The high price of empty office space
thecity.nyc
thecity.nyc
Comedy gold. Nobody needs more overpriced office space in NYC. If people needed more overpriced office space, it most likely wouldn’t be sitting empty. Plenty of people need more housing.
Adams is doing it right now. de Blasio did it. Bloomberg was a Bloomberg, and did it. Giuliani is so crooked that post-mayorship he lost his license to practice law while working for another well known long time thief and scammer in the NYC real estate scene (Trump, which they became criminal partners while Giuliani was mayor); I bet if I keep going back, I'll keep finding names associated with the real estate machine.
I'm surprised this Adams guy thinks there will be no repercussions. America is pissed and wants revenge: we, collectively, don't care who gets thrown under the bus as long as they're a politician or a businessman.
NYC made a bad bet on trying to maintain modern day slavery. The City should suffer, not the people who live there: force the real estate scammers to go bankrupt and take their skyscrapers, tear them down, replace them with something the city needs.
Chicago is the same. New Jersey is probably worse than NY. SF less so, but also pretty bad. I hear Texas is also really bad. Basically anywhere you have a political monoculture (and thus no risk of getting booted for a scandal), you get corruption.
If there's any way to make people laugh at your otherwise cogent points, it'd be this
Today I learned that working in a nice, air-conditioned office with a view for lots of money is considered "modern day slavery."
That's how far NYC has fallen, maybe you can say it has been like that since the 1970s if you go that far in history.
Affordable housing, eh? Maybe convert some of that CRE into housing then?
The former is exactly the same kind of ungodly expensive , corruption filled mess as what this article is talking about.
Housing that is affordable just means that there’s sufficient inventory that the market clearing rate is affordable.
The biggest barrier is not market dynamics—-you could just build through the demand—-but the political pressure of all those current owners that demand a windfall and will be very unhappy if affordability is achieved.
Those are valuable to the community, so the street isn't perpetually in shade and people can see the sky (there are lots of tall buildings), and so neighbors and retail customers can still find parking after your new 50-story skyscraper's tenants move in.
If there is only one tall building in the area, its shadow will be cast in different places throughout the day, not overly burdening any of them. If there is a cluster of tall buildings, this is even better, because another tall building will be the thing most of the adjacent building's shadow is cast on, and high density buildings will have wide streets between them to carry the traffic anyway, which also allows in light and air.
A sensible way to do this is to require larger offsets for taller buildings, which then allow wider streets and sidewalks in areas with many tall buildings. But that's typically not how the rules work when their true purpose is to limit construction; they just prohibit the taller building entirely.
> so neighbors and retail customers can still find parking after your new 50-story skyscraper's tenants move in.
They would have parking in their own building, if they paid the extra cost needed to provide that. Why should that be mandatory? Many people in a city may be content to not have a car.
IME such rules are born of a wide variety of interests that come together and work it out.
Public parking is a commons; commons with high demand need rules to share them fairly.
Public parking in a rural or suburban area is a commons. You provide some free parking as a convenience because land isn't at a premium.
Parking in a city is a market. If there isn't enough, the price goes up and then people build more because it's profitable. You can still have some street parking provided by the government (whether it's metered or not) but anybody objecting that there isn't enough parking is invited to take advantage of the high demand by building a parking garage.
> IME such rules are born of a wide variety of interests that come together and work it out.
The issue is that part of the "wide variety of interests" is the people who want to prevent development because scarcity increases the value of their existing property or the amount of rent they can charge. But this is an unsympathetic motive, so they find various pretexts to thwart construction and pass rules with a different underlying goal than the stated one.
True to a degree, but not nearly effective (not every market is a perfect one). Most dense cities don't have nearly enough parking for the demand. Also, there is a much larger commons than I think you imply.
I actually object to parking requirements for another reason: It creates more demand for real estate and drives up rent and purchase costs for everyone. I'd prefer more public transport.
> part of the "wide variety of interests" is the people who want to prevent development because scarcity increases the value of their existing property
I'm not sure they are less sympathetic than most others, who also have self-serving motives. Regardless, you don't get to say whose interests are valid (and neither do I), thankfully.
You can measure demand relative to supply by observing pricing. But if the price is high then it would be profitable to build more parking garages. The sort of thing preventing this from working would be if you would e.g. prohibit people from building parking garages. But you don't have to prohibit them in order to not require them. Requiring them is a subsidy.
> I'm not sure they are less sympathetic than most others, who also have self-serving motives.
"Landlords want rents to be high" is an extremely unsympathetic motive, especially in cities where a large proportion of the voters are tenants.
That's the reason for the pretexts. Otherwise they would just say "let's inhibit new construction so landlords can charge higher rents" instead of needing to launder it through another policy objective. The former is often exactly what happens in the suburbs where policies are put into place with the express purpose of increasing "home values" i.e. housing costs, because the majority of voters there are property owners and the prospective buyers don't already live in the jurisdiction to vote against them -- often because they can't afford housing there.
But because the true motive is often hidden, anyone opposed to astronomical housing costs has to be wary of policies that limit construction even when the stated rationale is something else.
That assumes that markets work well in every circumstance. I think that pretty clearly isn't true. It would be interesting to learn the facts of the parking space market in cities.
So it would just sound as bashing USA without providing any solutions. It would be even illegal to adopt most European technologies in a house in USA.
No. We have pretty low rates of this because the risk/reward ratio sucks for both sides.
They aren't. The rules you mentioned can be fit on a single page.
Zoning code is hundreds of pages, and that's just for what you can do with the land. It's more hundreds of pages for building out a simple interior (e.g. kitchen, power outlets, plumbing, bedroom)
For example, you have to both hire a licensed professional and have the city inspector sign off on the work. But isn't this redundant? Why couldn't you do the work yourself if the city inspector is still going to come and verify that it's up to code?
It would be a lot more cost effective to consult a professional to ask how to do something up to code (consult an electrician in the same way as you might consult an attorney) rather than the equivalent of requiring the attorney to work in the factory and manufacture your widgets.
Regulations that require decent, safe housing are important and valuable. In a very densely populated environment of millions of people, regulations are needed to make good, safe neighbors.
£12k to have a £45m return. A 0.03% cut.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/24/robert-jenr...
This is common across property types.
Im told by all sorts of people online that this sort of thing just doesnt happen.
> Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects.
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-it-really-takes-to-conve...
The worst scenario is that businesses en masse begin breaking their leases and the buildings quickly fall into disrepair. I’m sure there’s people working on a solution to move all the plumbing and infrastructure out of a central core to make better use of these structures. It might be best to keep things as they are until that happens.
That would be an excellent way of making new buildings too expensive to build.
Did I spotted an "Overton" PR operation? We all agree, I suppose, that WFH is here to stay, and similarly I suppose we all seen the RTO push by any means. So why keeping publishing news about the same points already well discussed and known?
Well it seems to me a tentative to made the obvious "debatable" so it will be debated and slowly some PR inject a bit of FUD making the unacceptable "acceptable in certain cases", than such case became slowly more and more common to the point that the new normal would be accepting RTO.
If you agree be attentive.
In Portland, for example, where the shrieks have been amplified by right wing media and out of state lobbying, there has been a nationally reported attack that has sold many subscriptions to the NYT. Just five years ago Portland was used to sell a different subscription for post-Portlandia fans.
When policing returns to normal, and when there is enough public sentiment to spend more on police and create more prisons, the problem will be "solved." Meaning we can go back to keeping the poors away from the tourist and wealthy neighborhoods and in prison if they don't comply.
It works in all the southern states. Those states all have police that rule with an iron fist and prison rates at 2-3x or even 4x the "liberal" states. Just sprinkle in a bit of prayer on top and you've got the solution to all this. I'm in West Palm Beach now, where there are no homeless, just a bunch of people living in tents across the water from Mar-a-lago who have been docile enough to avoid the police here, keeping all the the snow birds safe.
> But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order. - Gustavo Gutiérrez
All ends of the spectrum...condos and trailer parks. The community wants a quiet environment.
It's enabled by the fact that federal discrimination law explicitly allows "one-sided" discrimination by age. Not for any other classes (race, sex, etc)