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Comment by asimpleusecase | Hacker News Reader

This has an impact not just in rents for office buildings but the entire ecosystem of support businesses that sell to workers who come into city centre to work. One example. Small organic food shop, that sold mostly to office workers and has seen a 70% drop in foot traffic. The same thing hits bars, cafes, restaurants, theatres and other venues. Those very things that make living near or in a city interesting for many people. In my case, precovid I thought a city centre apartment could be kinda nice, no commute, nice vibe and lots of access to amenities. But now much of that vibrant ecosystem is gone. Why would someone want to live in a converted office in such a setting? And if you house people who only have no other options - aren’t you just creating a type of ghetto?

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I have always found that office-heavy areas of a city were pretty lame in comparison to denser residential. It does not seem like a big loss to me. Office centers tend to have some sandwich/salad lunch places that close at 4pm, some stuffy overly corporate happy hour bars, some dry cleaning places, some convenience stores and fast food spots.

Dense residential area tend to have the full range of services, more interesting restaurants and bars, more fun, more interesting. If people are spending more of their day there, I would expect a flourishing of these kinds of business. At the end of the day, some storefront owners will need to move to other areas to take advantage of changes in demand.

Cities are very dynamic things. They are constantly changing and renewing themselves. Neighborhoods come up and go down. There is no stopping it.

These characteristics are not true for most large cities. San Francisco for example suffers none of this.

The financial district, esp north of market, and south going towards embarcadero (Google, ...), is basically exactly this.

Yeah, I used to work on Market Street and SF is exactly like this.

So a single block represents the entire city? What about the thousands of other businesses that remain open and within walking distance?

Time to retrofit some of these office buildings into apartment complexes.

> Time to retrofit some of these office buildings into apartment complexes.

But why would people want to live where they don't want to work?

Because it's cheap and maybe the demographic that uses the "downtown" changes. Iirc The former Goldman? JP Morgan? hq in Manhattan ( moved to Newark?) Is now an apartment mostly occupied by 20-somethings that want to live in Manhattan

The big issue is how few cities reach sufficient residential density with enough occupancy over a wide enough area to begin creating that vibrant community. A few overpriced apartments towers near the CBD won’t get you there. I’d say the city I live in Perth, Western Australia has completely failed to cross that threshold and the current real estate environment is basically actively pushing back to prevent the urban core from ever getting there.

We may find we get the density and vibrancy, with all accompanying shops and services, but centered where we live rather than where we work.

I think it's part of the general swing back to a healthier work-life balance, and really ... that would be fantastic!

These vibrant ecosystems flourished where people spent most of their day. It could be a huge win if they finally migrate to residential neighborhoods, where people will now be more present.

Residential neighborhoods don’t have the same peak density. In central business districts every street has shops, in residential ones it wouldn’t be sustainable.

The reduced density is still enough to support mini-hubs.

In Europe they are common and have been flourishing again even as cities flounder.

Pre pandemic my local town center in the London commuter belt was in a death spiral. Now its expanding.

Hmm, comparing flourishing residential neighborhoods in Berlin like Kreuzberg (not every but enough streets have small shops, Cafes, Restaurants, all vibrant and positively living from sunrise to sunset and beyond, enjoyably walkable with a lot of green) vs the more purer City-center office regions like Mitte where you have shops that noone needs (yeah yeah sure someone wants to buy at Dolce Gabbana, biased not me) which just feel awkward beyond usual business hours I find this generally not true.. atmosphere is much more desirable here, and its better for the "small shops" vs Starbucks&McDonaldses also..

Sure, if you think only of residential one family house areas (but which true city centers have those) or poorer skyscraper suburbs that is true, but another story?!

Of course they would and they are.

I grew up in a district which has 150k inhabitants and an effective population density of 4.6k people per square kilometre (11.8k people per sq mile) and it was much like a city within a city, with all the shops, services etc. Everything within walking distance.

It even has somewhat of a regional identity and a political movement which capitalizes on that.

To this day I see it as the sweet spot of population density - it's dense enough for the things you mentioned, but at the same time doesn't feel crammed.

The difference in perspective in this thread boils down to North American (except NY) vs. European perspectives. My residential area has six floor buildings with lots of residents and ground floor shops and cafes. This setup only rarely exist in the US.

Much of the world proves this assumption false. See, e.g.:

- Residential districts in China and many former Soviet countries. Big concrete blocks, with the bottom floor lined with small stores. They're absolutely delightful places to live.

- Urban residential districts in the US aren't quite in this style, but a city like Cambridge will have small shops within walking distances of virtually all housing.

The critical thing is that the shops are a lot more pleasant and human than US business districts. A massive lunch hour line at some overpriced (probably due to high-rent and long lines everywhere) sandwich place isn't very human. A small business run by the owner is. One of the differences is that in residential settings, business owners and residents are part of a community -- they get to know each other, sometimes for decades. Business districts have people moving in and out too frequently for that.

"Peak density" is also a lot worse than "mean density." Both a customer and a business owner is better served with traffic spread out throughout the day, rather than nearly 100% of business crammed in during breakfast and lunch hour.

excellent comment!

> a city like Cambridge will have small shops within walking distances of virtually all housing

I lived in Cambridgeport near Central Square in Cambridge, MA. There was indeed a small convenience store/variety shop almost within sight of my apartment. In six years, I bought something from them only once that I can recall. I used to walk quite literally past them to Whole Foods to save money. (When Whole Foods is killing you on price, you’re going to have a tough go of it.) Looking on Street View now, there’s paper over the windows and a notation of “permanently closed”.

I’m in a different neighborhood of Cambridge now. There are local shops here as well. Except for the food places, most are empty of shoppers almost all of the time. I don’t know what’s different to make these shops not particularly useful, but most purchasing seems to happen at the larger supermarkets and big box stores a few miles away (or online). Those have better selection, much better pricing, and are faster/more convenient in aggregate.

I don’t blame the local stores if they have to set uncompetitive prices due to rent or whatever other factors, but consumers also don’t have to buy products at uncompetitive prices.

For grocery shopping in Cambridge, I'd be some combination of Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and H-Mart. Yes, there are a few specialty markets and bakeries but those are almost certainly occasional things. CVS pharmacy. Maybe a hardware store if I need something routine and small. And restaurants of course. But besides buying consumables, mostly food and mostly at bigger chains, I'm not sure what all the small stores I'd be going into would be.

I remember when shopping meant visiting the butcher, bakery, fruit market, dairy. Then supermarkets were invented.

But everything that is old is new again. Now we shop at three different supermarkets! To get the best prices or quality or specialty item or whatever.

Maybe they'll invent a super-duper-market or something like that next, and we'll go back to a one-stop experience.

> Residential districts in China and many former Soviet countries. Big concrete blocks, with the bottom floor lined with small stores. They're absolutely delightful places to live.

That really isn’t true. At least in China, the most common living arrangement in big cities is the gated apartment complex, their might be some retail on floor one, but it is usually on the other side of the gate, and the gate you can enter or exit from is often not conveniently located to access that retail easily (given my experiences living in Beijing). If they did away with the fences/gates, things would be much more convenient.

I live in a rural/suburban town of a few thousand. There's a tiny "downtown" thing branching off the highway with a deli, convenience store, pizza place, and some other small stores. Whole town is only designed for cars besides some sidewalks in this downtown area, but you can bike around just fine if you're fit enough for hills or have an ebike. I have a single family home that's about a 10 minute bike ride from this downtown. Almost all homes are single family, and a lot of farms. I think this setup works great.

Mixed use zoning is the answer. The American-style segregation of life vs. work needs to be a thing if the past. It might have made sense when most of work was industrial and thus noisy and dirty, but with modern office environments and services it just adds mobility costs.

> Residential neighborhoods don’t have the same peak density

This is only true in American suburbs. You have horrible one family dwellings only, and you space them far out on empty sections with massive roads between them.

This is the problem, and its also what is actually unsustainable.

Agree.

The place I work had diverse companies in a 'tech park' - Amazon, Google, and many others inside a gated office space, the total population of which could easily surpass 10K.

We used to have a common and very vibrant food court, even though each company used to give free cafeteria food, employees used to walk to the common food court for variety - of both people and food.

Also, since there was so much traffic of well paid, propensity to spend people, office park operation office used to arrange for paid fun stuff during lunch hours, which used to lend lot of colors to dreary office days.

During Covid the food court vanished along with all fun activities (consequently all those people who used to run those). The company cafeteria obviously closed as well and even when it has started now, they are pale shadow of earlier operations (less staff, owners of food counters working as staff).

It's kind of shocking to read the phrase "vibrant food court". If this was the bar before COVID it can only get better.

You can think of the generic food courts in the typical US mall, but there are also plenty more boutique food malls around.

Read up on Singapore’s hawker centres for an idea of what’s possible with food courts

Those are the result of forced ghettoization of the street vendors. When I was a kid (mid 60s/early 70s) the place was a lot less regimented and there were street vendors everywhere. There was much greater variety of food (and hygiene). Cleaning that up homogenized things — which I want to believe was an accidental side effect, though one can never be sure.

Palo Alto used to have a funky food court where the downtown Apple store now stands. It had been a supermarket but converted sometime in the 70s. It lasted into the late 80s.

Apart from nostalgia, it’s where Debbi Fields started “Mrs Fields cookies”. Yes, another Palo Alto startup from the 70s.

Half agree.

We need to rethink the concept of city. If we don't do that we'll end up with ghettos. But if we do and implement the transformation then we'll develop something more desirable than conglomerate of various businesses. A center of a town can very well be vibrant and inspiring without most businesses if the resulting free real estate is repurposed by galleries, theaters, restaurants, parks etc.

But we won't in the near term. This will just start to happen after all other options have crumbled and one option will still be to just hold empty housing and real estate for the purpose of mere speculation. I'm pessimistic.

Must be some US thing with its more mobile and dynamic population, but I dont see any real change pre-covid vs post-covid in the city centre we live in (Geneva, Switzerland) or any other bigger cities we saw in past half year.

Few moved out, few moved in, maybe rents adjusted a bit but I didnt check that. Same shops, bars restaurants opened, same entertainment going on.

Yes, it is an american thing of how cities were built and social factors. Cities here tend to have commercial districts where nobody lives and residential districts or suburbs and you have to drive between the two.

The more European model where first floor is commercial and residential in top, it's a different story to have everyone working from home, no overnight ghost town in commercial districts.

I know a few areas that were gentrified in earlier times and ended up with things more suited for residents of a certain class than commuters. I also know of other downtown locations that became terrible to live in because a grocery store was uneconomical use of space.

I'd generally say that if they can fill it to a good density it can have a good local market compared to suburbs with poor density.

But how do you fill it to a good density when the cost to live there is higher and there's no need to live there to earn a living anymore?

People I knew in the conversion of industrial areas to unaffordable lofts did not have commuter jobs, maybe photographers, who combined their studio and home, etc, until they were priced out by trust fund children, possibly in disguise as boutique owners and entrepreneurs, then there are retirees looking for a certain feel and walkable community, etc.

At each stage the surrounding retail and gastronomy changed towards something that could support higher floor cost.

People, culture, and amenities attract people. Maybe lowering prices would help too. Artists, galleries, restaurants, theaters are all attracted by dense areas with prices that are attractive. Cities can also step up to help with incentives instead of completely leaving it up to the free market to sort out.

But those people and culture and amenities are just other people, and when the core economic engine of the city is gone, those people leave too.

Imagine you're a Jamaican halal chicken shop owner and your core business is professional office workers walking by on the way home from work and stopping in for a bite. When that office worker is no longer there because he can make the same salary and cut his expenses in half by moving 1000 miles away, you're going to go out of business. Maybe you move 1000 miles away also so that you can afford your rent. This is how the cascade happens.

Theaters and museums and all those aren't why cities have a lot of people, those exist in cities because that's where the people are. when people become more spread out, those things will follow suit.

The economy is supposed to be about enhancing other people's lives, not vice versa. Living in a city where you can walk down the road to get a chicken sandwich is a big win over living in a suburb where you have to drive everywhere. That's still true if you're working remotely.

Right but the vast majority of folks won’t pay more to live in a similarly sized apartment as a house in suburbia to experience that. They will spend less money on a nice house in suburbia unless they had no other choice.

If the big apartment were a fraction of the price of the house in suburbia, maybe. But it costs way too much to build tall buildings for that to ever be feasible.

Asian and European cities work because everyone expects a smaller amount of living space. And the large houses in suburbia are simply priced out of reach for 95%+ of the population.

This has it the wrong way around. The price of infrastructure means that dense places cost less to upkeep than sparse places. The reason that cities cost more than the suburbs is 1) that there's more demand for cities, and 2) in the US, taxes paid by city-dwellers subsidize the expensive suburban infrastructure.

No, all in construction costs for a typical 40 story high rise divided by number of saleable square feet equate to much higher cost per square feet than the average suburban housing development. I’ve seen very credible figures that indicates it’s at least a 2x multiple even for a barebones apartment building with no amenities at all

And that’s before the expensive taxes, permits, etc., that cities charge on top for downtown or high rise construction, which as you say partially subsidizes suburbia. So in reality it’s more around triple the cost per square foot in a North American city.

The only reason apartments bigger than a shoebox are affordable at all is because land acquisition costs when divided by hundreds of units is obviously far lower than for even the narrowest cookie cutter tract.

A 40-story high rise isn't the density we're referring to here, in a discussion of European-style urban living. Obviously one can astronomically inflate the price of any building by stretching it preposterously upwards, thereby requiring exotic materials and building techniques to support its own weight and the increasing winds and seismic concerns. But "dense urban living" doesn't mean "skyscrapers", it can mean four-to-six-story mixed-use buildings, which are both short enough to build without difficulty or undue expense and dense enough to realize efficient infrastructure costs. To be sure, skyscrapers are a dead end that we should be building less of.

In that case land acquisition costs make it too pricy since attractive downtown plots in a big city like Toronto are easily hundreds of millions per acre. Because they are zoned for 40+ story buildings.

And why would any land owner seek to zone for less than the maximal allowance?

If you mean forced downgrading of the zoning or replacing existing suburbia with mid density developments, or subsidizing mid density as opposed to suburbia, that’s an entirely political conversation since the roadblock is zoning laws and the legislature.

Earlier you were claiming that those 40+ story buildings are too expensive to build. If that's true the problem of getting people to build mid density there will solve itself. Developers that overpaid for those plots will lose out, but whatever they paid initially is a sunk cost; building something you can get paid rent for beats building nothing.

And yeah, if there are sandwich shops or whatever whose business is only viable at skyscraper-level density and not at 4-6 story density then those will go to the wall. But I doubt that's a big segment. Mid density means proportionately more floor space at street level, which should be friendlier to businesses.

We may see a more pronounced downturn in city centers, and we might see a drop in density below skyscraper level (though personally I'm skeptical of even that much). But we won't see a hollowing out of the cities; at the very least, Vienna-like density still makes sense.

You were not carefully reading. Land costs are different from construction costs.

EDIT: And in any case there is no real benefit for the city council to stop upzoning at mid-rises only. If they’re expending the political capital to upzone they have every reason to go all the way.

Land costs are a sunk cost as I said. If it's too expensive to build skyscrapers then it will make sense to build midrise. If it's not too expensive to build skyscrapers then it will make sense to build skyscrapers. There's no scenario where "it's upzoned so we'd better leave it empty instead of building midrise" makes any kind of sense.

Since when are land costs 'sunk costs'? Do you imagine land owners can't sell their land to a higher bidder? I'm talking about Canada and the U.S. here, not about countries which prohibits private land sales without prior government approval.

If you paid high pre-recession prices for land whose value has now dropped, that money is sunk; refusing to build a moderate-price building (appropriate to the land's current value) on the land because the land is "too expensive" (in terms of the price you originally paid) is cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Huh? Land value has at least doubled everywhere I know of in the U.S and Canada since 2009.

In which municipality has land value declined since 2009?

And even if so, why does that mean they are forced to build anything? They can just keep it vacant and pay a much lower property tax, some folks just don't want to go through hassles even if it's somewhat less efficient.

If land value hasn't declined then what on earth would be the logic of leaving it vacant? If you're not doing anything with it then just sell it. I don't even get what you're arguing at this point.

Some people want to own bare land? You were the one who brought up the issue of vacancy.

> In that case land acquisition costs make it too pricy since attractive downtown plots in a big city like Toronto are easily hundreds of millions per acre. Because they are zoned for 40+ story buildings. And why would any land owner seek to zone for less than the maximal allowance?

> If you mean forced downgrading of the zoning or replacing existing suburbia with mid density developments, or subsidizing mid density as opposed to suburbia, that’s an entirely political conversation since the roadblock is zoning laws and the legislature.

You appeared to be claiming that land will be left vacant in the absence of political changes (with the frankly bizarre suggestion that land needs to be downzoned to encouraged more building). If that wasn't what you were claiming then what were you claiming?

You need to understand the fact that many are willing to own bare land and put it to its less than theoretically optimal usage. In fact they will fight against attempts to develop it.

It's called land banking if you haven't heard of it before.

I'm not sure how any of your comment follows.

The density itself makes it worth paying a premium to live there. Just being able to not own a car is a huge saving that can go straight into rent, and even if it costs more the quality of life benefits are worth it.

And hell, worst case land prices and rents in the city center come down a bit, that's not really a problem.

Many/most people living in a lot of cities still own cars so that they can easily travel outside the city. It's a perfectly valid preference to live in the denser part of a city but it is a preference and not an absolute.

Sure, but not everyone has to prefer that for there to be enough demand to keep prices up.

Thats also a reflection of the way american cities are laid out, with large physical separations between where you work and where you live.

Im glad to live in America, but the way cities are laid out elsewhere makes more sense.

Is this true? Won’t the businesses go where the people are? So more organic shops and cafes in the suburbs? Or if the office building is turned into housing, all the people would be back again, and not just from 9-5, so the businesses would follow, right?

> Those very things that make living near or in a city interesting for many people

Most of the time, the types of bars and restaurants that rely on office workers as customers are not going to be the type of bars and restaurants you'd go in your free time when going out with friends.

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