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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

People are always fretting over the low availability and high cost of housing, yet here's a building with 2200 rooms and all the infrastructure needed to service them. It's all so tiresome.

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Hotel rooms are not apartments. The lack of kitchen facilities in particular makes them incompatible with long stays, and you can't just retrofit ranges and ventilation and sinks etc into already small rooms.

Every discussion like this people people assume the challenges of converting old buildings are insurmountable and throw up their hands. Nobody living in a tent or car has ever said 'of course I'd like a warm room with a bed but not at the price of altering the building code or compromising on anything.'

Will you pay for the conversion ? Who would ?

I would like for some of my taxes to be used on such conversions. I already help out some homeless neighbors but my personal capacity is limited. I much prefer my taxes go to this end than buying more paramilitary equipment for cops or vanity development projects.

If the rooms are too small, that's one thing, but there's already plumbing for water, and adding a microwave and induction hotplate isn't too difficult. Sure, it wouldn't be as nice as a full kitchen, but it's serviceable living space. I'd rather that than a tent on the street which would have an even worse kitchen setup, although it might have more space.

> lack of kitchen facilities in particular

Do you need a kitchen in central NY? Those that can afford the location can also afford to eat out?

It’s more a matter of code. In most (all?) of the country, to be classified as housing you have to have a kitchen.

One (relatively) easy solution is to have one big community kitchen per floor. That’s how my dorm in college worked and it was fantastic. I’d love to go back to that approach. Having a dedicated kitchen area taking up square footage 24/7 that you only use a few hours a week is pretty silly, even more so if you do prefer eating out.

The type of people who need to get off the street are probably not always the best candidates for maintaining a shared kitchen space ?

Granted that for some it might have benefits, probably much better to let people go at their own pace.

Let’s not perpetuate the myth that being homeless implies a person is unable to engage in basic human activity. Sincerely, a formerly homeless individual who can maintain a pan just fine, thank you.

If anything, experience living with only the bare minimum cookware taught me to maintain it better. There’s no such thing as “I’ll deal with that later”, when that is all you have.

Let's not pretend people with mental health issue want to spend time in communal areas to get access to food.

Just because a person does not have a house does not mean they have mental health issues. And even if a person does have mental health issues, it does not mean they cannot live normal lives. The sooner people realize that the better.

You can have something resembling a supermarket or food court as opposed to some Dickensian soup kitchen. People with mental health issues sometimes need autonomy and personal space, but also sometimes need to be sociable or have access to community.

Likely true, but the maintenance can also be done by employees or motivated volunteers. ISTM that providing services is what a hotel does well and what supportive housing for people who end up homeless often needs to do as well. It doesn't need to be luxurious or wasteful, but it seems sensible to take advantage of infrastructure and economies of scale that are already known to work.

Absent of building code, it’s pretty disparaging to dismiss kitchen facilities in a permanent dwelling because someone might be able to afford eating out everyday in perpetuity.

Actually my comment was based on a sample of one couple I knew living in Greenwich. I recall they said something like "we never cooked at home during the years we were there". I wasn't sure if they were representative of inner city NY living - that's why I asked (my question was genuine and not intended to be dismissive - please read guidelines). They both came from cook at home families outside the US so their choice wasn't cultural AFAIK.

Well, this is what Vornado plans to do to the neighborhood:

https://books.vno.com/books/kpoe/#p=1

It doesn't look like a neoclassical SRO is going to fit in there.

Lots or spaces could be converted to housing but there are other plans in mind; plans that make thick profits will always win over helping people people.

Lobbyists ?

I mean they’re going to replace it with a much larger building. What are you complaining about exactly?

Few of the "much larger building"s going up recently in NYC are high-density, affordable living space.

Few new cars are highly affordable.

We need a continuous supply of new housing, or rebuilding, and in particular NYC should always be building up up up.

There are three ways to deal with shortages: waiting lists, market pricing out the lowest incomes, and building enough new housing to let everyone who wants to live there live their. Only the last option, build build build, is the least bit fair. Every other option is exclusionary and destructive to community.

Why do we need affordable living space in NYC? You know what’s got affordable housing: Iowa.

Randian fantasies aside, cities rely on quite a bit of low-paid labor. Those folks tend to have to live somewhere.

You've really internalized the 'I've got mine, FU' trope over time.

Not at all. I just have no sympathy for the likes of NYC. Turning old hotels into below-market housing so that a service class of workers can serve Wall Street seems dystopian to me. Seems like Qatar, not America.

Literally no part of the building being discussed has ever contained housing for NYC residents.

The post upthread proposed changing that, yes?

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