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Comment by NotYourLawyer | Hacker News Reader

Turn it into apartments.

As has been discussed here previously at length [see also https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...] newer office buildings are difficult to convert to housing because of their layout (and 350 California looks modern). Older high rise offices are still expensive to convert and are pretty much limited to luxury apartments as a result but are better from a floor layout perspective.

(It's also an open question whether housing demand in the downtown area will stay so high if a lot fewer people are going into offices every day.)

The issue of converting offices to housing is water supply and drainage. Electricity is well supplied in modern offices. The reason luxury apartments make sense is because either the apartments are real big so there's less plumbing needed, or they're real expensive, which pays for the necessary plumbing. But there's another way around that - low-income SRO housing with the shared bathroom and kitchens where the existing ones are.

It probably isn't much more expensive to just build a new building on an empty lot or other easy to demolish land if you can. You need to spend a lot of money to buy the existing building/land, basically gut everything inside until it's just a concrete shell and then rebuild everything into a residential design (electricity, plumbing, insulation, elevators, garbage disposals, amenities, windows, etc.). Then you probably still get apartments that are worse in design than a purpose built building so won't be worth as much.

There was a good comment in another thread by someone who converts office space to apartments, explaining why it's hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35728990

There are a ton of issues. For example, plumbing is very expensive. And in office towers, plumbing is typically run only to service bathrooms near the core of the building. Not bathrooms and kitchens spread all over the floor plan.

These types of challenges are overstated. Conversions can be done its only a matter of penciling out the finances.

Then, just put the bathroom and kitchen at the core of the building and the living space at the edges of the building.

Even if building hippie commune flats, that ain't gonna work because of economics.

If it were economical, building owners would already be doing this.

While possible, the major problem is cost of compliance with residential building codes as they differ greatly from commercial ones.

People have rented industrial areas to use as commercial and residential habitation, but fire/code inspectors usual find out and shut it down.

It's not that easy, those places were built as offices, not apartments, they don't have a lot of the things that are required to be liveable.

e.g. Plumbing throughout the floor, single-occupancy bathrooms, windows in the center, HVAC and utilities that can be metered and operate independently from other "units". This kind of building is a lot tougher than say, a pre-war office building like you might see in NYC. Those ones tend to have more "rooms" and sometimes center shafts, whereas these newer ones are a bunch of stacked up wide open floors, with elevators, mech, and bathrooms in the center.

Who said it was? Do it anyways. The cost of having an empty building in a big city is high. Getting some more people in there is good for the city, so the city should help. Having the downtown area decay is bad bad bad. But I am sure the owners are exploring every option they can. But to me the answer is simple: figure out a way to make it happen.

I agree, but it’s always a question of money. With the cost of transformation it’s possible the value of building will be zero or even negative. In this case the owner of the building default and the building stay there and decay until the city take on the burden of demolition or transformation with dwindling tax revenue... Start to look like Detroit scenario.

It doesn’t look that bad form the outside, I wonder what would it take to collapse like this.

Well, nothing is stopping you from making an offer on the building.

I am more talking about the city than buyers.

[Given enough political motivation and building/zoning permits] Can't these be taken down and rebuild into residential? Given a long enough projected decline in needed office space there must be a ROI to rebuild at some point.

Tearing down a building in a downtown area is expensive and if demand for residential units also drops (ie: why would you want to live in an empty office building wasteland). So might be better to invest in buildings in further out areas that have not been built up as offices yet. Removing the daily need for commuting to work can change a lot of the dynamics around where people want to live even if they stay in the same metro areas.

Even if I wanted to live in San Francisco I sure wouldn't choose to live in the general downtown area if I weren't commuting to a job there every day.

Recent article on NYTimes and its HN discussion. TL;DR: it's not that simple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35120366

Reply on news.ycombinator.com