100 Salesforce employees work in its 61-story HQ
sfexaminer.com
sfexaminer.com
The same problem that's driving the empty space, i.e. 'remote' should 'solve' the housing problem for those remoting, in that there's unlimited inexpensive places to live in the US. It's just expensive to live in specific places, i.e. near that tower.
Other than maybe some industrial buildings retrofitted to lofts + civic issues around that i.e. sidewalks, buses, zoning yada yada it's unlikely you'll ever see these kinds of things retrofitted.
Give it another 2 years, this space will get used one way or another.
In short, it wasn't a very profitable venture due to costs of retrofiting it and folks who live there...still feel like they live in an office building.
Even if a lot of people go fully remote, owners of these buildings assume the drop in demand will kill new projects rather than permanently empty out existing properties.
The actual problem is that it costs an enormous amount of money to retrofit commercial properties as residential.
Source: currently have dozens of commercial RE clients
Edit: from the SFChron article mentioned above:
> “Finding the deal for us is almost like the needle in the haystack,” he said. “We had to basically build a brand-new building within a building. It’s not for the faint of heart.” > > Each apartment at 229 Ellis St., ranging from 180 to 300 square feet, cost around $400,000 to build out, less than ground-up construction.
Seems expensive for that tiny of a space.
Office buildings are often concrete with drop ceilings to make it easy to access sprinklers, wiring, and pipes, but you would still need to run all of those things across every floor of the building.
A single, modern condo likely has 2+ full baths, so if you're trying to get 10 units per floor, you're going to do that work 20+ times.
Kitchens are also difficult, yes. You need to be able to vent heat and smoke, and you need different electrical wiring in most cases.
Then think about ceilings. Drop ceilings are not appealing to most people, so you need a solution for that. Even if you keep the drop ceiling and just use a nicer tile, you're still spending $5-$30/sqft.
Walls aren't that expensive, but you need a lot of them to convert back from the trendy open-office plans that most buildings have.
There's also a lot of legal work to convert to condos (assuming you don't want to do rentals, which most of these office owners absolutely don't want to do).
There's just a much bigger difference between office and residential space than people realize, I think.
And in the case of land, this appears to be the case.
Even if that's only an illusory belief, it's still a determinative one in constraining supply.
Though that may be starting to change:
"After Years of Failure, California Lawmakers Pave the Way for More Housing"
To ease an affordability crisis, the Legislature voted to open suburbs to development, allowing two-units on lots long reserved for single-family homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/business/california-duple... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28319169)
I'm still skeptical the roadblock's been cleared. But the noise about fixing the problem's getting louder, at least.
For example, universities and hospital bills have shot up way more than inflation, just huge.
You'd think that would lead to more competition and lower prices, but no way.
Where are this inexpensive accredited universities that charge half the price? Where are the new hospitals that charge half the price?
The only thing that actually goes down are real wages. Companies will gladly pay a lot for real estate, inventory, whatever, but not the employees. Minimum wage in 1979 was $2.35, which is $8.84 in today's dollars. The minimum federal wage now is $7.25.
From the 1930's to 1985, the top tax bracket was 70-90% taxes. The rich get richer. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergy Brinn and Larry Page, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, and the rest of the immoral patrol.
Community college? To be fair, the underlying problem is that everyone is competing for whole "jobs". Since it is a discrete unit you cannot be 95% as good as the best competitor, you have to be 101% as good to get the job. Assuming perfect structural unemployment, it would still make more sense to just let you and the best guy work 50% of the time rather than let the best guy work and let you stay unemployed. Of course the best guy wants moral superiority so he redefines success to be hard work and thus his ability to push you out of the labor market becomes his success.
Health care is a special circumstance. The free market maximalist assumption that the free market and the law of the jungle are the same is actually wrong. The free market is created by denying the law of the jungle (by delegating all violence to the state). With health care the law of the jungle is quite strong. It's easy to extort an unhealthy patient. Whatever benefits the free market is supposed to offer is swamped by our fear of death and the ability to abuse it.
It is not a coincidence that you picked two industries that thrive on the magic of regulatory capture.
Student loans, which follow a person even if they go bankrupt, removed all incentives for banks to lend intelligently. In fact, they are incentivized to lend larger sums to as many people as they can. And health care is a 9,000 layered beast of corruption across local, state, and federal levels.
Utah Valley University. It's less than half the price and if you're from a midwestern state they have sweetheart scholarship deals.
Arguably property tax on office buildings should be lower to discourage cities from dedicate too much space to it.
There's been a number of deaths of residents and countless accidents recently because of some of these locations are absolutely terrible for residents to live in.
One area on my way to work has no green space for about a mile, access is through a single busy road used by skips and big vehicles and the noise starts early in the morning, and air pollution is very high. Where do families and children go when they want to play?
I think it's criminal councils are approving some areas for residential use. I think councils are liable for deaths in these unsuitable areas.
It still received regular cleaning services and etc to all floors. Only a few bothered to leave our corner of our floor.
Using the executive suite bathrooms was a real treat.
Later I worked in a scyscraper. Our floor was never exactly full, then like 80% on the floor were laid off. Entire teams gone.
Eerie is a good way to describe it. Being more or less alone with so much space, especially when you remember better days, is not fun.
I had the same experience - facilities dutifully kept doing their thing. They also worked through one week business shutdowns. First time, food kept coming too.
Now I work from home, which can be a different kind of isolating. If people left (one way or the other) I'd hardly notice unless they're on my team. (Still prefer the homeoffice overall, but eager to see my coworkers again occasionally.)
San Francisco has a history of converting office buildings into residential space with some notable examples within blocks of the Salesforce building. The Palms on Fourth between Bryant and Brannan is an example of this. Compared to the cost of housing in the area the complications involved with remodeling are actually rather minor, especially for new modern construction like this recently finished building.