“[We used to be involved with] conversions that cost $75 to $150 a foot. Now, the market rate is $350. For high-end luxury, it’s $450. The economic model is very challenging for conversion,” said Cordova. “The way to do it is for governments to provide subsidies for conversion…the government needs to provide about a 20% cost subsidy.”

The standard liberal solution - means tested handouts to business owners who are already rich with the cover story of “helping” poor people by subsidizing housing construction that will target luxury buyers/renters and will gouge the shit out of everybody in the process.

Holy fuck these people are dense. Communists and urban planners have been screaming this from the rooftops for 30 years.

They’re not quite at acceptance yet. This is the next phase, but what’s really going to make them shit their pants is the realization that, for housing, it’ll still be cheaper and more effective to spread density more broadly than to replace their million square foot office buildings with million square foot residential buildings. Those offices only got so big because of the value of those workers being close together (for a variety of reasons). Without the need for those workers to be that close together, there’s no reason that people would pay the necessary prices to live in the downtown cores where those buildings are. Even though some people will still work in the remaining buildings, and some of them would prefer to live close to where they work, they’re not going to pay the same exorbitant prices when in most places they could live a little further away and get much more for their money.

What we are seeing is a permanent, structural drop in the demand for dense commercial real estate, which will have cascading effects on the demand for all types of real estate in these dense urban environments. The demand for premium office space in the core was the primary driver of the rest of the activity. Workers no longer need to be in those offices, so companies will pay less for them and take up less space. That means fewer people in these areas, which means less demand for retail and services, which means even fewer people. If there are fewer jobs, services, and amenities in these downtown cores, then there are fewer reasons to pay top dollar to live there. With the cost of building high-rise residential, it might end up being that there’s no reason for that kind of density to exist at all. I’m sure there will be some projects in some places where the economics work out, but the overall trend will probably be to spread density and activity out, rather than try to put everything on top of everything else.

The urbanization-for-its-own-sake YIMBY weirdos who want everyone to live in an anime cyberpunk dystopia are going to be malding and seething for years to come. Or they’ll snap out of it and become 15-minute city people and somehow be annoying about that, but progress is progress.

imagine 30% of commercial office real estate turned into green ways, public transport infrastructure, third places etc.

they’re going to be turned into parking lots, aren’t they

In the downtown cores, where demolition costs are highest, there are lots of businesses that would be willing to re-locate once rents reset. Suburban office parks are the ones that should be torn down and redeveloped.

Sometimes it’s even too expensive to turn them into apartments, could just build a whole ass other tower for the cost. Who would have thought that having a giant tower of glass with no areas for recreation and balconies was going to be an overheated waste of space

30% of office buildings should be transformed into esoteric art collectives

Is it maybe possible to just use the buildings and turn them in to something useful like housing? As long as it functions adequately