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Comment by RichardCNormos | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. Low-income housing is the perfect use for all this extra office space. San Francisco has a problem where the low-income people who work to serve high-income people can't afford to live in the city that they work in.

Converting office space into affordable housing is a win for everyone, except the landlords, but I won't shed a tear for them ;-)

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We've tried to convert offices to homes in the UK, and there's something particularly dystopian about the result. I think they have to make strange trade-offs to make the space useful, and its ends up being not very nice. I'm sure it's better than being on the street, but it isn't nice.

NYC has build a lot of dedicated public housing and even then dystopian is probably a good summary of the result.

I grew up in the Sedgwick projects in the Bronx, and my grandma still lives there. She's been in the same rent-controlled apartment for 40+ years, which was affordable to her as a small business owner (hair/beauty salon).

She's now living independently at age 86, thanks to a social security check and a community where she's everyone's abuela. Rent-controlled housing made it easier to divorce her abusive husband and start a business back in the 60s.

How is that dystopian?

not the person you are responding to, but I think they meant dystopian as in the "vibe" of the place. For example, many housing projects in France (where I live), tend to be basically large concrete rectangles, with very little green space. When compared to posher neighborhoods, with lots of trees everywhere, this can seem a little claustrophobic/totalitarian/dystopian. It feels like a less "human friendly" environment than you stereotypical suburb with front lawns.

I see where that's coming from, but to offer an alternate perspective the suburbs seemed "dystopian" to me at first - we moved upstate for middle/high school. The same 6-8 Stepford model homes on every street, strip malls filled with the same 10 stores (Walgreens/CVS, Costco/Walmart, etc), people dressed VERY similarly, and nobody walked anywhere. The teens in my suburban high school seemed way less happy and did more/harder drugs compared to the Bronx.

I'm not saying the projects were lovely. The elevators smelled like piss. But public housing - even ugly public housing - was a huge part in enabling two generations of single moms (my mom + grandma) to raise their families, start businesses, and thrive.

> How is that dystopian?

The practicalities of the original design and trying to adapt it means these conversions often have limited natural light, limited fresh air, are made from hard, unbreathable, manufactured materials, are very 'liminal', have bad acoustics. Have you read the theory of 'sick buildings'? Homes made from office space seem to end up very 'sick', with an impact on people's mental and physical health, and increasing isolation.

That's how it's dystopian.

Quite a few have been done badly (cheaply) so there's issues with insulation, damp, etc. And like you said, they don't often look nice.

You can't just convert office space into residential space. Completely different building codes. Just the retrofit for the plumbing makes it untenable.

I know this will get downvoted but, I say Throw the building codes out the window. Housing people is more important than regulations.

If it made a difference to your ability to get shelter, which would you rather choose: have shelter or live in a illegal tent under a bridge resting assured with the knowledge that there's a big book of rules in place.

The problem is not all codes are meaningless regulation, and some of the important ones are indeed expensive (and vice versa). If you yolo it, you get cases like the Grenfell tower fire, and a lot of people literally die.

This is how you get housing tenements, and SF has a history of over-paying for impermanent housing solutions (like tents in a parking lot, or cots in a navigation center).

Not all buildings in SF are high-rise open-plans. If you're imagining converting Salesforce tower, I see how that would seem impractical.

Most commercial office space in SOMA (old warehouse buildings) can be converted into live/work lofts.

Building codes were written in blood (and for much of the plumbing code, human feces and black mold).

anyone up for a rewrite in Rust? :D

If you're talking low-income housing, it could be closer to a dormitory setup. Common bathrooms and kitchens, etc. This used to be common in low-income urban rental property, and still is in some parts of the world.

Building Codes are words on paper. They can be changed more easily than physical buildings.

Think of most offices. Central elevator shafts and stairs and bathrooms. A massive floorplan with all the windows on the edges. How do you convert to residential? Have 5 feet by 500 feet units so everyone has light and a connection to plumbing by the elevator shaft? Residential buildings have a lot more access to natural light throughout the structure and they are plumbed entirely differently. Hvac and wiring too.

>How do you convert to residential? Have 5 feet by 500 feet units so everyone has light and a connection to plumbing by the elevator shaft?

A dorm (ie. shared bathrooms/kitchen) wouldn't have this issue.

Dorm buildings are still thinner and have more access to natural light. No matter what you get these awkward units and dystopian unlit spaces internally. In places like nyc with huge, city block width apartments, there are actually internal voids that let in natural light deeper into the structure.

The problem with shared bathrooms & kitchens is that no single person is responsible for cleaning them and as a result they end up being messes. It can work (in theory), but in practice it ends up getting ruined by lazy jerks.

Yeah I remember the dorm bathrooms on a sunday, full of puke from saturday before the cleaning staff showed up on monday morning.

This doesn't describe a lot of office space in San Francisco, especially SOMA. There are a couple of high-rise open plans (like SF Tower), but many offices in SOMA are converted warehouses.

Check out 510 Townsend, one of the properties mentioned in the OP. What do you think about converting buildings like 510 Townsend into live/work lofts?

Ambiguous blanket statement that flies in the face of ingenuity. Change the byzantine codes.

Google "Chesterton's Fence".

Theoretically, the wages should come up to make it possible to live there, assuming the service providers are actually having trouble hiring.

It seems to me there might be some disconnect in demand and supply of various labor types (not many unskilled jobs compared to the number of unskilled workers, vs not many software devs but lots of openings). It seems these forces drag the bottom down while pushing the top higher.

Edit: why disagree?

> Theoretically, the wages should come up to make it possible to live there, assuming the service providers are actually having trouble hiring.

Why, theoretically, would wages rise enough to make it possible for any worker to live in the city? I think the situation where workers with the worst alternatives and weakest negotiating position are stuck commuting into SF from outside is unfortunate but theoretically entirely understandable; SF wages aren't forced to rise to support someone living here, but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting.

"but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting."

True, but then the implied issues with not living in the city you work in become moot if truly compensating for the commute and cost of living outside the city.

I think maybe you mean something by "truly compensating" which isn't actually being achieved. But the lesser compensation we are achieving is still sufficient to impact people's behavior.

Suppose you're able to get two part time jobs with relatively little predictability in your shift schedule. Both are minimum wage, but one is in SF where the minimum is $17/hr and another is in Concord at $14/hr (the state minimum for a company with <25 employees). Say you live in Antioch, and can get to the Concord job in around 35 minutes for $4 with BART, and get to the SF job with more than 1h and $7.30 on BART (one way). So for every shift in SF you pick up, you get a $3 premium per hour relative to the Concord job, but for the first 2 hours that just goes to cover your extra BART fare, _and_ you lose an extra hour in transit. In dollars you still come out ahead on an 8 hour shift in SF relative to in Concord, but I think it would be unreasonable to say that "the implied issues ... become moot".

I say theoretically, because in a theoretical world the market would be efficient and the employee would be analyzing the income and costs. Your examples are using locale in a HCOL state. Now image if the workers there actually did analysis on moving to lower cost states.

Yes, the moot part is based on them being truly compensatedfor the extra commute, in which case it would be moot. It's much more interesting to me to look at the income inequality and market side than the "solution" of creating subsidized housing. I'd rather go after the true root problem than cover up one symptom and allowa the problem to persist.

You're looking at it as it exists today. I'm saying theoretically this other stuff should work (but may not in practice).

I think this line of thinking is just sloppy. "Theoretically" the efficient market only gets to pareto optimality, i.e. we can't make the commuting low-wager worker's situation better without someone else being at least slightly worse off, but there's no lower bound on how bad things can be for that low-wage worker. Nothing assures us that we converge to a state where at the low end "the wages should come up to make it possible to live [in SF]" or anywhere particularly close.

I find your thinking sloppy. There, was that helpful?

"better without someone else being at least slightly worse off"

Exactly. The point (if you go back through my comments) is that there seems to be a demand and supply imbalance based on the skill/type of labor. We should be looking at ways to slow higher end wage growth and promote it in the lower end. One way to do this could be around education. Essentially, increase the number of developers on the market while decreasing the number of people who are only qualified for the lower wage work. We've kind of seen this with the pandemic shrinking the labor force and driving those lower end wages higher.

Who do you expect will pay for the conversions if not landlords?

Obviously government subsidy..

Meaning taxes

Or, good old QE.

Who wants to live in a city if you can work from home? If you are poor and need housing subsidies and there are no jobs for you, there is no reason to live in the city to begin with. People go live where the jobs are. Without "white collar" jobs producing demand for services, there is much less demand for "blue collar" jobs.

If it's just cooping people up, there are cheaper ways to house people than maintaining expensive buildings that need financing and upkeep.

Subsidies.... to the landlords who own the buildings? Or are you saying this will be owned and operated by the government?

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