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Comment by fancyfredbot | Hacker News Reader

Turn them into apartments please. Property prices are too high. At least some offices can be made suitable for residential usage.

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The primary challenge with office tower conversions are the floor plates. Most are big, sprawling rectangles with yawning amounts of interior space intended for cubicles, interior offices/conference rooms, and other windowless uses. Natural light is only available at the perimeter and therefore comes at a premium. The vast majority of proposed apartment conversions call for putting the living area along the curtain wall of windows and push the bedrooms into windowless areas within the core, which is problematic. Removing natural light from sleeping areas messes with circadian rhythm, reduces egress options, and reduces ventilation options as well. In my humble opinion we should not normalize the idea that access to natural light and ventilation in a bedroom should come at a premium in residential construction at least. If you’ve ever been on a cruise ship and seen/stayed in an interior state room, it’s pretty much that but a place intended for permanent residency.

Optic fibers and light domes. These are all long solved problems everywhere.

One issue is plumbing. A floor of apartments needs more pipes and drains than were built in for office space. Interesting problem to solve, for sure.

Besides plumbing, one thing that came up on a similar discussion in the subreddit for my local area was that there the codes are different between commercial & residential in terms of how far away a room can be from an exterior wall. And it's not uncommon for commercial buildings to have a lot of space that would be unusable in a residential setting because of this.

Plumbing wasn't an issue for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Van_Ness_Avenue

I think the shape of the building matters most.

Not really. Most of these kind of offices have either a raised floor or suspended ceiling, making the addition of this kind of service trivial, compared to doing it in residential buildings. Natural light and fire escapes will be more difficult to provide.

My understanding is that this is often prohibitively expensive, and potentially impossible for some buildings.

Bulldozer, then build

To some extent that's starting to happen near me. But it's a long, expensive process.

I don't disagree that housing would be a good addition. But it's not going to be a magic bullet without flaws.

But the whole reason people wanted to live in a lot of these cities was to be near the offices.

I don't know which cities we're talking about here, but i happen to know at least a few cities that are desirable to live in even if you don't have to commute to an office.

Yeah, there are cities that are nice to live in, but a lot of them were built around particular industries or had huge commute flows that surely had something to do with the housing demand. Like SF, Sunnyvale/Palo Alto area, Pittsburgh, Redmond, and Detroit.

People used to act like worker bees following the queen, but now it's more complicated, and some of the queens have moved.

San Fransisco's housing prices reflect the high pay available to tech workers living there, sure, but it would still be an extremely attractive place to live without commute reduction as a benefit. Night life, cultural scenes, gorgeous weather, it's an extremely attractive city in its own right. Urban living is extremely attractive to many people who don't have families to fill out sprawling suburban homes.

If in-office white collar work collapses totally, I'd expect to see a sudden drop in housing prices as older people who were only living in the city to save on a commute rush out, followed by a delayed correction of people currently living outside of cities because they can't afford them moving in. Prices would likely remain greater than suburbia, but maybe closer to the halfway mark between current city/suburb rent costs.

The cities that will be hit hard are the "cities"/glorified suburbs that litter the rest of the Bay Area. They're too expensive to for just the weather, they don't have the attractions of urban life, and basically the only reason to live in, say, Fremont, today is because it cuts your commute in half relative to living on the other side of the hills.

> San Fransisco's housing prices reflect the high pay available to tech workers living there, sure, but it would still be an extremely attractive place to live without commute reduction as a benefit. Night life, cultural scenes, gorgeous weather, it's an extremely attractive city in its own right.

It would be an attractive place to live but for the random stabbings, used needles, and human feces.

I can see why some people would like SF despite those issues. It's a big advantage that you can get around the city without a car and that the weather is nice, particularly those two things in combination. I still hated it for other reasons but don't assume everyone does.

The thing is, for each person there willingly, it seemed like there were 10 people just moving or commuting in for work. It was assumed by default that you don't live there or at least haven't been there for long.

The number of people who actually leave their cities for a different one for work-related reasons has plummeted over the past several decades.

Problem is American cities are not nice to live in.

An office in your home is really near. And can be the basis of a nice tax write-off.

Careful with this tax advice, it doesn’t work if you are salaried (at least not at the moment).

Also doesn't help if you're using standard deduction.

If I was a commercial landlord, I would start doing this ASAP before everyone.

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