Empty offices are becoming apartments in Texas’s big cities
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
I lived in a hotel for a while. White carpet! White marble sink! Don't drink any grape juice or wine!
When your kitchen is just a mini-fridge, hot-plate, electric kettle, and a toaster, everything takes so many extra steps to protect your environment from any possible spills. Had to do dishes in the tub, and while the laundry was broken, also did laundry there and then turned the whole room into a drying area.
Things like this are going to be happening with increasing frequency. Landlords and property managers are going to get mad or at least very stressed about %$#@# dangit these &@#^@# people how can they live like this!? Meanwhile the tenants will be pissed about living in the converse situation wondering @#$@#$ dangit how are we supposed to live any other way if the facilities are built for other activities!?!
there are ultra-premium variants
However, the city's never had a lot of tech employers, and the vacant office space downtown seems like such a waste. It is good to see it being put to use.
As an aside: with the expansion of major tech employers in Austin and pervasiveness of remote work, I wonder if there is much demand for optional hybrid setups like teams from in the region going into the office once a month or so for collaboration. I am not sure if I'd prefer it to full remote, but in person meetings with coworkers can be quite enjoyable.
Allowing people to live a little further from Austin while commuting in occasionally seems like a good way to get some of the benefits of in person work while letting people choose locales with a lower cost of living.
I like your semi-remote idea. May I suggest everyone get together at a resort-like area, not at an office?
It would have to be nearby if people on the team have kids. It's hard to get away for any extended period of time as a parent.
Going only off several hn comments - don't they just lower your wages?
High speed rails would absolutely transform the paradigm overnight. It would solve a lot of affordability issues in Austin while introducing more money into the SA economy. As it currently stands, SA has virtually no tech scene (relative to other major cities), is too sprawled out, and too much effort for people to want to commute between regularly in my opinion. It’s a hard sale for younger developers. There’s a lot of potential though!
Before conversion? The two biggest obstacles are:
* Commercial mortgages make it nearly impossible to change a property in this manner, so you're usually limited to buildings owned free and clear.
* In most cities, zoning/planning would push back on this; I suspect the most interesting part of the Texas story is how they routed around that.
that's a contractual issue, rather than an engineering issue. This can be fixed with a stroke of the pen.
If I'm a bank holding a commercial mortgage, it's very finely honed to minimize my risk; as part of that, I contractually limit what can be done with the building.
Why would I, as a lending institution, throw that security away for something much riskier? If the emptying out of commercial buildings that we saw during the pandemic accelerated, that might have provided the incentive. But it seems like that trend line isn't going to continue in force.
I think converting high density commercial properties to residential is a great idea in a lot of cities. But ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free.
Not at all. Your commercial mortgage lender will always help you increase the productivity of your asset. Phone call. Excel docs. Talk terms. Lawyers. Done.
If you don't know this, nobody loaned you $#,#00M and you'll never need this advice
Where bureaucrats actually get to just make the decisions at a high level, rather than everything being second guessed by NIMBYs it's just really obvious what you have versus what you need. If you know your city has an inventory of empty mid-size office buildings sat on the market for months, yet apartments within walking distance of the city centre go for crazy money, it's a no brainer to authorise conversions. Whereas if the last office building was snapped up an hour after going on the market, while residential sales are crawling, a conversion from office to residential is nonsense, tell them to go away.
What really doesn't work is the partial conversion of offices on industrial/commercial parks out of town. It seems to lead to completely incongruous buildings, dumped essentially in the middle of parking lots, without basic amenities such as verges and pavements. Those buildings tend to be flimsy, and it's hard to see the environmental argument for keeping them. I would rather see those sites razed and rebuilt as better quality housing.
1) Office building and space is in demand but the market rate is much lower than the residential rate.
2) The owner of the office building will 'pretend' there is no interest in the property (sometimes for more than a year), so they can plead to the planners that they want to convert th building to residential.
The planners authorise the conversion and the owners make a tonne of dough.
There is no free market in real estate.
2016 Main was converted from a hi-rise motel into condos years ago, they are pretty nice but there is always the feeling that it's not a complete domestic environment.
At least the plumbing was there.
There's a couple more of these nearby that were left over from the oil crash of the 1980's, which were eventually abandoned after years of reduced energy travel. Looks like one of them has been gutted recently and might be under conversion now.
If you need intermediate pumping stations or holding tanks due to the height of the building, those could be inside adjacent to the outside pipes.
I wonder what causes these buildings to have such restrictions on plumbing. Maybe it's like elevator shafts where they eventually take up a lot of space if the building is very tall.
Conversely, adding more toilets, for example, may also pose a challenge. My dad helped design the plumbing system for a rebuild of a football stadium. One of the final tests was to have a bunch of volunteers go to every sink, toilet and urinal in the building and turn them on / flush them simultaneously to ensure that water pressure stayed high and the drain pipes didn't back up.
Adding more toilets in a building not meant for them can be a big deal right after lunch / around "busy" times... Some may not be able to flush or overflow if the pipes can't handle the extra activity.
Who instituted the limit? Was it in the lease terms, city ordinances, or something else?
This means you couldn't chip up the concrete slab to place new pipes, the way we could in e.g. a strip mall. This is an understandable limitation, because the integrity of slabs is important for tall buildings.
However, this wouldn't be a limitation in a residential remodel. They aren't going to mess with the slab or the pipes in it. They're just going to lay everything over the top of the slab. If the new toilet is 40' from the utility shaft, that is 3" for the pipe plus 5" for the fall. Add an inch for the floor itself. Average residential ceilings are much lower than average office building ceilings, so there is definitely at least 9" to spare.
Retrofitting all that additional plumbing is expensive.
Toilets are obviously a different story. But as long as no one is shitting in their kitchen or bathroom sink the water flow post-usage can in theory be managed.
I don't think it's a timing issue. The issue is that the fresh and wastewater plumbing simply doesn't exist in the places you'd expect in housing, so there can be a significant cost to adding it, beginning with just figuring out where you can run it through the existing spaces.
A holding tank and whatever pipes then are used to empty it are still plumbing, and even more complex than regular plumbing, unless you are suggesting that people would haul their own waste out periodically.
Also recall that wastewater pipes need to be at least slightly angled so that they drain properly using gravity, further constraining their potential paths. This can be quite difficult to design even when remodeling a regular house.
You can add drainage the same way, you just don’t need pumps for the drain stacks.
Some office buildings will be more amenable to conversion than others, so part of this would likely be selecting buildings for conversion where the conversion is both straightforward and will produce nice apartments. You want buildings that have many floors but relatively small area per floor.
Like....
that extra space is a closet in my specific case.
Services is the other big one. Many more rooms needing hot and cold water and wastewater connections, more AC outlets and customisation, etc. Even if you have the space to do so (as office floor to floor heights are typically higher than residential). Plus remodelling facades to give more residential style windows etc.
And does your basement have enough space for the cars residents will demand?
Its an expensive business to add this all in and sometimes may be cheaper to just knock it down and start afresh.
Residential buildings tend to be a donut hole shape or an H to keep distances to windows about 20m. Office buildings are usually big, deep squares or rectangles.
Another thing is that offices can have worse sound insulation.
Or even as offices.
Google Maps / Satellite: <https://www.google.com/maps/place/Energy+Plaza,+1601+Bryan+S...>
That sounds like quite a significant inconvenience. Didn't it put people off, in a "holy shit I'm not staying here for another second" kind of a way?
Nearly all instances go unrecorded, so precise frequency of distribution in England is impossible to determine. But they have spread across the globe to all countries and all continents except Antarctica, so chances are nearly certain you've got them in your home, even in England.[1] They're a little startling, but harmless to humans, and help keep your spider population in check. Even though I have probably only seen 5 of them in the last 20 years in places I have lived spanning the Eastern Seaboard of the US, I have no delusions about they being there regardless of spotting them. Unless they're disoriented and dying, like most "bugs," these things are supremely sneaky.
>> S. coleoptrata is indigenous to the Mediterranean region, but it has spread through much of Europe, Asia, North America and South America.[2]
[1] https://records.nbnatlas.org/occurrences/search?q=lsid:NBNSY...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata#Distribu...
The residential tower is built with concrete layers separating every floor (not always every flat within the same floor unfortunately). An office building has no separation between floor, only a thin sheet of metal.
I would never live in a converted (purpose built) office building office, except perhaps if it is to live on the top floor.
By the way, the thin steel deck you saw gets concrete poured on it too once installed.
Gutting the interiors entirely is necessary, maybe they even need to gut major areas of the building to support more utilities as well. It’s probably not cheap so affordable housing may not be in the equation afterwards because of the renovation costs.
If so, is that problem unique to California? If the problem is worse in California than elsewhere in the US, then what about the design of the system could be changed to improve the situation?
Companies in Houston can and do build industries like petrochemical processing plants in or near residential neighborhoods.
For example: https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/arkema-explosion-r...
You can do almost anything you'd like since it is your land.
Very different culture to California.
Also I’m not sure there’s a meaningful distinction between zoning laws and a local regulation like parking minimums. The effect is the same so zoning laws as a concept becomes a bit of a red herring unless we take zoning to include all general rules and regulations that govern how buildings can be built, transit, etc.
Kefir is similar to yogurt but different from it.
You must conform to the law and not deviate from it.
I'd guess it's the influence of Spanish, which uses "a" (~ "to" in English) for almost everything.
But you're right — I've heard some native Spanish speakers say "different to", and it's likely because they say "diferente a" not "diferente de" (where "de" typically translates as "from").
This situation raises an interesting philosophical question: is it ungrammatical for a native Spanish speaker living in CA to say this? I have always considered it to be an ungrammatical/incorrect usage. But coming from a British person I wouldn't consider it incorrect. I would consider them to be speaking a different dialect of English.
If a student said this in an English literature class in CA, my guess is that the teacher would correct the native Spanish speaker but not correct the British student. Or at least this would be my intuition as a native English speaker who studied linguistics a decade or two ago!
A personal data-point: I'm a native English speaker from norcal/oregon, and my wife is a native Spanish speaker from Monterrey, Mexico.
Since learning Spanish and being exposed to her good, but definitely not native, English, I didn't even notice "different to", and it doesn't seem particularly "weird" to me. But if I think about it I'm pretty sure it would've seened very weird to me back when I was in Oregon!
(It goes the other direction too. E.g., she's caught herself saying "vino rojo" instead of "vino tinto" and "hacer linea" instead of "hacer fila".)
In general I think it's pretty common when two languages are in close-contact to get some cross-contamination like that.
And prepositions are often pretty arbitrary.
https://la.urbanize.city/post/another-koreatown-office-build... (2017)
Typically to stop the encroachment of commercial or industrial buildings into residential areas? Wouldn't this, offices into apartments, be rather amenable?
If this trend continues, you'll be around even more people, and even more amenities will spring up to accommodate all the new people. The only catch is that your next job might not be close by in the city. Perhaps it'll be remote, or you'll be commuting out of the city. Thankfully, logistically, this is far preferable to the inverse.
This observation is pretzeled enough that I do not understand what you are trying to say. But I take exception at the suggestion that there is some political group that is more compassionate when dealing with homeless people - everyone of every stripe has compassion for homeless people. Charity is a near universal value. The political debate is 100% about:
- What is effective.
- What help should be compelled, and from whom (there are issues of fairness here).
- What is the root cause of any given case of homelessness.
And besides, in this case I note relaxed regulation that lets offices convert to apartments (without tripping up some zoning permit problem) is more effective at getting people into homes than compassion.
Not sure your list is equaling 100%. As a life long Texan, the red and blue lines are far and wide here and purple is thriving in certain areas; largely based on transplants. The purple, and especially the blue part that is changing the gradient; is to be feared by the MAGA republicans. Even people I consider non-extreme GOP Texas standard politics over past ~50 years type people do not want to tolerate the reality of modern day homelessness. Our culture in Texas is very NIMBY on this topic. Zero tolerance as in "I will pull out my shotgun if you step on my property." Nearly every pre-Y2K teenage boy has a story to tell about that if they grew up in Texas.
I suppose I consider this part of the cultural phenomenon that comes with growth. Although, fused within politics. Also, economics because the reason this is even happening is the city of Dallas has been losing to it's suburbs in the economic department. That's why so much office space is vacant. The pandemic ruined it for sure but it has been bad for a long time.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. It's been 22 years since the year 2000, so it sounds like you're describing a temporal impossibility.
Can we blame them? Who should tolerate homelessness and poverty issues? Aren't people in deep blue urban areas getting their own anecdotes about homelessness right now? Aren't we seeing people avoiding situations and neighborhoods there as a result?
Personally, and I can definitely be wrong here, I expect that relevant mental health issues aren't going to be simple enough to just throw earmarked housing, destigmatizing, etc. at. Local government is going to have to take some responsibility for the behavior of the mentally ill one way or another.
For instance, if you say that we should both give twenty quid to a homeless bloke we see, and I disagree because I genuinely don’t think it’s a good way to help, you (if you were so inclined) might call me uncaring but that wouldn’t be true. Then you argue that I should be compelled to give the money and I’ll fight you on that, for several reasons, and before you know it you’re casting me as evil.
I've heard from friends that work with the homeless, as well as from reading online, that many of the homeless feel invisible. People don't stop to talk to them, they don't make eye contact, they don't say "hello" while passing on the street.
From this I feel that treating the homeless as people -- even if it isn't something that tangibly benefits them -- is beneficial. Making small talk, or even just making eye contact and saying "good morning" while walking by would make them feel a little more human.
Obviously this doesn't solve the problem, and I expect that most homeless would prefer food and shelter over chit-chat, but when we're talking about "compassion for the homeless", I think that this fits perfectly in that hole.
But there are many, many people who would never for a second even consider the welfare of homeless people as a factor in any decision they ever make, personal or political.
So for all practical purposes charity is definitely not a universal value.
It's also easy to call experts until one agrees with you.
The conservatives in my hometown of Seattle are fairly vocal about not giving a fuck. It's sort of their defining feature. As in, they differ not at all from the liberals except on homeless issues.
I gather homelessness in Seattle has been getting worse for years [0] and that the city is something of a liberal stronghold. So the question is open - are the liberals more compassionate, or are they merely identifying ineffective policies as compassion? Because I would expect real compassion would cause homelessness to decrease. More compassion -> less homelessness is the link I'd like to see if I were out there being compassionate. Or at least growth in line with population rather than exceeding it. Compassion implies that people are about to do something useful.
In short, what you observe is consistent with conservatives being less compassionate, but also consistent with conservatives being equally compassionate but more realistic about policy effectiveness.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Seattle#Measur...
I'm not sure I understand. You probably don't mean that literally unless "tomorrow" is 50 years from now. How does it lower rent to make some housing affordable, simply by increasing supply?
Same principle behind targeting the high end market first for new products. Affordable iPhones are the used ones or the older models… not the latest models. Outside of government subsidies, the private market doesn’t target the poor for new stuff because it doesn’t make economic sense.
Yes it lowers rent by increasing supply. Same principle behind old iPhone models going on sale when the new model comes out. The rich people buy the new phones and flood the market with old models.
If you also look at the iPhone mini experiment it had abysmal sales… the phone was a new model that targeted the lower end. People Penny pinching tend to also look at used phones or actual old models.
But I think it still fits with my point that the new stuff doesn’t sell well with the poorer market.
Build more housing is a part of the solution. Not an ideal solution but better than doing nothing.
I haven't been interested in buying any of the available houses in my city for 10 years now, but recently they've been developing medium density townhouses and apartments in locations that aren't the CBD, but also not suburbia. That's a fair middle ground for the middle class that we have today.
Even building straight luxury soaks up the rich folks you'd otherwise have to compete with, by removing them from the equation.
Shouldn’t everyone have compassion for the poor and needy?
At the same time, barring a major felony, and sometimes not even then, nobody is exactly forcing them into a successful engagement with a recovery program either. If someone is unable to make a rational decision on the subject, who's fault is it if they continue to be untreated?
I agree we need more housing. I also think we'll have "homelessness problems" even if we built enough housing to go around. There are a lot of intersecting problems.
Then you get policies like "we don't need a social safety net (institutional compassion) because we have tax-deductible donations (institutional, discretional compassion)". Or similarly "we don't need progressive taxation because wealthy individuals employ more people" (i.e. the trickle-down fallacy).
Turns out people are assholes and you need to take their money by force- ie government.
Bucketing people so simply is a mistake. Often libertarians (similar to communists or any other political ideology) genuinely want to make things better and have genuine complaints about how things are run that would stand up to analysis.
I lean libertarian myself in many ways. I don’t care who you marry or if you dye your hair blue. I don’t care if you get an abortion (your right to choose - I’m a strong supporter of abortion rights), etc. I support exploring universal healthcare as well because it’s clear that solutions we’ve tried in the past are suboptimal and we are being outcompeted here. Environmental concerns are something that libertarians strongly support. You polluting the air harms me and others. Destroying the rainforest harms me and others. But I also think market mechanics tend to solve problems better and we can see that with environmental concerns where public policy isn’t enough - you need a 1-2 punch of policy and market mechanics like a carbon credit or coin or something. The public schools are a problem for example because Conservatives believe that Liberals have taken them over (untrue IMO) and are dictating teaching political ideology. This is a problem because if you lose power (as liberals have done in many states) then you are now subject to what the other party wants taught. There’s room here to explore - and universities (which need reform) show how choosing where you go to school instead of basing it on regressive property tax systems which require housing by-in could work. There’s a lot we can figure out.
I think for libertarians they should look at government less so as a thief and more of a platform. One thing you’ll note though is that libertarianism can accommodate communism, while the reverse isn’t true. That’s a key problem with certain ideologies like fascism or communism. People have been starting communes and worker collectives in America for a long time. There were never free markets or entrepreneurs starting new businesses in a meaningful way in Soviet Russia or Maoist China.
(not that I don't give to charities, but I tend to view my charities as political acts rather than moral acts).
Maybe we find out that good portions of government spending like education, social welfare, etc all get a huge boost in funding whilst leaving military and other policies with less funding. Maybe it makes everyone happy that they are doing their part for the things they believe are important, like charity. Instead of fighting for crumbs for their cause after most of the tax revenue has been allocated to wasteful projects.
We don't even get to pick this basic thing right now. I don't know about you but it spoils the taste of this supposed democracy to me. And then to be told I'm an asshole for wanting such basic autonomy is the cream on the top. This is not noble and just at all, democracy doesn't deserve such descriptors.
Argh, very bad typo. This should be individual compassion of course.
But if the number of visible rough sleepers falls, most people won't look too closely into whether the city provided treatment+housing+employment; or whether the city gave them a bus ticket to another city and send the cops to hassle them.
(....aaaaand in 5, 4, 3.....:-)
Similar trends and numbers apply nationwide, if not worldwide. You could certainly say all of this (indeed, to an even greater extent) for places like San Francisco and New York City.
Is this really the best of all possible worlds, where a small number of investment groups with vast wealth can keep accumulating the core real estate of cities, to extract wealth from its citizens?
2. Overcrowding doesn't even make sense. Thats just a subjective opinion.
3. Cities aren't loud cars are loud[0]
Every big city I’ve been too has been dirtier than low density suburban areas of equivalent wealth.
Cities are definitely louder than suburban streets, if they’re in cul de sacs and not next to a main throughway.
They're also louder, but that noise is contained within relatively small pockets. Fans of quiet suburbia need not worry.
This stuff is a fad. I don’t care what people say. Sitting on some tiny urban apartment working at home all day makes zero sense. Neither does paying for some co-working space to escape said tiny apartment. Might as well go to the office… oh wait… same thing in this brave “new normal”
All we are seeing is the rebirth of white flight to the suburbs branded as some kind of new revolution in tech work.
It’s a fad. Covid mitigations we’re temporary. Pendulum is gonna swing back. It’s just a matter of time.
Outside work hours I use the same floor space for private stuff, like gaming on my PC with too many fans and lights.
Oh, sure, having a separate dedicated work-space is nice, cognitively speaking, but it's a wild exaggeration to claim it can't ever be dual-use.
I'm not American, so aside from the unit conversions I'm having trouble reading the sentiment.
Is a 1200sq ft apartment considered large in the US? Are rooms normally 300sq ft?
I' asking because I live and work on around 700sq ft, of which 150sq ft is my office.
I would hate to try to WFH in a 1200sq ft place with family though. I think at least a floor of separation would be needed, lol
If someone from my corner of the world made the same statement I would make light of them, calling them "temporarily embarrassed Americans".
Personally I wouldn't know what to do with 1000sq ft and up, but this comment makes me think that I perhaps simply lack imagination.
Well, its easy for me :P
Server rack, 3D printing station/workshop, home gym, kitchen, storage, bathroom, yard equipment (typically a garage, tbf), home theater, deck (does this count?), kids rooms, etc.
That certainly wouldn't fit into 1000sqft.
I mean, I believe its totally possible to live within 1000sqft. You just have to "give up" a lot of things or a lot of potential... but you also gain some. I hate mowing the yard, for example, lol.
This part is particularly interesting. My 150sq ft office has a laundry rack because I didn't protest putting it there.
My co-worker lives in a detached house so his office space is larger, but again - laundry rack.
People that can do this would end not taking into account the location of the job when choosing the place to live. This will take time to sink, but in my opinion is the likely consequence.