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Comment by astiela | Hacker News Reader

Good, Now turn those empty offices into housing

Wish granted. They'll be turned into luxury apartments worth $1M a piece, bought by foreign investors, and vacant 364 days a year.

There’s easy solutions to that if it ever becomes a problem (the easiest is a vacancy tax) but it’s not currently a problem in the US as can be seen from the fact that places which have built more housing in the past decade or so have much lower rents than similar places that haven’t built as much housing.

Arguably it is already a problem. NYC's "Billionaire's Row" is crammed full of apartments built for the sole purpose of investment and remain vacant. Imagine how many homes for "regular" people (yes, it's Manhattan, they'll still be expensive) could have been built there if there wasn't a financial incentive to bury money like this.

These skyscrapers buy "air rights" from neighbours to build high which takes away even more homes.

London has areas with the same problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wehsz38P74g

This is kind of a whataboutist point.

Places like NYC and London fit a kind of niche where there is a market for this sort of opulence/money-laundering. But if you, like, sit on a bunch of commercial real estate in Des Moines Iowa, turning it around into a $50 million apartment for the Saudis is not a real possibility.

NYC's primary problem is having the worst housing production rates of any major US city (aside from a handful that are economically struggling and have low production from outright lack of demand), and the downstate/LI suburbs being exceptionally bad as well.

The rest is basically irrelevant. Every one of those few "billionaire" buildings could be 1-bedroom market rate units at 100% occupancy instead and it wouldn't do anything significant for the overall problem.

For one example of how broken NYC policies are: 60% of residential lots aren't zoned for anything over 2 stories. The city needs to have much of it moderately upzoned to get decent (and decently distributed) housing development, not to somehow start building affordable skyscrapers in Midtown.

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There's a fantastic non-partisan report here that lays out the scale of the failure and various ways to improve the issue very clearly: https://cbcny.org/research/strategies-boost-housing-producti...

If you want to just skim, the various charts show it clearly enough without actually reading every paragraph.

Vacancy tax seems like an easy solution until you start thinking about implementation. How do you expect to enforce it?

Make the penalties very harsh, and allow whistleblowers to collect a percentage of the fines.

NYC just charging not insanely low property tax, especially on these billionaire condos would be a good start.

That would actually require demolishing them and building residential buildings from scratch. Most office spaces are not designed to be inhabitable 24/7, they would suck as apartments.

And yet it happens https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-47720887

And re-open the local shops, instead of having every one close in on the concrete hell.

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