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Comment by zxexz | Hacker News Reader

Turn the office buildings into affordable housing.

My understanding is that office buildings usually don't have enough plumbing or ventilation ductwork to make this reasonable to do, let alone cheaply enough to make it viable to make it into "affordable housing".

Unless you're suggesting that the government take on a bunch of debt on everyone's behalf to do this as a public service for those who are having trouble with rent, without regard for it being a financially viable project by itself. idk how it compares to the other options for doing that.

‘Affordable housing’ is an overloaded term at this point. There are people who qualify for ‘affordable housing’ in NYC who are making ~$180,000 and will be paying $3,000/mo or more in rent after their ‘low-income subsidy’ is factored in.

In case anyone is curious, here is a table of "area median income" in New York City: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/area-m...

It does appear to be the case that you can qualify for "affordable housing" in NYC if you make $180,000/year ... and have a family size of at least 3. (In fact, it goes up to $290,565/year with a family size of at least 8.) However, the category of income this represents is "middle income", one level above "moderate income" and two levels above "low income". Even with a family size of 8, "low income" caps out at $140,880/year. It appears that approximately half of new affordable housing targets "low income", and most of the remaining half for incomes lower still.

(The specific term "low-income subsidy" appears to mostly refer to the "Medicare Part D Extra Help Program" and cuts off below $35k/year.)

It would be a service from the government to residents in buildings they acquire and modify (through private-sector construction companies). Housing should not be privatized.

Couldn’t they do dorm style with shared bathroom facilities? Usually office buildings have much better ventilation than private residences.

Would you want to live in that?

Depends on the price point.

And it doesn't really matter what any one person would or wouldn't want to live like. I wouldn't want to live in a 200sqft apartment in NYC, but apparently a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money to do so.

That's not the correct question.

The correct question is if homeless people sleeping on the concrete - would they want to live in that. And probably a good many of them wouldn't.

They do have a good amount of ventilation, since they’re high occupancy, but you would need to run vents to all the units, at least, rather than large ducts to larger, more open spaces.

What about new office buildings? Could it be economically viable to include a residential option? Is there anything comparable to running a bit of extra conduit, the way some newer homes are built? PVC isn't free, of course, but maybe it's a negligible extra cost compared to the rest.

It’s rarely that easy or financially viable. Major changes to the building’s core systems are required.

At this point it doesn't matter anymore. We have whole generations of young professionals who are forced into life long debt to have a shack to live in. Your argument is like arguing against letting people have bicycles and continue walking, because cars are better. People need to escape rent feudalism first, then we can talk about other stuff.

I believe the point being made is that converting office buildings into affordable housing is more difficult and expensive than building that housing from scratch. If we want to help people escape rent feudalism first, we might consider what the most effective way to go about it could be instead.

Which, perhaps coincidentally, gets at what's been a major question in American cities for quite a while now: what are we going to do about how hard it's become to build affordable housing to help people escape rent feudalism?

We're talking about California in this particular case. That's a place where one of the organizing principles of politics for generations has been preventing new housing. If you want to enable people to escape from being serfs on rent farms, you'll need to grapple with that.

> Which, perhaps coincidentally, gets at what's been a major question in American cities for quite a while now: what are we going to do about how hard it's become to build affordable housing to help people escape rent feudalism?

As I see it, there is not any lack of housing in Western society. There are a ton of unused or underutilized housing and a on the other side a ton of employed people who are denied access because of hyper inflation in real estate prices.

In the past the elder generation would pass on their real estate to their offspring when they were making families. Then there was a period in the 20th century with high wages, were people could buy property with their wages, so that tradition stopped. Today it is not realistic for a working person to buy property without the life long debt, and that is according to plan.

I randomly chose Kansas City Kansas and there are houses there for less than 200k that looked ok.

Living in San Francisco is not necessary. Live somewhere cheaper and stop complaining that desireable places to live are more expensive.

Living in Kansas City is not a viable option unless you belong to certain demographics. Stop promoting it as such.

Please be more specific in your criticism of Kansas City. Many of its residents will be enlightened by the wisdom you can confer.

There are not enough homes in all the Kansas Cities in the country to make that a universal solution. Instead of $1M homes in SF and $200k in KC, you end up with $800k homes everywhere.

On top of that, what you save financially you frequently pay for in other ways. Communities and services that can be found in large cities simply don't exist in smaller and midwest areas.

There are probably 100 cities in the fly over states just like KC.

I live in a small town because I could not afford the big city near by.

Life is full of compromises, not living in the most expensive city in the country shouldn’t be considered a hardship.

> Life is full of compromises, not living in the most expensive city in the country shouldn’t be considered a hardship.

For many of us, the culture of smaller cities and increasingly even the laws of entire states represent an existential threat, or an existential threat to our loved ones. That is much more than a "hardship."

Can you explain what the existential threat in an entire state or a small town is that requires people to live in the most expensive and desireable cities?

For one, being transgender. Doubly so for transgender minors.

Even though you are not really worthy of a response due to your spiteful way of expressing yourself, I can assure you that most young people don't want to live in San Fransisco or New York city. The pricing-out happening the last decade is world wide. Most people just want to work, follow the rules and have a chance to a dignified life with their own home and family.

> Live somewhere cheaper and stop complaining

This is how you eradicate civil society, if working people are priced out of where they were born. But it happens, and it has happened historically. Millions left Europe for America. Millions will leave "cemetery cities" where young people cannot afford to live. I've seen such places and know how they are. The old people there hate the younger generation, even though most young people have moved out and the few teens there are itching to get the hell out as well.

Rebuilding in flood zones isn’t financially viable either but government pays for that.

Only in swing states.

On properties like this, that is still possible, BUT..

It wouldn't happen with the same borrower on the same deal/loan. It would go into a whole new construction type of loan (which is usually some sort of short term "mezz" financing for the transition period), and then get underwritten on maybe a 10 year.

The issue with the above now though is the transition to multi family costs a lot. Many will try and get cities/states to subsidize it. And then getting a good loan to make the deal work in unknown. Nobody makes deals like that happen when there is this much uncertainty in the CRE market. If you can't secure financing post construction to make the cap rate work.. you're done. Deal is dead.

Turn the office buildings into whatever the market wants: lofts, warehouse, light industrial, retail, recreational space, housing, etc. The one thing we know the world doesn't want is the status quo (otherwise they wouldn't be empty), so we should not do anything that keeps it from finding its best use.

How about we move jobs to somewhere cheaper instead of trying to figure out how to retrofit high-end office buildings into cheap apartments?

The rezoning alone would take a decade at best.

I know nothing about the topic, but someone who does told me this is not easy to do.

We do this not because it is easy, but because it gives us somewhere to live.

I see what you did there...

There are any number of difficult ways to give people somewhere to live that we're not doing. I would assume the reason to mention converting commercial property into residential is because the person suggesting this (usually wrongly) thinks it is easy.

> Turn the office buildings into affordable housing.

Or homeless shelters.

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