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Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

Will be interesting to see changes taking place in urban planning as the new era of working from home begins to effect the urban center and suburban areas moving forward. I've noticed it in the lunch spots in my suburban town- all way more crowded than they used to be and went through a transition period where they had to get used to the new volume.

Feels like a new era of some big changes in relation to city planning. Cities will have to build housing to account for the loss in tax base of commercial real estate.

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On the other hand, the few times I've gone into Boston or Cambridge during the week, rush hour traffic is as bad as it's ever been as far as I can tell. It's really hard for me to square the evidence of my eyes with narratives about city offices emptying out. Perhaps it's a rather uneven phenomenon.

Fewer people are going into the office, but a higher percentage of those that are going in are driving instead of taking mass transit.

The level of traffic remains the same because the biggest incentive against driving is the traffic. Therefore, the traffic will always remain at the highest tolerable level, unless additional disincentives (such as congestion pricing) are introduced. This is commonly known as induced demand.

>a higher percentage of those that are going in are driving instead of taking mass transit

I can believe that. I think I've only taken the train in once. (Not because I was avoiding it but because it didn't align with my schedule.) And there were a fair number of empty seats at the point it would have probably have been standing room only pre-pandemic. But sample size of one and this was a number of months ago.

That said, my overall observation is that things are probably closer to back to normal than in some tech industry bubbles.

Well, the type of job you can work from home at, is limited. Only a small minority of people are working from home.

Think of all the trades(mechanics, construction, plumbing, builders, etc). Think of all retail workers. Think of manufacturing.

That's already well more than 1/2 the jobs out there, and there are more.

I would be surprised of more than 10% of people, are wfh.

In NYC the explanation is pretty simple. Weekday subway, bus, and train ridership is about 60% of pre pandemic levels. Most of those people are no longer commuting at all, but some percentage have switched to driving.

The percentage numbers don’t quite tell the whole story, either. There are two million daily riders missing.

https://new.mta.info/coronavirus/ridership

Last I heard there was a housing shortage. Obvious solution would be to turn commercial properties into residential ones.

Our building in SOMA did this.

It's obvious but not easy. Oftentimes commercial spaces don't have a lot of plumbing. They usually just have the one bathroom and kitchen space per floor usually in the middle.

A large office space would need walls and a lot of plumbing work to convert to apartments (and probably a lot more electricity to power multiple kitchens full of appliances).

And it can rather easily be added on the outside in some isolated ducts. The problem is cutting it down to appartments that correspond to fire safety codes. CAL demands you have two exits, which a office building easily fullfills with two staircases. But how do you do that in a converted apartment building, without loosing tremnedous amounts of space to hallways.

Everyone said the same thing about lofts/industrial spaces. Going by other contexts, the greatest profits will flow to people who Just Do It and make people happy, later seeking forgiveness instead of permission.

So what makes converting existing structures to residential use harder than building new residential buildings on empty land?

I view this as an "outrunning the bear" situation. I.e. you don't need to run faster than the bear, just run faster than your poor friend.

The cost to convert an office tower into apartments is high I'm sure, but is it higher than building a similarly-sized apartment tower from scratch? A lot of money goes into the foundation works and soils engineering.

The first thing you would have to do would be to remove much of the internal walls and structure, followed by running new electrical and plumbing. The latter two are very skilled-manual-labor intensive.

So make that kind of residential space... different.

Many of them aren't well-suited to it. Everything from plumbing to window coverage is not designed for it. Zoning also doesn't allow it - have you tried to get a zoning change through SF?

Anyway, you can convert some of them, but it's not an easy journey!

I don't believe WFH will last as long as people think it will

I don't believe assigned, mandatory offices and commute will last as long as people think it will

Requiring back to office will be a popular method of cutting labor once this recession goes full tilt

And also, a popular method of losing your top talent.

Companies that own their empty offices (e.g. the FAANGs) are definitely going want them full because of sunk costs, and then hope all the other smaller companies cargo cult them.

It probably will work.

A better world is possible, and it's actively sabotaged by entrenched interests.

FAANG is actually changing faster than you'd believe.

I've been at Microsoft and now Amazon; they're both extremely remote friendly. Offices have been largely empty so they've not renewed most of the expiring leases.

Some functions still need to be performed in-person so they'll have some space but no longer the everyone comes to office to put on noise cancelling headphones to work individually mostly. And even that space is getting distributed across the country and not concentrated in SF/Seattle

Google, Apple, and Facebook have spent literally billions on now empty office space.

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