Visualizing all the vacant office space in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing all the vacant office space in San Francisco

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122 pointselsewhen89 comments

At the same time there's a huge shortage of residential space, where so many more people now work. Clearly mass conversion is necessary. I wonder if the city government can get out of the way of that.

Office space doesn't translate well into residential. Each bedroom needs a window (legal requirement in SF), so you end up with weird, deep, narrow lofts, typically

In San Francisco you could charge a lot for a weird deep narrow loft, especially compared to the income on vacant office space.

And many developers would happily knock down an office building and rebuild an apartment complex, if only they could get past the red tape.

The bathroom situation is even harder to fix, since even if you could find a bunch of tenants willing to share a bathroom across the floor (and you won't) you have to spend a lot of $$ to retrofit showers into the living space.

I wonder if you could run plumbing through, then a secondary floor just above it so that the apartment floors are a foot above where the office space floor would have been.

But the natural light is the biggest issue if you ask me. I would never buy an apartment without morning winter sun shining into every main living area. (North here in Australia)

Meanwhile I black out my windows because I keep a weird schedule and am normally bothered by sunlight indoors.

You radically underestimate how many people would like to live in San Francisco. If barracks style dorms were legal they would fill up fast [1]. If Hong Kong style coffins/chickenwire cages with a mattress in them three feet high were legal they would fill up fast. The reason cheap housing doesn't exist is almost always that it is illegal. Banning flophouses, boarding houses, single room occupancy hotels; it's always about keeping property values up and poor people out.

[1] These are known as hacker houses, are completely illegal, and actually exist in San Francisco.

Actually office space is not bad for residential retrofits.

Why?

For one, the heights of those floors are 10 plus feet. You can easyliy hide the plumbing under the subfloor, and end up with 8 plus unit heights. I didn't know about the window requirement. That could be changed overnight. I would happily pay a few hundred less because of a lack of window.

Many old SF buildings used to be converted to residential apartments.

Now--it's more financially advantageous to demolish the building, and put up residential condos.

(Condos are not rent controlled.)

We need to get rid of the residential condo Rent Control exemption. Most people will never make enough to afford one, even you tech guys.

I worked on many luxury condo projects in SF. As union tradesman, we all knew we could never afford one. They are nice though.

If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built?

(I don't want to get into a debate on Rent Control. It has helped out many dear friends over the years. SF only has so much land to build on before going farther into the bay.)

Rent control doesn’t apply if the condo is never rented. Rent control just makes it less likely they will be rented out at all, the market will always go where the money is.

It's not like that is surprising.

Rent control tells landlords that they should make less of their money from renting out. Just because the government doesn't understand what it is saying doesn't mean it is unfair.

When you have options X,Y,Z and the government says stop X then you stop doing X. The fact that you still do Y and Z isn't a loophole, it's what the government told you to do.

Ya. I’m not understanding why someone would think a condo needed to be rented out at all if someone couldn’t afford to buy it outright? Condos aren’t usually rented where I live, just apartment complexes that are managed blanket as rental properties.

Chicago seems to have many high rise condominiums. I think it would be wonderful if San Francisco could convert some of its office buildings into condominiums.

Perhaps some should be converted to apartments with some low cost.

I think there is a broader question of how much office space the Bay Area as a whole has/will have empty.

It seems kinda weird to build a lot of office space in a city with fantastic views and climate. Most of this square footage is probably just vacant most of the time. Just repurpose office to residential en-masse and build office blocks in eg Oakland or neighboring burbs (which could really use the revenue).

> If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built?

Rather than extending rent control to condos, perhaps removing rent control from apartments would be another valid way to achieve the result of more apartment construction?

As you say, there’s only so much land.

Rent control will reduce construction, since investors become anxious about the prospects of their return on investment.

> We need to get rid of the residential condo Rent Control exemption. Most people will never make enough to afford one, even you tech guys.

That's a myth. The price is high because "some" people can afford it. By limiting the price using Rent Control, these "some" people become "lucky first renters" instead of the people who "got the most cash".

The lucky first renter often are those with the most cash. Now they get to pay even less. It's like people advocating rent control know that they are throwing money into the throat of the richest people in the neighborhood.

Well... in Berlin that was pretty much the case. They wanted rent control for the most expensive parts of Berlin. You know, the places where the richest Berlin residents live in...

> I would happily pay a few hundred less because of a lack of window.

Windows are emergency fire escapes, which is a big part of why they are required. How much are you willing to pay to live in a literal deathtrap? How many dear friends struggling to afford to live in the city they love should live in deathtraps with poor fire safety? Has the Bay not learned its lesson about fire codes yet?

> If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built?

Can you help me understand why you think extending rent control would increase construction? Maybe step me through the math of it? I genuinely and sincerely do not follow your logic.

To my mind, condos get built in SF because it's possible to come out in the black. Building rent controlled apartments and coming out in the black would seem to be impossible given how high costs are in SF. How would rent controlling condos change this?

> > If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built?

> Can you help me understand why you think extending rent control would increase construction?

If SF applied rent control to both condos and rental apartments, it might change the balance so that relatively more rental apartments would be build, and less condos. If the numbers now were 80 (condos) and 20 (rental apartments), the new numbers might be 40 and 40.

If the problem is that apartments are difficult to turn a profit on and condos are comparatively easy, is there a reason to think we'd get 40 and 40 instead of 20 and 20? Or worse, maybe just the 20 apartments that were already going to be built? None of which are rent controlled at all, mind you.

If this seems counterintuitive - and it did to me at first - consider that the money being spent to develop that housing has plenty of alternatives. Not all of which are SF housing. SF isn't guaranteed some level of privately-funded construction each year, after all. Trying to shift the mix runs the risk of adjusting the size of the mixture too, exactly as your suggested model does.

A window on a 1000 ft tall building is definitively not a fire escape. Large buildings like this, whether residential or commercial, have purpose built interior fire escape paths. I couldn't say whether the commercial version of this is 1:1 substitutable for the residential one, but come on, the fire plan for any modern building over ~10 floors does not rely on windows.

Edit: Also, the fact that a non-operable window, or even a window too small for a person to fit through, will usually suffice to meet the bedroom/window requirement gives the lie to this "fire escape" idea.

Edit 2: Correcting myself here, for residences without automatic sprinkler systems, two means of egress (could be a window or doorway to the outside, could be a doorway to another part of house) is a requirement for a bedroom in the International Residential Code. There is a separate requirement for certain levels of light (natural or artificial) that can be satisfied by an inoperable/small window, which is what I was thinking about. In any case, all the commercial buildings in question would have automatic sprinkler systems, these fire escape requirements just wouldn't apply.

I'm not the original poster, but I can give it a shot:

> Can you help me understand why you think extending rent control would increase construction? Maybe step me through the math of it?

If rent control just means a maximum rent, and not a maximum increase, it would make builders prioritize maximizing units per building. This means more, although smaller and cheaper, apartments.

We're discussing San Francisco, where rent control policy works primarily by capping the yearly increases. It's always lower than inflation, too.

Shrinking units is an great thought! That's such a plausible mechanism that SF has gone ahead and done the thing its politics centers on - making building that form of housing difficult too. Parking minimums, density restrictions, and so on all affect the wonderful idea that is micro-apartments. And attempts to cut costs with pre-fab units assembled off-site ran directly into political conflicts as well.

It's impossible to read about the politics of housing in SF without arriving at the understanding that SF just really doesn't want to allow any new housing.

I don't actually think shrinking units is good in general - I just tried to explain how more strict rent controls could result in more units.

I think it's perfectly fine for SF to say "we want a bunch of single occupancy housing, not high rises". Certainly, that's not great for everyone who wants to move there, but it's perfectly fine for a city to decide they don't want to grow anymore.

And putting minimum restrictions with regard to density and parking is a great idea. If you aren't going to invest in public transit, you need people to have parking spaces. If you want to live in uber-packed urban areas, you can move to NYC instead. There are a lot of options!

I think it's fine, so long as people are willing to accept the sky-high cost of living that comes with their policy choices.

Would the cost of living go up with rent control? It seems like people who already live there have controlled costs.

Bear in mind that we're not talking about a counter-factual. SF has rent control today for most of its rental stock.

As you correctly say, people in rent controlled units have controlled housing cost increases year to year. They do not have controlled costs if they need to move. They do not have controlled costs for food or transportation or any other aspect of their cost of living.

To the extent that rent control drives up market rents as population increases, it definitely helps increase cost of living. To the extent that the politics around rent control help deter new housing supply it helps drive up the cost of living that way too. The effects of rent control on the market - and on the people blessed by rent control - are both well-understood.

San Francisco has made a series of policy choices that result in very high cost of living. There's nothing wrong these choices so long as people are willing to accept the results.

My building in SF is this. They rent to both businesses and residential, one and two bedroom lofts. They're nice!

Is it converted or designed like that? A lot of the new buildings I see are built from the ground up to be mixed use. One benefit I see is it helps cafes and such keep consistent customer numbers. Large blocks of office buildings have a lot of foot traffic during the week but become a ghost town during weekends. While large blocks of residential buildings do not have the same peak foot traffic to sustain a store.

Designed like that.

Indeed, it works well in the way you describe.

So, buy an office building, convert all the cubicles into long narrow "apartments" with a window at the end, and bam you've got a ready-made work from home office.

Bonus, if leave the conference room intact, the company can optionally have meetings in person instead of Zoom!

Sounds like many of the so called lofts that people bought in SF. I wonder what the prices are like for those nowadays? It seems that these places were where tech folk parked themselves before getting married and having children and then moving out.

i've been in buildings in manhattan that were previously office space. i had no idea until people living there told me. specifically downtown/fidi.

although i guess floor plate size has grown... either way, convert the skinny buildings to residential and use the big floor plates for biotech/coworking/office space.

there's a lot of free square feet and it's easy to shuffle modern offices around.

would definitely have to do something about unopenable windows though.

See 100 Van Ness for an example

I've always thought a big part of the problem wasn't the amount of this or that kind of space but the ratio.

SF has way too much commercial space for the amount of residential space it has.

As opposed to many others, I'm fine with residents deciding they don't want to change their city by allowing high density residential... however there's a simple price to pay: no high density commercial.

It is one of those fundamental things which should be mandated statewide, the ratios of commercial to residential should be within bounds for each municipality, and the abundance of some should drive prices crazy low and crazy high in some places so that these disparities tend to correct themselves.

Instead there are policies that seem exclusively tailored to only do the crazy high pricing part.

(and while we're at it, vacancy needs to be taxed to further drive the point home. if you won't lower your prices enough to get occupied, prepare to subsidize those who do)

How about you know just letting the market put commercial where customers are, next to residential. The market has no problems nor negative side effects of figuring this out. If we just ban cities from trying to plan their cities in opposition to proper design the problem fixes itself. It’s such a ridiculous self inflicted wound.

> The market has no problems nor negative side effects of figuring this out.

Half the buildings with empty spaces in SF are likely tied up in CMBSs with terms that state that the value of the building is based on the value its renting units out at, and if they lower the rent they have to recollateralize the loan, but they can just apply missed rent from empty units to the end of the mortgage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird...

The free market is about to create the commercial real estate version of the housing crash.

> The free market is about to create the commercial real estate version of the housing crash.

If so it's another correction that is sorely needed. Hopefully this time people are allowed to lose the money they richly deserve to lose.

Yes, no more government bailouts of deposits. Just the $100k insurance.

I agree, but we need to also remove the weird subsidies related to real estate and their derivatives for this to actually work.

Rent control, fed policy, etc, lead to certain types of land development being favored.

Why don't the faang companies do it then with their own campus? This will attract large number of employee to go back to office.

Do what? Where do you think these faang companies are and why do you think those municipalities want more residential space any more than SF does?

The bay is chock full of 30k pop municipalities that point everywhere but to themselves and say “this is your problem”

faang companies has huge campus which probably mostly empty right now, why don't they built housing inside their own campus ? This will greatly attract their employee to work in the office.

At least in mountain view, basically everything on that side of the highway cannot be zoned for residential stuff so the tech companies can't do this.

I also suspect that insurance and other regulation for being a housing provider isn't something they are interested in.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, it's a valid question. In particular, Google has actually proposed doing this in Moffet Field back in 2014.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-...

I think the problem is too many people benefit from the shortage of residential space. It would only become feasible to convert these if all the right people could be arranged to benefit. Since many in city government already are involved in residential real estate, as are many of their friends and families, why should they facilitate a large sudden increase in housing stock?

Unlikely. Everything about Bay Area governance is aligned to make doing projects of any type as slow, expensive, and as difficult as possible.

Add to that millions of square feet that are not officially vacant but are not in use either, because people are working from home.

it looks like that's included in the 17M based on the linked article:

>With all COIVD-era restrictions on office building occupancy rates having been eliminated last month, the effective office vacancy rate in San Francisco has ticked up to 20.1 percent, representing over 17 million square feet of vacant office space, with 7.76 million square feet of space which is technically leased but sitting vacant and actively being offered for sublet, which is down slightly from 7.99 million square feet of sublettable space in the first quarter of the year, and 9.33 million square feet of un-leased space, which is up from 7.97 million square feet in the first quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/07/over-17-million-squa...

I think there is a difference in what the post you replied to was implying. "Leased but offered for sublet" means the leaseholder is actively trying to offload that space, but there is a ton of additional space that is currently way underutilized because many people are still at home, but the company hasn't reached the point of trying to get rid of their space yet.

You know it might be nice if rents were to fall and existing companies could just spread out a little. The amount of space that an office worker gets has fallen so much in the last 20 years. The article gives Twitter as an example of high density but I know first-hand that Twitter packs them in much less than Google SF. Maybe people can have some dignity for a change.

A few years ago goog office compaction became so ridiculous that they eventually exceeded osha’s requirements for min restrooms at our campus (the lines were insane). Their solution was to park porta potties.. er i mean “mobile executive restrooms/showers” outside.

Edit: this was mountain view not sf though

The mention of "life sciences" connected with that huge amount of space caught my eye. What exactly is going on? A new super boom? Or is "life sciences" an euphemism for hydroponics now?

I'm guessing that commenter has a very specific definition since the term "life sciences" seems to mean almost anything biology related (from a quick google).

It usually means medtech, pharma, medical devices, etc.

It’s usually commercial space with attached lab space and all the infrastructure.

Lab space has been at a premium for a decade now. Most of the new buildings in SSF are all lab space and it goes fast.

Thanks for the data point. Then there is a boom, good to know.

If they can be rezoned residential, it could turn san francisco and other cities into wonderful cheap places to live. If everyone stays remote, we won't need offices anymore!

As it is, with office workers, society has to double the amount of living space needed.

In one of the most expensive places to live and operate on earth, there is roughly 3x as much vacant office space after a year of lockdowns vs before.

Wouldn’t it be weird if this wasn’t the case? You would think it would be a slightly higher multiple

SF? I wanna see it for NYC. I swear there's lot of space out there not on market.

Is there a coworking space in SF with low-distraction desks?

Heres and idea: Want me to go back to office ? Convert some of the space into housing/apartment/living space.

Rent it to employee for free/cheap as benefit.

Not only I'll go back to office, I'll live in the office.

Nothing like sharing a bathroom with a dozen other residents. Maybe they can give you exclusive use of a stall?

Doesn't have to be sharing bathroom.

It can have private bathroom & private kitchen just like regular apartment/studio.

Go look at all the plumbing in a commercial building. There is a reason why the toilets are all in one location.

If you need to plumb all new water sources, sewer, air handling and electrical it’s not going to be all that attractive to retrofit.

100 Van Ness seemed like a nice retrofit.

Well that looks god damn luxurious. I have no doubt it can be done, it's probably just not cheap so not a great solution to the housing crisis. And, like your example, depends on location and such to make it financially viable to retrofit.

Just as an observation, if you look at the different floor plans, most of the bathrooms and some of the kitchens are located at the immediate entrance to the unit (more towards the center of the building).

I assume that's to minimize the cost of running plumbing from the center out to the edge. But that's a guess, it would depend on the original layout. But it does look like a consistent feature.

yes of course it will require significant retrofit. The benefit seems significant compared to the cost for the company: to attract employee to want to work in the office.

Sharing a toilet isn't that bad as long as it still has paid cleaners.

Benefits are taxed. If you get free housing you'll get taxed on the difference between market rate and the amount you're paying. If that difference is 100% you'll get taxed based on teh full market value of your "free" housing. And if they fire you you'll have to deal with two of the top ten most stressful life experiences at once.

It's just a matter of branding and wording really. =)

"Free housing for employees" vs "A private lockable office with a really comfy sofa and a private fridge wink wink nudge nudge"

I know as a matter of fact that this does not work. This is regularly checked and municipalities are on top of it. When I worked at FAANG the company was fairly direct about this, with the internal communication about this being in the form of ‘we don’t care, but please don’t do it because y’all got caught several times and it’s a massive fine every time’.

>I know as a matter of fact that this does not work. This is regularly checked and municipalities are on top of it.

Seriously? Are municipal employees really staking out FAANG offices to bust people living in them? This seems like a weird sense of priorities to me.

Have to second this, I've heard far more stories of inspectors (as rarely as they come) ignoring an obvious loft in an improperly zoned area.

Tax won't necessarily be an issue, the total net cost of my housing can still be cheaper than if I pay it myself.

>And if they fire you you'll have to deal with two of the top ten most stressful life experiences at once

Of course but few thing could be done by the company to minimize the stress. This cons is not significant enough for me.

I don’t understand the downvotes on HN. This is a novel idea, even if I think it’s…not for me. Thank you for adding something interesting to the conversation.

Tangentially related I have no idea how WeWork isn't gone at this point. It's like the laws of physics are broken.

I rent an office in a competitor to wework and it's full of people.

I’ve heard of people going to WeWork because their employer closed the office but they don’t want to work from home.

I could totally imagine that.

Lots of people who would normally have excellent, well-lit offices, have a cramped bedroom at home due to exorbitant rent prices in the Bay Area.

When companies went WFH, they didn't give any rent subsidies to people to rent out bigger apartments with proper work space.

But they aren't renting offices at multiple thousands per month. They are maybe renting cheap hot desks or doing spot booking.

America is in a honeymoon period with remote work. Most people do not have separate dedicated workspaces in their homes, or worse have roommates, kids etc and must make office space in the bedroom. Rolling out of bed to your desk every day will warp your psyche over time (from experience).

As companies shutter the big HQ to save money on leasing empty square footage and workers disperse to distant cities, a desk in a cowork space, or even better a small private office, will become a very important need for many people.

Maybe not in the form of WeWork rebounding but the conversion of office towers to cowork is almost certain to be a trend in my mind, well before conversion to residential.

i do this. My employer reimburses me for any coworking space.

WeWork reminds me of listening/watching Real player audio and video podcasts in 1997 on psuedo.com .

It was basically a podcast channel for hip 90s NYC culture.

They got the idea totally right but the timing totally wrong. Psuedo filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

I work in an executive suite - not WeWork but a competitor of theirs.

Not too many have abandoned it. There's a lot of one person offices, so mostly everyone is in their own offices with no need for masks.

We've had a number of new people in the floor who rented it out because their own offices were closed, but they didn't want to work at home, so they rented out an office just for themself.

It's been fantastic for me, having an office here over the last 1 1/2 years.

It wouldn't work for a large company, but that's not who these executives suites like WeWork, Regus, Premier, Barristers, etc are built for.

Now, WeWork may have a lot of OTHER issues, I don't know. But any issues are not because of their market niche.

Are you saying this because of the hilarity that is Adam Neumann, or just the concept of coworking? I think people still really enjoy coworking - it's a great idea and for lots of people is well worth the money.

Worth noting lots of remote workers enjoy the occasional day at co-working spaces, and some do it regularly.

Yes, I am one of them, which is why I’m so confident they’re a good service.

WeWork has always been propped up by a large flow of investment money.

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