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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

If you have seen a residential tower and an office tower being built side by side, you know why.

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.

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This isn’t correct. You probably saw a concrete residential building and a steel office building by chance. It does not follow that every single office building is built this way. There are concrete office buildings all over the place, usually with thicker slabs than a residential building, because the office building actually needs to be designed for much higher loads.

By the way, the thin steel deck you saw gets concrete poured on it too once installed.

That’s the opposite of my experience. Office buildings are built to last and residential seems to have been built exclusively with clearance items at Home Depot.

It changes when they get taller. Apartments up to 5 stories are generally optimized to maximize tax benefits.

I'll guess that it's a very upscale residential tower (the rich don't want to hear the upstairs neighbor stomp across the floor), and/or a local fire code requirement for anything tall and residential.

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