This is an Activist piece - not an Analysis piece. You cannot trust facts reported in an article that's advocating change.
It cherry picks a number of facts in order to further the arguments.
Can't be done. Office buildings of significant size are not engineered for 24/7 human occupation. The sewer will be inadequate. The water will be inadequate. Retrofitting this would be spectacularly expensive, if it's even possible, as mechanical and plumbing chases are sized for the original design requirements and are difficult (if not impossible) to alter. It may be possible to do if residents were willing to use shared bathrooms, but they will not be.
HVAC is not sized for 24/7 habitation either. Neither are electrical requirements. Stoves produce a lot of unaccounted for BTUs. They require larger electrical service. The electrical service has to be metered individually, which requires quite a lot of space.
Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up. Nobody is walking that. The elevators are sized according to different rules than residency, so there are not enough of them, and they won't all be on a generator anyway.
Where you have plenty of space to develop renewables in a dense city? Where the home garage to recharge your car? Where the place to get larger and larger package due to the flourish of on-line retail? Where the place for future flying cars/drone delivery etc?
If middle-class people start to de-urbanize cities would be let full of desperate with much job offers to find work.
The denser an area is the more territories around are needed to feed it, to a point of 1000+miles ranges vs few if population is not that dense.
Anyway, at least in Europe people who want to be in cities normally are a not so marginal cohort, but still far little in size than the one who want to flee, only few countries where services are not developed outside cities have different mean opinion.
(In general, it's incorrect to assume that WFH implies a desire to flee to suburbia, particularly in dense cultural hub cities: people often seek employment in these cities because they want to live there, not the other way around.)
Put another way, what matters is the maximum volume the electrical, sewer, HVAC, elevators, emergency power, etc can handle. If it is scoped to handle 1,000 people for 8 hours of a day, it will do just fine for 300 people 24 hours per day.
> Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up.
I mean, you’re acting like 50-story residence buildings don’t exist, when in fact they do in many cities already.
That... depends? On one hand, an office building scoped to handle 1000 people for 8 hours a day might handle more peak toilet flushes than 300 people for 24 hours a day, but the latter might get way more peak shower/dishwasher/sink/washer use than the former.
The claim -- which all the experts seem to back -- is you can't convert large office buildings to residential. For some of the reasons parent says, plus more importantly, you only have a habitable outer shell or donut given light requirements. And it's extremely expensive to take water and sewer, which are all located in the core, and distribute them out to each future apartment.
See eg https://slate.com/business/2022/12/office-housing-conversion...
Almost. Use case for commercial office and residential is significantly different. In an office building, the largest electrical load will be HVAC. In a residential environment, it will be more evenly split between water heating, HVAC and appliances.
For example, in an office building, you might have one or two smallish water heaters to provide hot water for sinks, with a recirc pump to keep the water heater requirements down even further. There may not even be a dishwasher at all.
In residential, you get dishwashers, washing machines, showers and sinks that all need hot water. And they will run often, usually at fixed time points meaning you cannot diversify the electrical in the same way you would for an office building.
My point about a 50 story converted office building is the office building's elevators are sized differently for a different use case. There is a great deal of witchcraft and sorcery in how elevator companies do this calculation, but a 50 story residential has different elevator requirements than a 50 story office. It may not be much, but it is different. And you can't just add an elevator if you need to. They are integral to the structure of the building.
All this to say, yes, it can be done, but it won't be. It's fantastically expensive and there just aren't enough rich people to justify doing more than one or two.
This also does not apply to a more modest 3, 4 or 5 story office building. The requirements are much more manageable for these. I am only referencing the big buildings, maybe 10 stories or higher.
And while business buildings are not internally designed for 24/7 occupancy, their accesses are scoped for much higher occupancy as businesses tend to have denser occupancies than residential.
So most of the problem is the interior setting, which has to be retrofit anyway.
> Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up. Nobody is walking that.
Residential towers exist all over the world. And that's literally what Billionaire's Row is.
It can be done and has been done, but what the article fails to recognize is that it is spectacularly expensive—the original build-out, of course, but also the maintenance (I’ve seen this firsthand in the stratospheric HOA fees in the one class-A office-to-residence conversion I toured in my condo search).
Office to residential will happen, but it will be at the top end of the market. It is fundamentally incompatible with affordable housing.
I mean, of course it can be done. We can also solve the homeless problem by moving them all to the Moon and building Moon bases.
The point is that it is not practically possible for the reasons I stated as it is fantastically expensive. There are simply not enough rich people to buy into a converted office building. You will get a handful of them in name brand cities, but the ability to secure financing for these things will very quickly vanish.
I live in an office building that was first opened in 1914 and was converted into residential units.
Another 18-floor office building across my street is being converted as we speak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Artists_Theatre_Buildin...).
The Park Avenue Building is supposed to be converted in residential units by the end of 2024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Avenue_Building).
The Book Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Tower) is nearing completion with a host of residential units in its main tower.
Griswold Street, a major avenue in Detroit that cuts through our financial district has converted so many old office buildings into residential units that I have lost count.
The high-rise building part remains and is being converted into residential units right now.
There's zero reason why an article advocating for a change can't also contain trustworthy facts. I'm not saying this article is a good example of one, but I wouldn't follow "You cannot trust facts reported in an article that's advocating change." as a general rule. Pretty much every article advocating for a change is going to include facts, but that doesn't make them all untrustworthy. Advocating for something in an article doesn't require the author to ignore everything that doesn't support their viewpoint, or lying/misleading, or cherry-picking.
Identifying that an author is advocating for something should cause you to be on the look for out for those types of things (that's just critical thinking), but they shouldn't be assumed and the article or the facts it contains shouldn't be immediately dismissed as untrustworthy or wrong based on that assumption.
From the other nymag.com submissions on HN, and a look at their frontpage, and my past experiences with their articles, it seems like NYMag is an Activist news outlet, so this is not very surprising, if rather disappointing.