficulties of office-to-residential conversions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...

tholman 3y ago
- [1] Bloomberg Article https://archive.is/eTpi5 https://archive.is/eTpi5 - [2] NYT Article https://archive.is/fUtnl https://archive.is/fUtnl
dc_rog 3y ago
Related article from the prior day: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/why-converting-new-york-city-offices-to-apartments-is-so-complex https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/why-conve...
rexf 3y ago
The NYT article does a really good job explaining the difference between converting a prewar and a modern building. Also, TIL about loss factor: > As offices, these buildings can also rent 100 percent (or even more) of their total square footage, according to the quirky math of commercial real estate. https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies-in-size/ https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies...
- spjwebster 3y ago
  A well-known UK startup, renting an old building just outside of London, is (or was, as of a few years ago) paying square footage cost for an entire floor that doesn't exist. The previous occupants - a government department - had the floor removed to make for higher, grander internal ceiling heights.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

I wonder if some interior spaces could be preserved for commercial, some reallocated for retail, some set aside for tenant mixed use areas. I don't get why one area can only ever be for one kind of use.

WJW 3y ago
If you really want to know, I can't recommend the book "Seeing like a state" enough. TL;DR: For government officials who are charged with supervising regulations over tens of thousands of areas, it's already more than complicated enough if each of those areas has a single use designation. If you allow all of those to have multiple designations, it becomes too complex for humans to administer and so they don't allow multiple designations.
- another_story 3y ago
  There are so many cities (I'd say it's the majority in the world), with mixed use zoning which work wonderfully. Lower floors are offices or businesses and upper floors are apartments. Why is this so difficult?
  - mc32 3y ago
    I swear, it's impossible to please people. People are complaining that mixed use zoning on Taraval street in SF is wasting space because the street-level floors are wasted and they should be converted into apartments (many business have shuttered and ground floors remain empty in some mixed use buildings).
    - constantly 3y ago
      I checked and it turned out that “people” are a pretty heterogeneous group and regularly different groups want different things.
    - whatatita 3y ago
      It would be terrible loss to convert those business spaces into residential. One or two could be changed, as retail needs change over time, but removing possible retail and third space from near people's homes means less walkable neighborhoods. Where I live, we have short term reuse laws that allow retail spaces to be used for residential, social, or other uses on a fixed basis. Typically a few years. The idea being to review the reassignment when the local needs change. We get a lot of kindergartens that use these spaces, but also pharmacies, social clubs, and offices. Easy to move in and out.

RC_ITR 3y ago

It's against narrative, but this is one of the ways SF's downtown is actually extremely well positioned, assuming the trend of office conversions actually takes off. SF floorplates are usually tiny due to historic biases of our Planning Commission (the dog whistle used to be 'we don't want a skyline of cereal boxes'). In fact, looking at the data [0] most of SF's residential tower floorplates are bigger than SF's office floorplates. [0]https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Map-of-Tall-Buildings/xnf9-cudk https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Map-of-Tall-Bui...

Arete314159 3y ago
In addition, as climate change affects more and more places, I think SF will be the winner. It maintains a naturally air conditioned 65 degrees all summer long during a decade that has seen even Portland Oregon go into the high triple digits. Don't sleep on San Francisco.
- ves 3y ago
  Were we living in the same city? There were multiple heatwaves in the time I lived there, one so severe that Noe Valley got to 107. And this isn’t to mention the wildfires or inevitable water issues.
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    Apparently not because these are the hottest days in sf history: 1. September 1, 2017 – 106 degrees T-2. June 14, 2000 – 103 degrees T-2. July 17, 1988 – 103 degrees T-4. September 2, 2017 – 102 degrees T-4. October 5, 1987 – 102 degrees T-6. September 14, 1971 – 101 degrees T-6. May 30, 2001 – 101 degrees T-6. June 14, 1961 – 101 degrees T-6. September 16, 1913 – 101 degrees T-6. September 8, 1904 – 101 degrees T-11. October 4, 1987 – 100 degrees T-11. September 8, 1984 – 100 degrees 9 of the next 10 days in Dallas would be on that list. 3 days from last year in Seattle would be in the top 5 days on that list. We are comparable to the extremes of a coastal eastern city, with significantly lower temperatures between the peaks. There’s not many places in the US that have never seen 106. As for water, 80%+ of it in California is used for food that is exported elsewhere. Strawberries in December in New York are much more at risk than humans in CA. As for fires, nowhere in the world is safe from that, as this summer is proving.

bonestamp2 3y ago

For buildings where they can't cut the whole center of the building... maybe cutting more (but smaller) holes part way between the outside and the center would work. Then do vertical gardens up those shafts.

bloppe 3y ago
The issue is emergency egress. You need those shafts to be able to support external staircases with many dozens of people rushing down simultaneously in the event of a fire.
- aperson_hello 3y ago
  Do you? Most newer buildings go without external staircases (typically have two+ internals firewalled apart from each other)
  - acchow 3y ago
    I believe there are two different requirements for residential: 1 is egress (fire regulations), and the other is natural light requirements for each room.
    - aperson_hello 3y ago
      You're not going to egress out of a 60th floor window...
      - acchow 3y ago
        No, the natural light requirement is not a fire regulation. It's not about egress.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Do you? No, the window requirement is another housing suppression tactic. In New York, it is common for apartments to be illegally subdivided. It's how a lot of people live because it's affordable. I've done it. It's fine. Stairwells are necessary. But nobody on the 60th story of a high rise is egressing externally, FDNY's ladders don't even go that high. If you're only home at night, the window is a luxury. As evidenced by, when people are given a choice between more cash and a window, many choosing the cash.

INGSOCIALITE 3y ago

Typically switching from office to residential they will remove one elevator per bank and use the empty shaft for pipe/wiring riser

privatedan 3y ago

mmm… donuts…

mkoubaa 3y ago

Seems to me like a failure of imagination to insist that some buildings can not support this

addisonl 3y ago
I mean with unlimited money anything is possible of course, but that’s not how these conversions work.

hedora 3y ago

The main advantage of living in a converted factory (there are a lot of these in the rust belt) is that you end up with an absolutely enormous space made out of cool materials. I was finding it hard to imagine that there are inner-city office buildings (high rises) that have floors so large that they couldn't be cut into, say 1/4'ths, with four residences on each floor, and each unit having 50% windows along its perimeter. People build McMansions that are > 10K square feet, so for a building footprint to be too big for this (i.e., so big that buyers would balk at the size), then you'd need a high-rise with ~40K sq ft floors before this became a problem. A standard city block in Manhattan is apparently 237,000 square feet, so if you had a building that took up a whole block, there'd be a big problem. Now I'm wondering how many office buildings there are in a typical city block.

bandyaboot 3y ago
I doubt that people in the market for a downtown apartment share the same priorities for selecting a home as people who would buy a McMansion. I also don’t think you can equate 10,000 sq ft over multiple floors with the same area on a single floor. I don’t know how that space would be designed in any practical manner that wouldn’t turn it into a labyrinth. I guess if someone wants a ballroom or a basketball court in their apartment?
- bombcar 3y ago
  Rural areas are replete with relatively average 2k sq ft houses with 10k sq ft+ “workshops” or “barns” - which often are just big areas that never actually did any farming, but are used for storing toys or hobbies.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  > 10,000 sq ft over multiple floors with the same area on a single floor My neighbor's house is, IIRC, 11,000 sq-ft all on a single floor. Just a lot of very big rooms.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Due to fire code, to divide a high-rise into 4 corner units, you need to take up almost ~50% of the space for elevators, stairs and hallways. So you'd probably end up with close to 5k square foot condos - which isn't too ridiculous. You'd probably do 4 corner units and 4 non-corner units for a total of eight, and end up with each being between 2000 and 2500. The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a number of reasons. And when you're paying that much money, you probably don't want to live in a building that wasn't even designed to be lived in...

atkailash 3y ago

[dead]

tjmc 3y ago

Why not put edge datacentres in the middle? They could provide heating to perimeter apartments in cold climates and just imagine the ping!

Arete314159 3y ago
I love this idea!
- wavesway 3y ago
  Me too. Make it happen. Free 100 GbE all around.
smt88 3y ago
Very few humans live in places that need heat all year round.
- LUmBULtERA 3y ago
  The heat could be used for water heating as well.

andromeduck 3y ago

We could also just relax the window requirements for conversions.

ruined 3y ago
this is how you end up with mass mortality events
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  Aren't we all subject to death though ?
  - pretendscholar 3y ago
    Preferably not all at the same time
  - wavesway 3y ago
    It doesn’t have to be tragic…
  - jonathanlb 3y ago
    If it's in your power to prevent people from dying tragically in a burning building- you wouldn't?
    - jkeisling 3y ago
      Basic economics: The optimal number of people who die tragically in a burning building is not zero. Every person trades off some amount of safety for cost, that’s just part of living. It’s possible that this particular tradeoff isn’t worth it, but human life isn’t infinitely sacred. I assume if it were in your power, you also would rather let some people burn to death than ban wooden houses, for example. This, well, inflammatory emotive rhetoric really doesn’t lead to good discussion, or good policy for that matter.
- phantom784 3y ago

analog31 3y ago

Maybe I'd think differently if I actually saw the footprint of a large office building, but I'm thinking... My house has a basement and a garage, which are not approved as living space, and don't have proper windows or egress. Would it solve the problem to let the interior portions of buildings be designated as storage and utility space? I'd love to have more space for bikes and musical instruments. ;-)

petre 3y ago
They get to make two rows of apartments instead of one if they cut off the interior of the building. So better space usage = more $.

dirtyid 3y ago

Seems like you can trivially get around HVAC issue by just having individual units like in hotels or split units like many parts of the world (new builts and retrofits) and pare back existing HVAC / ducts for hallways/common space which are hooked up anyways. There's ways to do it cheap, but these not retrofitting nice office towers to be cheap units.

alexvoda 3y ago

Of course this is only necessary because someone at some point decided it is ok for modern post-war offices to no longer have natural lighting and ventilation. Why would office workers ever need to see the sun? According to the article, the pre-war buildings are easy to convert.

IMTDb 3y ago
It's not about "someone deciding that it is ok for modern post-war offices to no longer have natural lighting and ventilation". It's that the open floor model gained popularity; and the building technique evolved. This allowed huge windows to cast light for everyone in one go, since people were not putting opaque wall everywhere which were restricting whatever light that came through "their" part of the building to reach anyone else. "My window" became "our window". Similarly HVAC system evolved to maintain equal temperature in the whole building; there was no longer a need to bring individual heating/cooling system in every single cell since carefully placing some element would let natural convection do the work. Removing these walls allowed building to be built and heated/cooled with comparatively less material; something that was positive both economically and - dare I say it - ecologically. Converting these shared spaces into private requires to "undo" all these optimisations and will carry a significant cost. Just like converting a bus into several car is not easy because although the seats are there; you are going to need many engines.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > Just like converting a bus into several car is not easy because although the seats are there; you are going to need many engines. This is a great analogy.