The high cost of zoning restrictions and parking requirements making it difficult to convert Office Space into Living Space (Condos)
> 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...
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.
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.
No. We have pretty low rates of this because the risk/reward ratio sucks for both sides.
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.
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.