5 ms·
A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off
- phendrenad2 6mo agoWhen I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.
- hedora 6mo agoYet there is still a widespread housing shortage.
- nine_zeros 6mo ago[dead]
- LinuxAmbulance 6mo agoCommercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.
- ZunarJ5 6mo agoSounds like a job for people who don't have one, and a roof for people without.
- MyHonestOpinon 6mo agoYeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoWhat will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years?
- ipaddr 6mo agoMarketing
- red-iron-pine 6mo agounless you're an owner and control the means of production anywhere you live will be a slum in ~20 years
- blitzar 6mo agoThey have a roof that isnt a motorway.
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoThe context I'm referencing here is victorian flophouses and HK bedspace apartments, not American homeless encampments.
- supertrope 6mo agoColleges call these dorms.
- toomuchtodo 6mo agoWhy is public housing in Vienna not slums? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=vienna%20housing&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- kube-system 6mo agoBecause they are designed to be residential housing?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
- mothballed 6mo agoHaving lived in some midwestern cities with a bunch of extra "not easily converted" warehouses, I've seen lots of "illegal" art collective operations where they just put all the extra plumbing on the ground floor where it is easily retrofitted (you can even raise the floor with a false bottom for plumbing if no other option) and then everyone shares a big kitchen, then the upper floors where retro fitting is more difficult are for habitation. Maybe the HVAC unit is undersized or something, or some other safety factors are substandard due to these people not having the money to improve it further, who gives a shit it is better and safer than living on the streets. Obviously since it's illegal these aren't advertised but they're quite prevalent, and issues are rare enough that now decade past muh Ghost Ship Warehouse is the constant drum being beat by the brain dead building code worshippers who actually bought the line of bullshit that having people homeless and freezing and shitting in the streets was actually a 'written in blood' advantage.
- gopher_space 6mo agoCommercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats. The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.
- LinuxAmbulance 6mo agoIt's not so much the owner's financial situation, but rather that it'd be cheaper to build new homes than to retrofit a ten floor+ building's plumbing. You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own. And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a large commercial building would generate with 24/7 occupancy vs 8/5 occupancy. The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential isn't because it's not wildly profitable, but because building new purpose-built residential buildings would be cheaper than a conversion for anything other than one or two floors.
- ReflectedImage 6mo agoOh no, I live in a flat in a converted commercial building. They have been going wild in the UK converting office space to residential.
- gopher_space 6mo ago> The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential I do see this. That's my point. Your plumbing problem has been solved by not jamming a ton of people into the building.
- joquarky 6mo ago> the increased amount of sewage How is there more than an office full of people?
- quickthrowman 6mo ago
- _DeadFred_ 6mo agoWeren't the feds buying these to convert into very dense ICE detention housing? So they can support high density human habitation according to the Feds, but not normal housing according to who?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted I still haven't seen numbers that show this is a physics problem versus zoning problem. Worst case, make some things (e.g. washers and dryers, maybe even showers) communal.
- postalrat 6mo agoWidespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.
- mothballed 6mo agoI literally just built a house for ~$60k a couple years ago. A burned out trailer even in a rural shithole with no jobs in my state is about $100k+. An actual functional house, $250k+. This is counter-intuitive but it makes sense in context of the recent COVID 0 real interest mania. Meanwhile all the shithole land with no "dwelling" on it was never eligible for mortgages so people weren't able to bid it up to oblivion on debt that they locked in with 30 year mortgages so you get weird results like the cost of vacant land is way cheaper than the same piece of land with a house that can really only be bulldozed (latter would be cheaper in most times in history). End result is I built an entire house on property cheaper than a burned out uninhabitable trailer. Building on unmortgagable land is a way to bypass the fact houses are all locked up in 30 year loans at negative real interest rates. End result is it's far cheaper to build a house than buy even a shitty burned out one because to do the latter you have to buy someone out of their money printing machine of a negative real rate loan, which obviously they are only willing to do for a king's ransom. ------ re: location --------- I won't share my address but if you are looking to do this yourself: look up fishing canneries in Alaska, most of them are close enough to cheap plots you could do this on, often even without permits or property tax. These canneries are also usually desperate for workers and pay a livable wage to those with refrigeration technology certifications.
- AnimalMuppet 6mo agoIf I understood you correctly, land that has no building on it is not eligible for a mortgage, and is therefore cheaper to buy? With the downside that you have to pay cash, because you can't get a mortgage either?
- mothballed 6mo agoYes the land value is so insanely cheaper on un-mortgagable properties in my state, it's off the charts. I have developed land in my county so I'm familiar with the costs to develop, buy land, place utilities etc. (I did not become a land developer on purpose, only because I realized this absolutely crazy arbitrage) It would cost you about $200-$250k to buy a rural small acreage land with a manufactured home on it. If you pay cash for the land and drop the exact same manufactured home on it, it would only cost you about $150k, and you would get a brand new house instead of a "used" one. There is huge pent up demand for someone to just buy a huge swath of small acreage properties and just drop the cheapest manufactured home you could on it as the non-luxury starter home market is currently not being met. You could pretty much double your money. I'm not sure why this isn't being done en masse although a few private actors seem to be doing it and making a killing.
- milkytron 6mo agoFor a long time, the US had the money to build things, use them, let them slowly deteriorate, and then abandon them. It was cheaper to simply let things fall into disrepair, and build shiny new buildings and developments further away from the city center. Rinse and repeat. This is why a lot of inner ring suburbs are filled with strip malls that can't maintain their parking lots, don't have the residential density to support nearby businesses, etc. It's kind of an interesting development pattern that's been pervasive since the 1950s, and some towns and cities are trying to reverse it with infill.
- toomuchtodo 6mo agoDebt funded sprawl. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt... https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2025/4/14/cities-are-already-defaulting-on-their-debts https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2025/4/14/cities-are...
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoWhy did it fund sprawl? Why didn't anyone choose to develop density on existing sites? We built that stuff just fine from 1870 through the 1940s. What changed? Surely it wasn't the proliferation of government regulation of the development process (and the financials thereof) that caused developers to optimize for greenfield sprawl crap that could most cheaply check the boxes, get the cheap money, get the approvals, be compliant, etc, etc.
- toomuchtodo 6mo ago> Surely it wasn't the proliferation of government regulation of the development process (and the financials thereof) that caused developers to optimize for greenfield sprawl crap that could most cheaply check the boxes, get the cheap money, get the approvals, be compliant, etc, etc. I'm sure white flight was a component, as well as subsidizing the auto manufacturing industry and a car centric planning model with federally funded highways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://nlihc.org/resource/myth-white-suburb-and-suburban-invasion https://nlihc.org/resource/myth-white-suburb-and-suburban-in... https://www.governance.fyi/i/191825260/the-money-problem-is-real-also-not-real https://www.governance.fyi/i/191825260/the-money-problem-is-... https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-end-of-suburban-white-flight/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-end-of-suburban-white...
- nitwit005 6mo agoLook into US retail space per capita. It has far exceeded other nations for some time. Some retail store CEOs have directly discussed too much supply.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Look into US retail space per capita Recommend a source?
- nitwit005 6mo agoIt was harder for you to quote that and ask me, than to figure it out on your own, so I'm going to pass.
- blitzar 6mo agoI tried going out to shops again to buy things recently - its so much harder, more expensive and time consuming than having it arrive through my letterbox the next day.
- jerlam 6mo agoI've shifted in the opposite direction. It's hard to judge the quality or fit of items online, especially when major platforms have been easily gamed. "Anything goes" marketplaces shift the burden of choosing good products to the buyer, while showing duplicates of indistinguishable products at seemingly random price points. Shippers have become unreliable and returning things comes with a time cost.
- bombcar 6mo agoWhat, you don’t like buying product from md5(u_int64(rand))?
- triceratops 6mo agoOnline shopping is a demoralizing, soul-sucking, time and energy drain. Hundreds of options and no way to tell if anything is good. Reviews mean jack shit. I do the bulk of my shopping IRL.
- mono442 6mo agoThe AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoWill never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements. And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.
- mbg721 6mo agoThe lower-friction result is that the offices become huge apartment buildings with reverse-commutes to the suburbs, hoping the "stuff to walk to" survives. There are issues with that too, like plumbing and windows.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agomost of those issues will be very expensive or insurmountable for most high-rises -- a non-starter you're basically rebuilding from scratch at that point.
- mbg721 6mo agoMaybe this is a US perspective, but those are attractive properties.
- nitwit005 6mo agoAI was already supposed to have replaced all of us.
- silexia 6mo agoOffice buildings are going the same direction horses went a hundred years ago after the invention of the internal combustion engine.