How hard would it be to convert that building to residential, and sell each floor as an unfinished apartment or two?
(With ground floor for retail businesses that are generally appealing to residents of the building, such as a cafe.)
(With ground floor for retail businesses that are generally appealing to residents of the building, such as a cafe.)
I get into this debate every time this comes up, but this was my (illegal) first apartment in New York. It was great. It’s prudish tendencies like outlawing apartments with no windows that force folks like me, who would put black-out curtains anyway, to compete for housing with families who do need natural light. All while an office building lies vacant.
Laws around habitability have nothing to do with price. If you want to make the race to the bottom worse, remove habitability requirements and observe actual dystopia.
but unironically; it'd be much safer than the street
I imagine there are plenty of people out there that aren’t aware that windows are for safety and might find out in the worst way possible.
Limits I know are 1/8 of the flat surface you can march on must be openable windows, 1 complete air change per hour (you have a 50m³ room, you must change at least 50m³ of air per hour. There are some tolerance for historic buildings down to 1/12 of the flat surface, below that the accommodation can't be used to live in.
While for offices there is only an natural illumination requirement, and a ventilation NOT necessarily bound to openable windows. I do not know for the rest of the EU.
They are not used for egress in skyscrapers—no ladder goes that high. And commercial buildings have fantastic internal ventilation. (Skyscraper apartment windows often can’t be opened for ventilation anyway, and are not trivially shattered.)
Or maybe I’m wrong! Maybe the reason that we haven’t seen a rash of converted office buildings is that property owners are holding out hope for return to office, and desperately avoiding writing down their properties. That’s pretty plausible too.
I go on the Internet and it's people saying stuff like "Everyone worries about rent these days" and I really don't.
I once spent the night in a windowless hotel room in Xi’an. It freaked me out so I moved hotels the next day.
Anyways, American moral standards prevent us from just giving people window less rooms to live in, it has to be $100k/tiny home that will last only a few years, or something else crazy like that.
On the other hand, it forces people to become better, and most of them do. Social services help and hurt the problem: on the one hand, you won't die quickly if you become addicted to fentanyl, but on the other hand, the lack of immediate harsh consequences can make dipping into drugs appear less risky. On the other hand, in China, where bottoms are non-existent, and social services are very moralistic, if there are any at all, you know doing drugs is pretty much a death sentence. Even becoming a member of the ant tribe won't save you.
I think it's less about the pragmatics of the things you list, and more about the permits.
I could walk into a lot of commercial spaces, including my office and turn it into a code compliant dwelling myself with stuff from Home Depot I can fit in my truck.
I can't get it approved, permitted , by the city of SF, even if I did it by the books.
There are literally people who show up to the permit office with wheelbarrows.
If you want to fix housing in SF, fix the permit office.
I only know that because it tanked a developer from doing the conversion on a downtown SF property last year, and that made hacker News.