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Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. The depth and shape of the building matters quite a bit. A lot of office

Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. The depth and shape of the building matters quite a bit. A lot of office buildings are very deep and would result in a lot of rooms/space without windows or access to natural light. The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit. But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

umutisik 2y ago
Can the right LED panels make up for the lack of daylight in the interior areas?
redtexture 2y ago
Fire codes and building codes are an impediment to modifying distance from openable windows, for bedrooms. Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written the way it was for a reason.
- elicash 2y ago
  I can absolutely see the safety argument for distance from a window. Fair! But I will say, as someone who made his windowless basement his bedroom even though I had other options in my home, I love a super dark space to sleep.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    Yes. And in a city, it can be made more quiet. And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors. This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations. You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside. I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it. Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away. I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep. At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains. It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics. Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > means changing the national fire code Skyscraper windows aren’t usable for egress. This is a solved problem.
jxf 2y ago
Not all of the building needs to be direct residential; for example, I could definitely imagine some light retail, a computer lab, a tool library, an indoor track, a gym, et cetera.
- flanbiscuit 2y ago
  In Tokyo you have buildings with levels of retail, restaurants, bars, karaoke, etc. I'm sure Seoul and probably other dense cities have this too. Korea Town in mid-town Manhattan also does this, but that's just one little block. I'm really surprised there's not more of this in Manhattan actually. I'm sure it exists more than I'm aware of, but it should be more prevalent in a city that dense.
- _fat_santa 2y ago
  The problem here is zoning laws, in most places in the US you can't build businesses right next to residential. We would have to change our zoning laws and do something similar to a 5 by 1 (bottom floor is retail, top floors are residential)
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    The same in Europe, zoning laws are a bitch and they're basically existing for bribes. Many local city counsellors get paid off to change the zoning laws and thus raise the price of the briber's property.
    - immibis 2y ago
      At least in Berlin this doesn't seem to be true. While zoning laws are a bitch and exist for bribes, none of them prohibit intermixing offices with residential or retail with residential, and such buildings are very common.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        Yeah true here in Spain it's very mixed too. It's better like that I think because this way the neighborhood doesn't become deserted at night and also we can go to a local restaurant for lunch. The 'zoning' here is more building by building rather than neighborhood based. But I mean the same kind of administrative issue holds back conversions here. Most Office buildings here would be ideal. They're not that big because here it's illegal to offer office space without plenty of daylight.
kibwen 2y ago
> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? Yes, here's an article with great visualizations on how developers are coring out the center of repurposed office buildings in order to create columns of natural light (and how, in certain jurisdictions, this lost square footage can then be reclaimed via new construction stacked on top of the building): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Or even better just give every unit multiple huge bathrooms, dens, libraries, etc...
  - geodel 2y ago
    Well of course one can even have whole floor for single family. It is a small matter of how much one can pay for the space of that size that need to be hashed out.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      An office to condo conversion is going to be luxury regardless.
throwup238 2y ago
Doesn’t even have to be novel, especially if they can combine floors to make taller spaces in the inner column. Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on. Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you’d find in a mixed use city with cheap real estate. Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to simulate outdoors.
equalsione 2y ago
It would result in fewer units, but you could introduce "courtyards" that would act as corridors of light. It would depend on the depth of the building. You could potentially do it over two or more stories. Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work. Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try. Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.
- lazide 2y ago
  None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building. Those spaces are currently used for elevators and utilities. Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing. Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction. So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability. Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.
  - banannaise 2y ago
    Right, so the core of the building is elevators, hallways, and something that doesn't require light. The first use that comes to mind is resident storage. Using space on upper floors for storage isn't how you would design a residential building, but it is a useful purpose for otherwise useless interior space. Additional leftover interior space can be used for amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the existing space that doesn't require tearing down a building.
flerchin 2y ago
Storage, laundry facilities, gyms, office-spaces (gasp!). Less-than-optimally used is still better that completely unused.
- foobarian 2y ago
  It would be pretty fantastic to have some office space still, since now it will be possible to live right next door. Or same door even!
datahack 2y ago
Japan just used fiber optics to run sunlight to inside apartments for natural light in skylights. Obviously the apartments are cheaper typically, and as long as people get exposure to light like this they are generally ok. I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. I don’t think the problem is whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in place to encourage it.
- dagw 2y ago
  I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to solve these problems end up being against the building codes. Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how clever your technical solution is.
  - slashdev 2y ago
    Yes, this is the real problem
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Well, to be fair, a firefighter at the end of a ladder can't evacuate someone through a fiber optic run.
    - dagw 2y ago
      Surely you can solve that by having the occupants sign a waver as part of the rental contract where they wave their rights to be evacuated or rescued in the event of a fire.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        This hypothetical building wouldn't exist, because it would have never had a building permit issued.
      - 2y ago
UncleMeat 2y ago
This is conventional wisdom, but it always felt odd to me. Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces. In the beginning, they were low cost because of some undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not possible?
- dsr_ 2y ago
  Because industrial space needs room for very large machines, which means large volumes and good access to them. Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of small volumes and poor access.
- yardie 2y ago
  Lofts evolved from old factory and warehouses. This was in an era before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting. You needed lots of windows to light factories and lots of vertical space for convection cooling to work. Factories were at the edge of town and that town grew into a city. Eventually, the edge was closer to the center than the suburbs. And a new generation wanted to be city dwellers. Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some of the most in demand housing because of the large space and natural lighting.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Old (like early 1900s old) industrial spaces are radically different structures than commercial office real estate from the 80s and 90s.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  the buildings built 100 years ago to be converted 50 years ago are very different from the buildings built 50 years ago to be converted today. Improved efficiency and optimization for purpose in building design plays some role in that.
- bombcar 2y ago
  Because buildings that were already old 50 years ago were built before elevators and other massive height building techniques. Look at old factory pictures, usually about three or four stories max. That’s much more adaptable than a gigafactory or a World Trade Center.
cs702 2y ago
Charlie Munger was an advocate of residential buildings that have virtual windows (letting in "artificially created sunlight") instead of actual windows. Before his death he proposed such a residential building for UCSB: https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive-interview-with-billionaire-charlie-munger-on-controversial-ucsb-dorm https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive... Needless to say, conventionally minded experts of all stripes vociferously objected to it, including architects: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munger-dorm-is-bad-but-why_o https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munge... ...But I wonder if maybe cities should conduct small-scale tests of Munger's ideas to find out if they help put all that abandoned office space to good use.
- mplewis 2y ago
  Charlie Munger was a weird freak who fancied himself an architect. The only thing that qualified him to design a ridiculous building for UCSB was donating an insane amount of money to UCSB.
- bnralt 2y ago
  I don’t get the point. From what I can see, dorms construction often costs around $70,000. Munger was advocating that we get rid of windows and put students in exceptionally tiny rooms, and the cost will be about $267,000 per student? How is this an advantage?
  - currymj 2y ago
    as i understand it, the theory was that it would discourage the undergraduates from hanging out in their rooms, and force them to hang out around campus and socialize, and this would be good for them.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      My experience from a long time ago was that dorm rooms were never really a place to hang out. My undergrad had rooms off a kitchen/suite area and people did hang out there. But rooms were mostly for sleeping (etc.), studying, reading, etc.
jrockway 2y ago
As someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on blackout curtains (and sticking electrical tape on every LED in the house), I'd be happy to buy an apartment where few of the rooms have natural light. I know bedrooms have to have windows so the fire department can pull you out of a burning building while you're asleep or whatever, but personally, I am not a fan of the noise and light most of the time. I just think there is so much space that you can use in a residential setting without natural light. Your movie room. Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy it at a discount if it were offered to me.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  I rented a place specifically because one of the bedrooms has no windows. Easily one of the best quality of life improvements.
  - webdood90 2y ago
    Great, until it's not. You have no escape in case of an emergency. The room probably wasn't technically a bedroom.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      I think the probability of that is lower than my probability of death on my motorcycle. So they're probably going to be fine. Everything is fine until it's not. The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to be 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      That's easily remedied - axes and specialized entry tools can be used for exiting. Yeah, if it doesn't meet the legal definition of a bedroom, it can't be listed as one. That's partially why there are so few interior rooms - lower property value vs if it was a bedroom (but mainly consumer demand for windows).
snarf21 2y ago
I feel like this is not that terribly different than row homes in the city. They only have windows in the front and back and the back might just be a view of the building backing up on them from the other street. These houses already have a long skinny footprint and it works fine. It doesn't seem that hard to do the same with office buildings. Additionally, amenities like a gym, laundry, community room can all be placed in the center of each floor as desired.
- irrational 2y ago
  But a row house has a front and back door. In an office building, the entry would be in the middle. You could divide each floor up into four apartments - two long apartments stretching the width of the building, say on the East and West ends. Then two smaller apartments with windows on only one side on the North and South ends of the building.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    Why not divide it into four corner apartments?
    - hibikir 2y ago
      Four corner apartments work great if the floor plate is small enough to divide the floor by 4 and end up with a sensible square footage. Many office buildings are just so much bigger that this would lead to massive apartments that have few interior walls. Those are not so easy to sell. That's a reason the modern residential skyscraper is typically a narrow needle, instead of being shaped like Sears tower.
gumby 2y ago
> But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings and skylights.
- SamBam 2y ago
  I was thinking instead you could remove a long rectangle from the middle of each floor, so that the two remaining sides could have windows facing each other. If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the middle block pushed out on each level. In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so of the potential floorspace.
  - dexwiz 2y ago
    The feature you are describing is a light well. They work, but I am not sure how well in the configuration you are describing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      In Germany they're called "hofs" and incredibly common. Many apartments only have one view out over the hof, facing someone else's apartment 5m away. You get used to it.
  - cduzz 2y ago
    There's a good "odd lots" podcast about this[1]. There's another of their podcasts about how apartment zoning rules make it hard to make "family" apartments[2]. Basically you need two egress points, windows that can open, windows in kitches and bedrooms. All of these are directly in contradiction to modern office buildings with open floor plans, fixed windows, shared mechanical systems. So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME
deadbabe 2y ago
Pickleball courts!!
detourdog 2y ago
Charlie Munger did it. https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind... I know there is an HN thread.
tboyd47 2y ago
What they would do with a space like this in nearly every place on earth except America is make it a marketplace.
akgerber 2y ago
There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking. The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.
immibis 2y ago
These problems rely on a particularly rigid definition of what housing is. If your house had a back room with no natural light, that would be be far from convenient. But would you accept it if it cost half as much? I bet you would. There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?
Kon-Peki 2y ago
> Conventional wisdom is that only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window. I once toured a building that had been converted from an old warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned the space directly across the hallway. They were very large, and people had transformed them into offices, arcades, workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have been. You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.
- leoedin 2y ago
  That sounds great! The thing I love most about living in a house is the prospect of “engineering space” - places to do carpentry, electronics, home maintenance etc. Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Would a space in the center of an office tower really have enough air ventilation for ordinary hobby-maker work like sanding, soldering, painting, resin molding, grinding, etc?
    - pragma_x 2y ago
      Considering what some people do with basement spaces and almost no ventilation at all, I'm going to hazard a guess that a windowless interior room is not a dealbreaker.
      - ElevenLathe 2y ago
        Plus the fact that the commercial space that's being converted was often used for this sort of thing already anyway. Yes, this is mostly office space, but many engineering firms have an electronics lab or small prototyping workshop in their "office" space.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
Water and sewage drainage is also a big deal. Almost impossible to retrofit for 150 bathrooms, around the buildings, when you originally had 20, around the elevator columns. Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in NYC for 40 years. We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really important consideration, in almost any human venture.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  I don't buy it. Pipes are IMPOSSIBLE to increase the size? Or at some point you hit some city service with no motivation to actually provide service/infrastructure and fix the problem at that end? I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff. Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster. Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space. And, you know, incentivize minimal use of water.
ff317 2y ago
What about common spaces? Put the dwellings on the outer edges, and use the middle of each floor around the elevators as: gyms, libraries, swimming pools, saunas, indoor sports/games (pickleball? table tennis? air hockey? retro arcade machines?), meeting rooms and small-event spaces for residents? maybe a food court with 3rd party vendors? All kinds of creative things can be done!
coryrc 2y ago
SROs could use regular buildings with centralized plumbing. Bedrooms can do without natural light. Zoning laws can be changed.
carabiner 2y ago
In cities where people are renting out living rooms, closets as sleeping areas I think windowless units would definitely be viable. Hong Kong has cage bunks, SF has adult dorm rooms.
llm_trw 2y ago
Just a reminder that lofts used to once be the least desirable places to live. It wasn't until people figured out how to live in them that they became cool and desirable. Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a building for natural light and your office and workshops in the unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these buildings excel at providing.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
I don't think the shape of office buildings is a problem, you can just have stores and storage on the inside and apartments on the outside. The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to have plumbing ubiquitously.
avmich 2y ago
> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each. One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture, some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even with doors. Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows. And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves. Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have windows. The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use as a buffer for something which becomes unused and inconvenient. Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for non-living purposes.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Isn't that the norm already in US? I am from Europe and I have 3 living space rooms with windows taking two outer walls and inside there is bathroom and storage area with no windows? Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Bathrooms in houses often have windows, but not always. In apartments I’ve been in it’s been about 50/50. Definitely the classier (and older!) had windows.
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      In houses yeah, but in apartments, and any new developments I would definitely not expect to see windows.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Separate the internal hallways, convert the outside to residential, keep the inside commercial but redevelop it to support mixed office buildings and retail. Give the bottom floor a mall entrance.
llsf 2y ago
If the build ing is too wide, could we still do a mix use ? With residential on one side, and office on the other side / interior of the building ? R R R R R R R R R O O O O O R R O O O O O R R O O O O O R R R R R R R
- epolanski 2y ago
  The best thing is actually to carve out the Os in your example, thus you don't pay property taxes on that space. C = communal space/corridors/elevators. E = empty R R R R R R R R R C C C C C C R R C E E E E C R R C C C C C C R R R R R R R R R
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    WHy not do this R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R E E E E E E E E R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in. And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper. These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it? Here is another idea: R R R R R R R R R S S S S S S R R S S S S S S R R S S S S S S R R R R R R R R R You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.
    - TuringNYC 2y ago
      I love HN so much that we've been able to reduce this serious problem to an easy matrix representation that can be used to both demonstrate the problem and show solutions so easily.
wolverine876 2y ago
Much of the OP addresses that question.
egl2021 2y ago
If you read the article carefully, you'll see clues to why this developer can make it work in spite of conventional wisdom: 1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates. 2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.
hanniabu 2y ago
> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? Yes, the wealthy can have apartments with windows around the outer parameter and the poor can live in the center with no natural sunlight.
laserbeam 2y ago
> Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall. I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.
rtkwe 2y ago
I think a big benefit would be reworking code to make a way to safely allow interior units. They wouldn't be nice without natural light but it's a way to make a lot of units available cheaply.
sixo 2y ago
If SRO units weren't illegal, they could be simpler conversions, since full plumbing would only be needed in one central place per floor. See https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encampments https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encam...
- bluGill 2y ago
  Most offices already have break rooms. Sinks and dishwashers are fairly common in them. Make them a common area with a shared stove... Odds are the residents will pitch in and buy some cookware and set a policy of clean up after yourself.

umutisik 2y ago

Can the right LED panels make up for the lack of daylight in the interior areas?

redtexture 2y ago

Fire codes and building codes are an impediment to modifying distance from openable windows, for bedrooms. Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written the way it was for a reason.

elicash 2y ago
I can absolutely see the safety argument for distance from a window. Fair! But I will say, as someone who made his windowless basement his bedroom even though I had other options in my home, I love a super dark space to sleep.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Yes. And in a city, it can be made more quiet. And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors. This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations. You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside. I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it. Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away. I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep. At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains. It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics. Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> means changing the national fire code Skyscraper windows aren’t usable for egress. This is a solved problem.

jxf 2y ago

Not all of the building needs to be direct residential; for example, I could definitely imagine some light retail, a computer lab, a tool library, an indoor track, a gym, et cetera.

flanbiscuit 2y ago
In Tokyo you have buildings with levels of retail, restaurants, bars, karaoke, etc. I'm sure Seoul and probably other dense cities have this too. Korea Town in mid-town Manhattan also does this, but that's just one little block. I'm really surprised there's not more of this in Manhattan actually. I'm sure it exists more than I'm aware of, but it should be more prevalent in a city that dense.
_fat_santa 2y ago
The problem here is zoning laws, in most places in the US you can't build businesses right next to residential. We would have to change our zoning laws and do something similar to a 5 by 1 (bottom floor is retail, top floors are residential)
- wkat4242 2y ago
  The same in Europe, zoning laws are a bitch and they're basically existing for bribes. Many local city counsellors get paid off to change the zoning laws and thus raise the price of the briber's property.
  - immibis 2y ago
    At least in Berlin this doesn't seem to be true. While zoning laws are a bitch and exist for bribes, none of them prohibit intermixing offices with residential or retail with residential, and such buildings are very common.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Yeah true here in Spain it's very mixed too. It's better like that I think because this way the neighborhood doesn't become deserted at night and also we can go to a local restaurant for lunch. The 'zoning' here is more building by building rather than neighborhood based. But I mean the same kind of administrative issue holds back conversions here. Most Office buildings here would be ideal. They're not that big because here it's illegal to offer office space without plenty of daylight.

kibwen 2y ago

> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? Yes, here's an article with great visualizations on how developers are coring out the center of repurposed office buildings in order to create columns of natural light (and how, in certain jurisdictions, this lost square footage can then be reclaimed via new construction stacked on top of the building): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Or even better just give every unit multiple huge bathrooms, dens, libraries, etc...
- geodel 2y ago
  Well of course one can even have whole floor for single family. It is a small matter of how much one can pay for the space of that size that need to be hashed out.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    An office to condo conversion is going to be luxury regardless.

throwup238 2y ago

Doesn’t even have to be novel, especially if they can combine floors to make taller spaces in the inner column. Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on. Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you’d find in a mixed use city with cheap real estate. Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to simulate outdoors.

equalsione 2y ago

It would result in fewer units, but you could introduce "courtyards" that would act as corridors of light. It would depend on the depth of the building. You could potentially do it over two or more stories. Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work. Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try. Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.

lazide 2y ago
None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building. Those spaces are currently used for elevators and utilities. Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing. Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction. So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability. Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.
- banannaise 2y ago
  Right, so the core of the building is elevators, hallways, and something that doesn't require light. The first use that comes to mind is resident storage. Using space on upper floors for storage isn't how you would design a residential building, but it is a useful purpose for otherwise useless interior space. Additional leftover interior space can be used for amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the existing space that doesn't require tearing down a building.

flerchin 2y ago

Storage, laundry facilities, gyms, office-spaces (gasp!). Less-than-optimally used is still better that completely unused.

foobarian 2y ago
It would be pretty fantastic to have some office space still, since now it will be possible to live right next door. Or same door even!

datahack 2y ago

Japan just used fiber optics to run sunlight to inside apartments for natural light in skylights. Obviously the apartments are cheaper typically, and as long as people get exposure to light like this they are generally ok. I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. I don’t think the problem is whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in place to encourage it.

dagw 2y ago
I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to solve these problems end up being against the building codes. Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how clever your technical solution is.
- slashdev 2y ago
  Yes, this is the real problem
- kube-system 2y ago
  Well, to be fair, a firefighter at the end of a ladder can't evacuate someone through a fiber optic run.
  - dagw 2y ago
    Surely you can solve that by having the occupants sign a waver as part of the rental contract where they wave their rights to be evacuated or rescued in the event of a fire.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      This hypothetical building wouldn't exist, because it would have never had a building permit issued.
    - 2y ago

UncleMeat 2y ago

This is conventional wisdom, but it always felt odd to me. Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces. In the beginning, they were low cost because of some undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not possible?

dsr_ 2y ago
Because industrial space needs room for very large machines, which means large volumes and good access to them. Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of small volumes and poor access.
yardie 2y ago
Lofts evolved from old factory and warehouses. This was in an era before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting. You needed lots of windows to light factories and lots of vertical space for convection cooling to work. Factories were at the edge of town and that town grew into a city. Eventually, the edge was closer to the center than the suburbs. And a new generation wanted to be city dwellers. Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some of the most in demand housing because of the large space and natural lighting.
vel0city 2y ago
Old (like early 1900s old) industrial spaces are radically different structures than commercial office real estate from the 80s and 90s.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
the buildings built 100 years ago to be converted 50 years ago are very different from the buildings built 50 years ago to be converted today. Improved efficiency and optimization for purpose in building design plays some role in that.
bombcar 2y ago
Because buildings that were already old 50 years ago were built before elevators and other massive height building techniques. Look at old factory pictures, usually about three or four stories max. That’s much more adaptable than a gigafactory or a World Trade Center.

cs702 2y ago

Charlie Munger was an advocate of residential buildings that have virtual windows (letting in "artificially created sunlight") instead of actual windows. Before his death he proposed such a residential building for UCSB: https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive-interview-with-billionaire-charlie-munger-on-controversial-ucsb-dorm https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive... Needless to say, conventionally minded experts of all stripes vociferously objected to it, including architects: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munger-dorm-is-bad-but-why_o https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munge... ...But I wonder if maybe cities should conduct small-scale tests of Munger's ideas to find out if they help put all that abandoned office space to good use.

mplewis 2y ago
Charlie Munger was a weird freak who fancied himself an architect. The only thing that qualified him to design a ridiculous building for UCSB was donating an insane amount of money to UCSB.
bnralt 2y ago
I don’t get the point. From what I can see, dorms construction often costs around $70,000. Munger was advocating that we get rid of windows and put students in exceptionally tiny rooms, and the cost will be about $267,000 per student? How is this an advantage?
- currymj 2y ago
  as i understand it, the theory was that it would discourage the undergraduates from hanging out in their rooms, and force them to hang out around campus and socialize, and this would be good for them.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    My experience from a long time ago was that dorm rooms were never really a place to hang out. My undergrad had rooms off a kitchen/suite area and people did hang out there. But rooms were mostly for sleeping (etc.), studying, reading, etc.

jrockway 2y ago

As someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on blackout curtains (and sticking electrical tape on every LED in the house), I'd be happy to buy an apartment where few of the rooms have natural light. I know bedrooms have to have windows so the fire department can pull you out of a burning building while you're asleep or whatever, but personally, I am not a fan of the noise and light most of the time. I just think there is so much space that you can use in a residential setting without natural light. Your movie room. Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy it at a discount if it were offered to me.

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
I rented a place specifically because one of the bedrooms has no windows. Easily one of the best quality of life improvements.
- webdood90 2y ago
  Great, until it's not. You have no escape in case of an emergency. The room probably wasn't technically a bedroom.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    I think the probability of that is lower than my probability of death on my motorcycle. So they're probably going to be fine. Everything is fine until it's not. The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to be 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    That's easily remedied - axes and specialized entry tools can be used for exiting. Yeah, if it doesn't meet the legal definition of a bedroom, it can't be listed as one. That's partially why there are so few interior rooms - lower property value vs if it was a bedroom (but mainly consumer demand for windows).

snarf21 2y ago

I feel like this is not that terribly different than row homes in the city. They only have windows in the front and back and the back might just be a view of the building backing up on them from the other street. These houses already have a long skinny footprint and it works fine. It doesn't seem that hard to do the same with office buildings. Additionally, amenities like a gym, laundry, community room can all be placed in the center of each floor as desired.

irrational 2y ago
But a row house has a front and back door. In an office building, the entry would be in the middle. You could divide each floor up into four apartments - two long apartments stretching the width of the building, say on the East and West ends. Then two smaller apartments with windows on only one side on the North and South ends of the building.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  Why not divide it into four corner apartments?
  - hibikir 2y ago
    Four corner apartments work great if the floor plate is small enough to divide the floor by 4 and end up with a sensible square footage. Many office buildings are just so much bigger that this would lead to massive apartments that have few interior walls. Those are not so easy to sell. That's a reason the modern residential skyscraper is typically a narrow needle, instead of being shaped like Sears tower.

gumby 2y ago

> But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings and skylights.

SamBam 2y ago
I was thinking instead you could remove a long rectangle from the middle of each floor, so that the two remaining sides could have windows facing each other. If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the middle block pushed out on each level. In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so of the potential floorspace.
- dexwiz 2y ago
  The feature you are describing is a light well. They work, but I am not sure how well in the configuration you are describing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    In Germany they're called "hofs" and incredibly common. Many apartments only have one view out over the hof, facing someone else's apartment 5m away. You get used to it.
- cduzz 2y ago
  There's a good "odd lots" podcast about this[1]. There's another of their podcasts about how apartment zoning rules make it hard to make "family" apartments[2]. Basically you need two egress points, windows that can open, windows in kitches and bedrooms. All of these are directly in contradiction to modern office buildings with open floor plans, fixed windows, shared mechanical systems. So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME

deadbabe 2y ago

Pickleball courts!!

detourdog 2y ago

Charlie Munger did it. https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind... I know there is an HN thread.

tboyd47 2y ago

What they would do with a space like this in nearly every place on earth except America is make it a marketplace.

akgerber 2y ago

There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking. The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.

immibis 2y ago

These problems rely on a particularly rigid definition of what housing is. If your house had a back room with no natural light, that would be be far from convenient. But would you accept it if it cost half as much? I bet you would. There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?

Kon-Peki 2y ago

> Conventional wisdom is that only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window. I once toured a building that had been converted from an old warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned the space directly across the hallway. They were very large, and people had transformed them into offices, arcades, workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have been. You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.

leoedin 2y ago
That sounds great! The thing I love most about living in a house is the prospect of “engineering space” - places to do carpentry, electronics, home maintenance etc. Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Would a space in the center of an office tower really have enough air ventilation for ordinary hobby-maker work like sanding, soldering, painting, resin molding, grinding, etc?
  - pragma_x 2y ago
    Considering what some people do with basement spaces and almost no ventilation at all, I'm going to hazard a guess that a windowless interior room is not a dealbreaker.
    - ElevenLathe 2y ago
      Plus the fact that the commercial space that's being converted was often used for this sort of thing already anyway. Yes, this is mostly office space, but many engineering firms have an electronics lab or small prototyping workshop in their "office" space.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

Water and sewage drainage is also a big deal. Almost impossible to retrofit for 150 bathrooms, around the buildings, when you originally had 20, around the elevator columns. Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in NYC for 40 years. We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really important consideration, in almost any human venture.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I don't buy it. Pipes are IMPOSSIBLE to increase the size? Or at some point you hit some city service with no motivation to actually provide service/infrastructure and fix the problem at that end? I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff. Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster. Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space. And, you know, incentivize minimal use of water.

ff317 2y ago

What about common spaces? Put the dwellings on the outer edges, and use the middle of each floor around the elevators as: gyms, libraries, swimming pools, saunas, indoor sports/games (pickleball? table tennis? air hockey? retro arcade machines?), meeting rooms and small-event spaces for residents? maybe a food court with 3rd party vendors? All kinds of creative things can be done!

coryrc 2y ago

SROs could use regular buildings with centralized plumbing. Bedrooms can do without natural light. Zoning laws can be changed.

carabiner 2y ago

In cities where people are renting out living rooms, closets as sleeping areas I think windowless units would definitely be viable. Hong Kong has cage bunks, SF has adult dorm rooms.

llm_trw 2y ago

Just a reminder that lofts used to once be the least desirable places to live. It wasn't until people figured out how to live in them that they became cool and desirable. Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a building for natural light and your office and workshops in the unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these buildings excel at providing.

CuriouslyC 2y ago

I don't think the shape of office buildings is a problem, you can just have stores and storage on the inside and apartments on the outside. The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to have plumbing ubiquitously.

avmich 2y ago

> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each. One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture, some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even with doors. Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows. And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves. Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have windows. The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use as a buffer for something which becomes unused and inconvenient. Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for non-living purposes.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
Isn't that the norm already in US? I am from Europe and I have 3 living space rooms with windows taking two outer walls and inside there is bathroom and storage area with no windows? Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?
- bombcar 2y ago
  Bathrooms in houses often have windows, but not always. In apartments I’ve been in it’s been about 50/50. Definitely the classier (and older!) had windows.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    In houses yeah, but in apartments, and any new developments I would definitely not expect to see windows.

kmeisthax 2y ago

Separate the internal hallways, convert the outside to residential, keep the inside commercial but redevelop it to support mixed office buildings and retail. Give the bottom floor a mall entrance.

llsf 2y ago

If the build ing is too wide, could we still do a mix use ? With residential on one side, and office on the other side / interior of the building ? R R R R R R R R R O O O O O R R O O O O O R R O O O O O R R R R R R R

epolanski 2y ago
The best thing is actually to carve out the Os in your example, thus you don't pay property taxes on that space. C = communal space/corridors/elevators. E = empty R R R R R R R R R C C C C C C R R C E E E E C R R C C C C C C R R R R R R R R R
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  WHy not do this R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R E E E E E E E E R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in. And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper. These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it? Here is another idea: R R R R R R R R R S S S S S S R R S S S S S S R R S S S S S S R R R R R R R R R You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.
  - TuringNYC 2y ago
    I love HN so much that we've been able to reduce this serious problem to an easy matrix representation that can be used to both demonstrate the problem and show solutions so easily.

wolverine876 2y ago

Much of the OP addresses that question.

egl2021 2y ago

If you read the article carefully, you'll see clues to why this developer can make it work in spite of conventional wisdom: 1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates. 2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.

hanniabu 2y ago

> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? Yes, the wealthy can have apartments with windows around the outer parameter and the poor can live in the center with no natural sunlight.

laserbeam 2y ago

> Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall. I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.

rtkwe 2y ago

I think a big benefit would be reworking code to make a way to safely allow interior units. They wouldn't be nice without natural light but it's a way to make a lot of units available cheaply.

sixo 2y ago

If SRO units weren't illegal, they could be simpler conversions, since full plumbing would only be needed in one central place per floor. See https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encampments https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encam...

bluGill 2y ago
Most offices already have break rooms. Sinks and dishwashers are fairly common in them. Make them a common area with a shared stove... Odds are the residents will pitch in and buy some cookware and set a policy of clean up after yourself.