mixed offices and apartments in the same building sounds good… would cut the commute
I lived in a building thay was mixed residential/office space in Buenos Aires. It was really good, during the week you saw movement in and out so it felt alive, ar night and weekends was pretty empty and calm, and you could throw parties without bothering the neighbors.
lets defy the government and do it either way
I worked in an office once that was large enough thst you could absolutely live in it without being caught
Just live at work! I can see the LateStageCapitalism posts writing themselves
in the same building as a floor used for an office wouldn’t be living at work
vibes based analysis
You joke but if you have to go in it’s nice to be able to walk to work. I used to go home for lunch every day for example. I saved a bunch of money
* drools in Musk *
I think if companies are interested in cutting commute times, they’d normalize work from home. Doesn’t seem to be the case sadly
I see no way this could go horribly wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Mixed use buildings for actually quite common in much of the world and can work quite well. See what you do though is you put them on the market for anybody to rent, and not force people to live in your company housing.
If you go into any major city you’re going to run into mixed use buildings.
Yes please. Let’s give corporations a reason to convert their office buildings into apartments so we can all go back to WFH. Plus, the more housing we have in the city the cheaper it gets.
I’m hopeful that a lot of these will turn into condos so people can get into ownership instead of renting.
I like how this is finally acknowledging WFH as something that is here to stay but I’m not sure I understand the connection with the housing crisis. From the article:
New York’s famous Flatiron Building will soon be converted from empty offices into luxury residences
Luxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis. But maybe I’m wrong and there will also be developers converting less prestigious office space into affordable housing…
The other thing I don’t get is this: I don’t know Manhattan but I did work in some (I assume) similar business hubs in the middle of overpriced cities and I wonder: are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer? I mean if they were given the chance to WFH from anywhere would they still choose Manhattan? Honest question and maybe the answer is yes, because of the restaurants, culture, good schools or whatever… I would personally make different life choices if I could work completely remote, though.
uxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis.
It’ll have a domino effect, more apartments in Manhattan means less people in Brooklyn, Queens, etc. meaning prices go down in the latter boroughs. I live in Jersey City across the Hudson from Manhattan and a large part of the residents here are just people who can’t afford to live in Manhattan.
are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer?
Yes, I used to live in a converted office building in Newark NJ (not far from Manhattan) and really loved it. And yes people will always want to live in NYC and especially Manhattan. Many people, myself included simply prefer living in cities. I’ve also looked for apartments in Manhattan and it’s completely different than anywhere else.
I remember watching the SOHO lofts get built sitting in 78e traffic towards Hoboken every morning.
It seemed to me as if it was an old industrial revolution styled office building or warehouse being converted into apartments.
I hope to see more of that in the future
Former Commercial Zoning = Inner City
People are going to fight bare knuckle for that kind of residence at a reasonable price. They charge out the wazoo for small apartments in that area.
All high rise office buildings should be incentivized to have residential space. Let’s try and fix the housing issues and reduce cars/traffic at the same time.
The incentive is already there, it’s just prohibited because of zoning and building codes many places. All the government has to do to fix this is stop getting in the way.
There are 16,000,000 empty homes and 500,000 homeless. Office buildings aren’t going to be solving any real problem other than the people who own the building being shit out of luck
More supply is more supply. It’ll probably drive rent down a bit, assuming the plan works. This makes little difference to unemployed homeless people and does nothing to address the fact that many wealthy people see homes as a tool to secure their capital, but it’s not nothing. Hopefully it will help some people who are on the brink be a bit more secure in their housing.
The corporate landlords will just buy them up and let them sit empty the way they have done with at least 4 highrises that I can think of off the top of my head in downtown San Diego. Sure they have rented some of them, but the majority of those buildings sit empty.
No one can afford rent on luxury apartments
Are they were they are needed? Would we need to move people across the county to fill them? Or are they kept mostly empty as a form of storing wealth?
Please don’t provide this stat without context. It just promotes cynicism and despair. Reality is complex, and our solutions are going to have to be complex.
Many of these vacant homes are nowhere near major homeless populations. But office buildings often are.
https://ggwash.org/view/73234/vacant-houses-wont-solve-our-housing-crisis
Edit: If you prefer videos, here’s a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xZXdXxYBGU
Greedy real estate hogs and speculators are criminals imo.
There are sometimes some strange issues with office construction.
There might be no plumbing in the locations people will want for toilets and baths and kitchens in the individual suites away from the core of the building. Same goes for retrofitted laundry facilities.
HVAC systems (in the US anyways) are often centrallized and might need a lot of retrofitting to make it work like a condo/apartment.
Kitchen ventilation
Windows might not open, can’t get to a fresh air source
Aside from that stuff, the issue of empty office buildings while we are experiencing unsustainable housing markets is begging for a solution to address the demand.
There will probably be a handy sum to be earned for construction companies who get efficient at conversions.
It’s not that there might not be plumbing, it’s that there is zero plumbing in most office buildings aside from one clustered section for floor where there’s 5 to 10 toilets for each gender.
On top of that, you have completely different mechanical systems. An office building for instance may have one single mechanical system for the entire building, whereas an apartment would need separate mechanical systems for each individual apartment.
Then you have the kitchens, bedrooms and interior partition walls that are vastly different than an office building, plus the requirements for exterior windows which precludes larger office buildings with deeper floor plates from being converted at all without demolishing the interior portion of the building. Curtain wall systems that may or may not be compatible between an office and residential building (non-operating windows)… Not to mention the stair and elevator systems are probably not going to work either.
So in the end you’re probably looking at gutting the building down to the structure and removing every piece of the building including the outer envelope, roof, all of the electrical plumbing and mechanical systems… In the end it may or may not be cheaper just to build a new building from the ground up.
Source: am architect. And yes, I have done conversions like this in the past.
Can you clarify for the laymen in the room what you mean by Mechanical Systems?
Heating and air conditioning.
I wonder if it would be possible to require all future construction to be designed in a way that it could easily be switched between commercial/residential. Like each floor of an office building has to have plumbing roughed it to support x number of toilets/showers on each floor, stuff like that.
Really, really not necessary and really not practical.
Short answer is nope. Commercial and residential building codes are very different, as are the engineering requirements.
Also offices don’t require that all the rooms have access to natural light the way residential buildings do. That’s why office towers can be thicc blocks while apartment buildings often need to be U-shaped.
it’d be a lot of work resolving all those issues… but definitely doable. just have to find the maniac with money and drive that wants to do that
Offices are actually chill if you take out the cubicles and stuff. They are spacious, neutral, and have a bathroom and roof access.
I worked in a few skyscraper type offices and they are pretty awesome. The view was always crazy and there were always good food options nearby right in the middle of the city. You could make a nice house in there. Just need the bathroom and kitchen to be near the center of the building. You could probably fit 4 nice size units on each floor of my old building. But they would want to make a ton of tiny overpriced ones instead so they will say there isn’t enough plumbing lol.
Can we finally get mixed zoning??
How about instead of giving money to private companies in the hopes that they build housing you give that money to people so they can afford to live in all the housing that already exists.
Why do libs always make this shit more complicated than it needs to be
Because they don’t actually support doing things to help people, they just want to give more money to the rich.
Because both just give money to crappy landlords, but with exta steps. Why not just tax the hell out of anyone who owns a building that’s empty for longer than reasonable, maybe with an extension if you can prove you’re redeveloping an office into housing.
Because there isn’t enough housing that already exists.
Sure there is. An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.
Pass nationwide legislation that restricts owning housing for commercial purposes beyond a certain threshold, and put rent controls in place pegged to 20% of the median income per town/city. You’d eliminate 95% of homelessness before the ink was dry, massively increase homeownership rates, and be the most popular politician of an era.
It’s not even an ebil communist plot, and it’d still be more effective than giving even more money to private developers on a pinky promise they’ll build something people can afford, just trust them this time.
An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.
If they are renting it out at exorbitant prices, then it’s not empty. If it’s empty, then they get zero money. You’re saying it’s both, which makes no sense. Interest rates and property taxes are both high right now. It costs investors money to hold empty property without renting it out. They don’t have to wait for people to pay inflated prices. The demand is already there.
I’m all for more regulation, especially for developers and investors. Stiupulate that at least 50% of all new housing built be affordable. Give incentives to rehab old condemned properties. And stop letting AI algorithms determine rental prices.
According the the last census there are 15.1 million houses and apartments sitting empty in the US, roughly 29 properties for every one unhoused person in America.
When I looked it said 13.9 million. But how many of those are habitable? Does that number include Airbnbs? Properties stuck in probate or the foreclosure process? How many of them are in senior communities that don’t allow younger people or families? The census data doesn’t specify any of that.
That’s true, there might only be as few as 15 vacant properties for every person we are currently allowing to freeze to death.
Yes there is. The problem is housing is treated as a commodity instead of a basic human right
Now I don’t know whether to feel owned!
If the average Joe now has more money from the government, wouldn’t that drive the property prices up? Polish govt has a program where a mortgage is guaranteed to have 2% interest rate, while in reality the govt pays the difference between the 2% and the actual bank’s interest rate, and that just made the prices of housing increase.
The only way not to give money to already rich developers is to have the govt build houses on its own to compete with the developers themselves, which is I assume unthinkable in the US. That would literally be communism
Getting people to live in offices is good because it brings people back to walkable, urban cores.
That would be good. Unfortunately this is more about bailing out rentseekers in urban cores, by enabling the building of unaffordable housing
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Libertarians: Always finding the rarest of occurrences to continue their dismantling of government and the systems that gave them everything they have. lmao
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How does deregulation restrict the housing supply?
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Were there regulations at some point in US history that prevented that?
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Landlords being allowed to permanently take rentals off the market (by pretending to do construction work on them forever) to artificially reduce supply and drive up prices is a major problem. This practice used to be blocked by inspection laws that were removed.
But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
Why can’t you? I don’t believe that there is any law saying you need to have a home in a residential zoned area (anti-homeless laws say that you cannot use public space as a home).
As far as I know, zoning laws just say that you cannot sell or rent out a property in a commercial district as residential. That is a false advertising/minimum allowable quality law, much like you cannot sell the meat of an a diseased animal. Commercial areas likely don’t have the infrastructure (schools, utilities, safety) for people to live in.
As a libertarian
Why are you attracted to children?
This is another proof that office buildings are an anachronism.
They always were, it’s just corporate landlords stood a lot to lose from them losing prominence so kept them artificially in demand. Went so far to lobby that corporations need to have an office by law, even if their structure doesn’t necessitate one.
Think of the real estate investors! /s
Oh, I’m sure they’ll charge a minimum of $2k/month even for the shittiest of the shithole office apartments. They’ll get their money don’t worry.
A million Grenfell Towers, coming right up
Shut up
If utilized as it should be, this Is a really good idea. It creates desperately needed housing, indirectly supports work from home, rescues downtowns struggling from customer loss, helps prevent default on tons of property loans (and preventing something akin to the 2008 crash).
I like Biden. Giving taxpayer money to developers is another thing, but I’m happy to hear that the US govt is off the RTO madness train, at least in this particular situation. There were those articles about Biden wanting federal workers to return though…
There was a leaked OPM memo that was going to require DC govt workers to RTO. It obviously made a bunch of waves and they backed way off of it.
This is probably their compromise solution. Because the DC mayor and all of those poor unfortunate corporate commercial landlords were losing money. And businesses weren’t getting the foot traffic from office workers anymore.
The talented govt folks would walk. They already don’t get paid what their equivalents do in the private sector. RTO would have screwed the administrations ability to get things done.
What does OPM and RTO mean?
Office of Personnel Management
Return to Office
