Wouldn’t it be cheaper to convert them into apartments?
Not so much as you might think. The requirements for an office are significantly different to housing, and the conversion is on par with tearing down and building anew, for worse housing.
Not enough natural light in many cases. Can’t be subdivided in any logical way for apartments
It can be cheaper to demolish an office buolding and build a brand new apartment building than to just convert the offices. From floor plan to ceiling height to water and electrical lines, offices have vastly different requirements compared to living space.
there’s an “existential crisis” facing the office market, as the one-two punch of rising vacancy rates and declining property values squeeze building owners.
So the laws of supply and demand are working as it usual? I mean, that’s what they tell us market rates are for, why should I care if some rich guys don’t understand how the market works, that’s their problem.
For conversions [to apartments] to start making sense financially, the government needs to provide a 20% cost subsidy
Oh, fuck you! You overextended yourself, don’t see an easy way out, and now you want someone else to bail you out so you don’t lose any money. The only way this should be allowed is if: the ground floor is reserved for a variety of mostly small shops, a certain percentage of which have to be locally owned and run, and maybe the second floor is small office space. The new apartments are mostly reserved for low-income people, and are rent-controlled. To get around the issue of the floors being so large that you either cluster apartments around the edge and have a big empty space in the center, or you have long thin narrow (and very unappealing) apartments, you go for the cluster around the edges approach, and turn the center into into a variety of things: maybe every floor has a laundry room, every third floor has some storage space for the tenants, every fifth floor has a gym, every few floors has a few community rooms where people can meet and play games or kids can hang out, with one or two floor’s community rooms specifically set aside as quiet space for reading and studying, etc. And ffs, put in really good sound insulation between the floors, and between apartments.
If the government needs to provide a 20 percent subsidy, then I expect at least a 30 percent ownership stake in the project to be held by the government. At least, ideally any building that took advantage of the subsidy would have most of the control handed off to the local community.
Capitalise on the profits and socialise the losses! That’s the American way!
Aah yes, the corporate whiner strategem.
“We overextended and now we have to sell at a loss! Help us, Obiden wan Joenobi, you’re our only hope!”
Yeah fuck that. At least these fucks have a hard reset button if they fail. I bet most indebted people wish they could “realign” with little personal cost.
I’ll take a 20% subsidy to offset my costs too, thanks.
I think you’ve nailed the solution.
The problem with office conversions is, essentially, not enough windows. Every bedroom needs a window, as does the main living space. Even if you make the bedrooms very narrow, there’s just way too much space in the middle.
Convert the inside to retail, offices, community spaces, and storage, and add more staircases for easier movement between floors and you could get fully-enclosed communities. Live, work, and play all in the same building.
He’ll, you could even build a school on one floor pretty easily; classrooms are a lot bigger than bedrooms, so you can keep windows in most rooms and make bright classrooms. I worked in a private school in an office tower and it worked great.
you are speaking my goddamn language MORE PLEASE
If defaults rise, the problem could swell into a full-blown banking crisis, experts warn.
Oh no, the economy will adjust. Anyway, where’s my avocado toast.
Like, they’ll get bailed out. Can we make sure the rest of the economy (namely, the labor that makes the whole thing work) gets through this without hurting as well? Seems doable, definitely beneficial.
Of course not. Labor must pay for the mistakes of over leveraged commercial space that has slower internet than most homes.
We all must return to the office so Brenda has a captive audience to talk to about her cats and then we can listen to Peter belch in tones slightly lower than whale calls for hours on end while he eats microwaved tuna.
Sarcasm? I’m neurodivergent and can’t tell
It was sarcasm
It is. I tried to lay it on really thick, but with the some people are these days it’s honestly difficult to tell.
We don’t let economics actually work if rich people are going to lose money. We just filter money up from the rest of us to fix the shortfall.
Oh no. Anyways.
Good. Replace them with housing. And or vertical farms.
But they won’t. They’ll act like they’re missing out on their extra bonus on top of their millions because everyone doing WFH owes them equity while they brag about how they’re valuable risk takers.
Someone should tell them that taking risks sometime means you lose
That would be pretty neat to alternate floors with housing and farms. You could even do community gardens for each floor.
I’d really hate to live in a building like that. My friend was a manager at one and while it was super cool when I visited, it was also pretty loud and busy.
If they could do a ‘vertical version’ of what Barcelona does in some way that would be neat
Housing I can see, but i’ve never really seen the appeal of vertical farms.
Even the cheapest possible high rise construction is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than some random patch of dirt. Your also going to have a problem using a lot of heavy machinery, which means a lot of unnecessary and very long hour hard labor. All of this to cut down on the energy used in transportation, but the energy needed to move the train car from the field to the city is tiny compared to even just harvesting and planting, much less growing things indoors or off season.
There are many potential economic benefits to vertical farms, but their primary appeal for many is to cut down on land usage to allow for more wildland to replace the farmland.
As far as I know vertical farms are always about growing crops not raising animals. Switching away from eating animals would already free enormous amounts of land for wilderness, without requiring that we stack farms for some reason.
Ok. Yes that is technically true, if everyone stopped eating meat it would also free up lots of agri land in theory. They arent competing ideas.
Eating meat made from crickets, from a non animal meat factory, etc are also possible ways for us to reduce land usage. None of that is really about vertical farms though, and none of that would address plant agri except for feed.
“Stacking farms ‘for some reason’” is an interesting and disrespectful way to engage with my comment providing a reason to do exactly that. That doesn’t give me a good indication that you’re here to engage in good faith.
My point is that vertical agriculture implies a plant based diet. We could already switch to a plant based diet and save most of our agricultural land. Vertical farming basically means getting light from somewhere other than the sun, as the upper floors block the sunlight. So it doesn’t really make sense, and won’t likely save any land. I’m happy to be shown otherwise!
Unfortunately it can be extremely difficult/costly to convert an office building into livable spaces. Taller apartment buildings are basically built around their water and utility infrastructure.
Instead of having a couple bathrooms per floor, you’re going to have to install at least one for every tenant. The pumps that force the water to the top of the office building would have to be swapped for a much larger one that could handle the increase in volume.
There’s quite a lot of interest - and action- inside the industry surrounding conversions. I’m on the structural side and have probably seen 3-4 articles in trade rags over the past quarter about strategies and opportunities in conversions. IT may not be feasible everywhere it for every budding, but the industry (including suppliers and designers) are interested enough that it’s part of the discussion on a regular basis.
Oh, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of talk about it. It’s one of those Hail Mary ideas that would be easy to market if someone could make it profitable .
I could see it happen for older, not so tall buildings. I just have a hard time seeing someone turn office space in a glass sky scraper into up to code housing. Even ignoring the inherent engineering problems, just figuring out the fire safety for something like that would be maddening.
Why would the volume of water be much greater? Aren’t those bathrooms made for an office full of people to use, shouldn’t the amount of water going through the pipes be similar?
No
People in offices are not showering and running dishwashers three times a day.
Have you ever seen 100 showers going at the same time in an office building? Because that happens every 07:00 in an apartment building.
Not to mention that some jurisdictions require windows in every bedroom, so you end up with some very weird layouts.
That’s for houses. You’re not expected to egress through the window when you live on the 20th floor.
You’ve described how much of the world works. It’s almost as if the US has been living in an economic bubble for a long time and suburbs were never the answer.
Pretty sure they just mean that it’s not as easy as just converting former office buildings into livable space, and that developers are not going to want to pay the cost when it can be cheaper to demolish the building and build a brand new apartment building vs renovating the old office building. IMO, fuck what developers think about spending the upfront cost, we need housing 20 years ago now and the suburbs suck; but pointing it out to capitalists isn’t gonna get it done.
Developers will always waste resources and harm the environment for money. It’s their job.
Pretty sure they just mean that it’s not as easy as just converting former office buildings into livable space, and that developers are not going to want to pay the cost when it can be cheaper to demolish the building and build a brand new apartment building vs renovating the old office building.
Not only is it more expensive, but a lot of the time it’s just not possible. Why would a developer add enough room in the utility columns to add enough extra space for enough piping to accommodate several times it’s original projected water consumption?
Add in local ordinance such as the increased fire protections required for multi family homes and you’ll begin to see some of the inherent problems people like to breeze over.
You’ve described how much of the world works.
No, nowhere in the world do they regularly convert sky scraping office buildings into housing.
I wasn’t saying it’s costly or hard to build a tall residential building, just that the way the office and residential building are built are fundamentally different.
Shared bathrooms are often used.
