Can turning office towers into apartments save downtowns? | Hacker News Reader

Can turning office towers into apartments save downtowns?

newyorker.com

366 pointspseudolus716 comments

It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic.

From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*.

There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions.

These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.

> a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc.

That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely:

Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services?

> every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments

Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).

It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem

> the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem

Did it? Not in NYC. Crime is very low; it's arguably one of the safest places to be in the country.

The problem is the differences...

IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities.

I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments.

Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice".

The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.

True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was more or less static downtown through all of that. Though, nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more) remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year history or so of that city, one could say office space was largely unused.

Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".

"older" and "newer" is the construction type.

Think of an old brick building with several stories and a window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with windows spanning multiple floors.

The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge cost.

The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building not purposed for this is challenging (where does the "contaminated" air go out?).

It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.

> who wants to work somewhere with no services

Nobody wants to work there, yet lots of people work there since they need money. And it's the employer who chooses the location. Of course top talent does not need to work in a crappy company, but that's the theory. Also empty space = less trafic. And you can get food delivered. If you can afford it.

People are foreced to work in crappy open plan offices all the time.

Not easier, maybe slightly more economical. One could easily turn the less-desirable inner spaces into common areas or something else economically-sustainable, like public storage, co-working spaces, etc.

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say as a European how crazy it is to keep finding out the US is so large that even some third-tier city I ± never heard of is big enough to have a downtown full of outright skyscrapers[0]! It reminds me of reading about some minor Indian city and then looking it up in Wikipedia and seeing it has a population in the millions.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Ka...

A city doesn't need to be big to have skyscrapers. It's just a policy choice, like how wide roads are or public transportation. Many Americans are surprised that small European towns are big enough to justify a train station.

Small American towns used to have train stations, even in the middle of nowhere. They enabled factories and other industrial work. Then the trains would go away, and the factories would die, or it would happen the other way around. Then teenagers would go out to abandoned tressels to have bonfires and drink near the scenic decay every weekend, until the cops showed up to scatter them running into the woods.

Thinking of "too small for a station", whenever I passed through Dovey Junction I was only able to see one building, on the other side of a river, and it appears that there is literally no road or path to that building.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wx98GRYpPaRbrcRg6?g_st=ic

Well Europe and the EU both have larger populations than the US and quite a bit higher population densities (even though the continent of Europe is slightly larger) so wouldn't you expect Europe to have more skyscrapers than the US?

A fairly common US city plan seems to be: small ultra-high-density core with a bunch of skyscrapers, fading almost immediately to rather low-density, and then shortly afterwards to virtually no-density. European cities tend to be generally higher-density (no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris), but with fewer skyscrapers.

Europe just seems to go for much more mid-rise high-density neighborhoods compared to the US with skyscrapers in the city center and then sprawling suburbs that are so low-density you can barely get out of them without a car.

East of the Mississippi river has similar population densities to Europe (still less, but not by much). However US population density is skewed downward by the large amount nearly uninhabited land in "the west" and Alaska.

A lot of it is about zoning laws. The downtown Helsinki area has 0 skyscrapers, and the closest ones are the Redi buildings about 5km away.

Wait until you see China. There are multiple cities bigger than NYC or London that most people have never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...

Many of those cities are compromised of enormously large areas though. Chongqing is larger than the country of Austria and has a population density of 390 people per square km. London has a population density of 15000 people per square km.

There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.

Europe seems to do a better job at constructing buildings that can be used in various use cases, though. So when the office use case goes away, making the building into apartments is fairly simple.

This is unlike the office towers mentioned in the article, which don’t really lend themselves naturally to being apartments.

The history of Kansas City is very interesting - it was well poised to be the size of Chicago until rail travel became less popular. So during the 20's & 30's it was a major landmark for Art Deco architecture.

All things considered, I wouldn't be surprised if a non-zero number of people have only heard of Kansas City because of Taylor Swift.

Wouldn't be that Nashville? IDK that much about Taylor Swift, but that's the only city that comes in mind.

Similarly it was strange to me when visiting Athens that there were essentially no skyscrapers!

European cities didn't have skyscrapers until recently because of "muh monuments muh medieval skyline".

It's changing though I'm seeing 40 story (luxury) apartment complexes go up all over Dutch cities.

Yeah, the US is big. Movies and TV shows usually only show like 2 or 3 cities which makes everything seem like it's close together. For instance I live on the east coast, and I've never been to LA California, which might seem weird but it's over 2500 miles away. Different regions have basically different sub-cultures that emerge because we're so spread out.

I was under the impression that Kansas City was still in a bit of a dire situation as far as crime is concerned[1], so I appreciate you highlighting some positive developments.

In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular traffic.

[1]https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous...

I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run. People generally devalue thing that are free in my experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it must be for poor people, not me).

Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it.

Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes.

I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad.

I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.

Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a small one. It will be interesting to continue following their experiment.

The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new developments (a good thing). This was the first public transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent sized event it became the smartest way to park and not overpay.

They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.

Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.

Effective commercialization of station space is indeed a positive development, but you don't really need to privatize railways to get that (even without going into the whole "privatizing in Japan is not the same as here", since large private companies and local authorities coordinate strongly in ways that we wouldn't consider acceptable in the West). Very dense European cities, like London and Paris, are getting more and more of that type of development too; and even in Tokyo, not all stations have a commercial development on top. It's mostly a function of density levels, which are sky-high in Japan.

One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West, where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and in their remuneration levels.

My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13 years I've been going.

Honestly the places that did it successfully didn’t try to make transit cheap, they didn’t subsidize cars. Requiring amenities like parking by law seems to be working at cross purposes to spending money on transit. For desirable real estate it seems the only way to make affordable housing it to take away expensive upgrades. I think we can agree that safety is not a luxury, but parking spots, private laundry, private kitchens, even private bathrooms, these are things that many people live without every day. I remember some of those times in my life fondly even. Making it illegal by force of law to live like that seems… counterproductive to me, if our stated goal is affordable housing.

Why not just ban the homeless then? They’re not hard to identify and remove.

> transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA

That’s the objective reality, in most of the USA.

The only way they’ll attract people that aren’t forced to use it, for financial reasons, is to remove the piss and puke from the floor, the stains of the same composition from the seats (although rock hard plastic is getting popular to compensate), and prevent, not remove, the guy with obvious drug and mental health issues, and now has his dick out, from boarding.

If you want something to be attractive for the general population, it has to, literally, be attractive, or at least not repulsive. Otherwise, the shorter commutes and clean interior that personal transport gives is the obvious choice, as it currently, measurably, is.

But, that can’t happen, because anything nice will be destroyed/vandalized, because anyone can board. The goal of not discriminating against anything or anyone is a choice that society has made (probably the correct one) that makes public transport literal shit.

I don’t miss the few times I used it, then noped back into my car.

I suspect charging a nominal but non zero fee e.g $2 on peak $1 off peak per trip probably ends up with the best of both worlds. Free ends up with some negative side effects

You're describing issues that all have a core of, "Snooty (upper) middle-class temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who won't let themselves have nice things because The Poors." Here is a short and simple plan for fixing the issue: get over yourselves.

I feel like this might be a double edged sword in the long run.

A lot of public transit where I live (Mumbai) is subsidized, which means its not profitable to run the way it is run.

That was a very popular decision at the time (help mobility of the poor), but it ends up with massive underdevelopment as the needs expand. There’s no money for private companies to invest in the infra and it waits on election cycles to push investment.

I feel that if it was actually profitable to build new trains / metros / etc it would have happened much quicker.

Yeah crime post-pandemic there is still a major problem, although typically concentrated in poor neighborhoods as opposed to downtown. When I first moved there, the inner city was considered really dangerous and I saw such rapid gentrification that you'd see people walking their dogs in the middle night without incident just within 8 months or so. So it just sorta.. moved.

I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.

Crime rates on that site appear to be from 2020.

I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite a while, many apartments were once factories or something else 100 years ago.

I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.

Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.

Yes I'm thinking of buildings probably 1980/90s onwards. We are tearing them down and rebuilding apartments in some cases I'm aware of. That seems like a real shame to be honest.

I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.

They've been doing it in the USA for quite a while as well. Most former factories are now "The Lofts at [name]"

Also, you pay property taxes on the actual floor sizes.

So even if you turn into apartments the areas close to windows the rest of the space is still taxed even if empty.

Thus, in areas like Manhattan it's virtually impossible to convert those buildings or you need to literally cut off the center of these buildings.

To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda pleasant place.

Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.

The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.

Redevelopment of derelict downtowns has been outsourced to massive real estate corporations who have created a successful formula that they can pretty much copycat over and over.

Kansas City's Power & Light district, which you mention, was built by the Cordish Companies, which cut and paste in Louisville and Baltimore, among others.

https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts

Certainly there are benefits of revitalizing urban spaces but the fact that it is entirely engineered, has little room for local entrepreneurs, and most financial benefits flow to a small cadre of real estate giants, is also somewhat concerning.

It feels hard to avoid. You need scale to make the project viable: a single small redevelopment in a run down area is unappealing, but if you do the whole block, that's a different story.

There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.

In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time.

Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space.

Tldr; idk, necessary evil?

It is a policy problem. There was an OddLots podcast on the topic of NYC CRE to Resi conversions a while ago.

One issue is theres longstanding zoning laws on conversions that limit what can be converted based on year of construction. The year doesn't automatically move forward annually so a new law has to be passed to adjust it otherwise it remains stuck at 1965 or something like that.

Can confirm, I worked in 909 Walnut, and witnessed downtown transform.

KC is an underrated city, and a surprising tech area. Getting Google Fiber first definitely helped. It is commonly called Silicon Prairie.

One problem with doing this - as seen in Manchester in the UK, is that the new residents will demand that their neighbouring bars and clubs be closed to cut down on noise and disturbance. It has the effect of gutting a city centre of it's culture and nightlife.

Same thing is happening in London's Soho. New 'luxury flats' blocks are being built and life gets sucked out of the place through gentrification, but I guess Soho Estates is happy. Another victim of this short-term developer greed is London's Denmark Street where Jimmy, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the rest of the world's rock and pop royalty used to hang out, record, and shop for gear. That area could have been turned into London's mini Nashville with recording studios and clubs, but instead we got the Outernet monstrosity. Most of the old shops are gone, the only ones surviving are maybe three guitar shops. There are a couple of new ones, Roland and Korg, but the staff are so incompetent that I don't see them lasting.

I'm hardly an expert on this, but it seems the exact same thing happened to all sorts of cities in the 2010s. Millennials wanted to live in cities.

It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but still worth pointing out.

Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.

There's a massive demographic increase in single person households. If you're single you have to meet people you can't just retreat into your suburbia castle with your family.

Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.

They also converted old factories into these wild thrift stores and concert spaces (West Bottoms).

I have seen something similar happen in Birmingham, AL while living there since 2015 to 2022.

I know people who live nearish the KC downtown area, and live in an old elementary school that was converted into an apartment complex. A bit weird architecturally, but they seem to like it.

> 750sqft

70m2 for anyone wondering

Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. The depth and shape of the building matters quite a bit. A lot of office buildings are very deep and would result in a lot of rooms/space without windows or access to natural light.

The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit.

But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

> Conventional wisdom is that only certain office buildings can be converted to housing.

If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.

I once toured a building that had been converted from an old warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned the space directly across the hallway. They were very large, and people had transformed them into offices, arcades, workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have been.

You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.

>If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.

Maybe, but you can't throw out the building codes. A warehouse, certainly, can be retrofit. But office towers? Almost certainly not.

Elevators are not sized for residential; electrical service not sized for residential loads (dishwasher/dryer/microwaves/ovens); HVAC not sized for residential heat loads (same as above); metering requirements means the existing electrical rooms are not large enough (they are never large enough); plumbing and sewer are not sized for residential.

It goes on and on. Even if you got the building for free, you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again. It's not entirely clear whether it is or is not.

It can be done if you make huge, expansive apartments, which has to be read as "really expensive". There aren't that many really rich people who can drop 5 figures per month for an apartment.

That sounds great! The thing I love most about living in a house is the prospect of “engineering space” - places to do carpentry, electronics, home maintenance etc.

Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.

> If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.

Conventional wisdom is that there won't be too many windows available to throw conventional wisdom out of :-)

The danger is that people will be tempted to use the unlivable space as living space, and then you get some massive fire that kills a bunch, and then reactionary laws that prohibit everything uselessly.

NYC has a few places like this, but typically it is living space above the ground floor, and you can rent "dont-ask-dont-tell" space in the basement. Most people use it for storage, but I've seen a few workshops in them.

I’ve seen similar, except the building had > 10 ft ceilings for some reason (it had been a factory). The owners built a ~ 9ft “building” that was missing a wall (and ceilings) inside the space. That was where the kitchen and bedrooms were. Light came in through the open wall in the kitchen, and from where the drop ceiling in the bedroom would have been. The rest of the factory floor was hobby / office / entertaining space.

It was spectacular.

I dunno if it's practical, but the idea of an urban "garage" for woodworking/storing your kayak sounds kinda awesome.

The shape isn't always right either. Pipe fixtures can be in the wrong spot. Structural pillars can't be removed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/cit...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...

Note that things such as arcades may need additional power demands that the area isn't sized for (fire risk). Workshops may need added ventilation and woodsheds would require additional power too. A theater type area could have issues with fire codes and occupancy.

Are you willing to share where that building is? It sounds like a dream to me.

>If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.

In St Louis, the largest building in the state, which is 1.4M square feet and 44 stories, recently sold for $3.5M. It sat empty for several years despite being offered basically for free. The new owners have not announced plans for it.

It's a pretty pure test of your claim. I guess we'll see what happens.

Old warehouses were built very differently compared to modern office buildings. Specifically, office buildings are made to the load requirements of office spaces, with their symbolic walls and furniture. You may have trouble putting even bathtub into an apartment converted from an office.

Damn, that sounds like an ideal place to live for me. I live in an apartment but also play music. I would love to be able to set up a drum kit (and maybe store an e-bike) and still be in my walkable area for cheap ish rent.

As someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on blackout curtains (and sticking electrical tape on every LED in the house), I'd be happy to buy an apartment where few of the rooms have natural light. I know bedrooms have to have windows so the fire department can pull you out of a burning building while you're asleep or whatever, but personally, I am not a fan of the noise and light most of the time.

I just think there is so much space that you can use in a residential setting without natural light. Your movie room. Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy it at a discount if it were offered to me.

It's less about natural light than ventilation. If whatever ventilation systems the building uses breaks down, interior rooms without opening windows are a liability.

Modern skyscrapers do not have openable windows, so the building ventilation system is totally relied on anyway.

Isn't ventilation most of the time built into offices and hence much better than what you can get in most residentual buildings?

This seems wrong... are people opening windows on the 60th floor? What about those buildings whose design precludes easy retrofitting to openable windows? I'm not being rhetorical, I'd like answers.

Office towers do not have windows that open, aside from some very old ones might have windows that open.

Commercial building windows in general do not open at all.

I rented a place specifically because one of the bedrooms has no windows. Easily one of the best quality of life improvements.

Great, until it's not. You have no escape in case of an emergency. The room probably wasn't technically a bedroom.

> I know bedrooms have to have windows so the fire department can pull you out of a burning building while you're asleep or whatever

When we were looking for a new house we toured one that had a bit of remodeling done. What was done was the back patio was enclosed to turn it into a room. The detail was that there was an existing bedroom that had a window onto the patio.

The solution, which I have to assume passed code, was simply to retain the bedroom window, even though it did not lead to the outdoors. So this house had an interior window.

I think in most places that bedrooms just need two means of egress plus possibly a specific ventilation requirement, which is most commonly met via a door plus a window, but could be met by two doors to two different legal means of egress (and an HRV/ERV if ventilation is required under locally adopted code).

> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

Yes, here's an article with great visualizations on how developers are coring out the center of repurposed office buildings in order to create columns of natural light (and how, in certain jurisdictions, this lost square footage can then be reclaimed via new construction stacked on top of the building): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...

Or even better just give every unit multiple huge bathrooms, dens, libraries, etc...

> But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings and skylights.

Impossible to pull off on a modern office building designed with pre-tensioned concrete floors. Cheaper to demolish the building and start again.

Thanks, didn’t know the floors were also structural supports. I thought they just hung from the central core.

Oh well.

I was thinking instead you could remove a long rectangle from the middle of each floor, so that the two remaining sides could have windows facing each other.

If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the middle block pushed out on each level.

In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so of the potential floorspace.

There's a good "odd lots" podcast about this[1]. There's another of their podcasts about how apartment zoning rules make it hard to make "family" apartments[2]. Basically you need two egress points, windows that can open, windows in kitches and bedrooms. All of these are directly in contradiction to modern office buildings with open floor plans, fixed windows, shared mechanical systems.

So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME

The feature you are describing is a light well. They work, but I am not sure how well in the configuration you are describing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell

That’s an interesting idea. If there’s enough room between floors already, I wonder if you could squeeze in some horizontal periscope skylights without removing floors. Just need to occasionally send someone out to scrub the exterior window like in that show Silo

Not all of the building needs to be direct residential; for example, I could definitely imagine some light retail, a computer lab, a tool library, an indoor track, a gym, et cetera.

In Tokyo you have buildings with levels of retail, restaurants, bars, karaoke, etc. I'm sure Seoul and probably other dense cities have this too. Korea Town in mid-town Manhattan also does this, but that's just one little block. I'm really surprised there's not more of this in Manhattan actually. I'm sure it exists more than I'm aware of, but it should be more prevalent in a city that dense.

The problem here is zoning laws, in most places in the US you can't build businesses right next to residential. We would have to change our zoning laws and do something similar to a 5 by 1 (bottom floor is retail, top floors are residential)

The same in Europe, zoning laws are a bitch and they're basically existing for bribes. Many local city counsellors get paid off to change the zoning laws and thus raise the price of the briber's property.

Right, these laws absolutely should change. I would hope that any municipality facing a problem like this, with lots of empty office space, would also recognize the fact that their zoning rules are a bad idea.

I used to live in 100+ year old warehouse building converted to residential. It has even less windows than a glass paned high rise. They used the interior space exactly like this. One floor had a gym. Some floors converted the space to storage units available to the residents. Other floors had other shared common space. All ideas as you probably took 5s to come up with. It's really not a hard problem to solve that any developer worth their salt would not be able to solve.

I saw a picture of one of those giant suburban developments in Texas... like thousands of cookie cutter homes over a huge area. But I'm sure you could provide the same amount of living space and better amenities in a focused apartment building. There should be schools and restaurants and shops etc spread out over every floor. Or maybe like a 90's shopping mall with a 30 story apartment building on top. It just makes sense to me.

You’d be surprised. Those homes are surprisingly cheap to throw up and you don’t have to do any additional support/maintenance.

And you’d mainly be missing the yards.

Most of these office buildings they’re talking about should just be knocked down and new purpose-built multi-use buildings built in their place.

How would any store or restaurant survive being on the third floor in the center of an apartment building?

Sharing a wall with a neighbor is something I happily to pay a premium to avoid. Hearing a neighbor beat her son or listening to top volume manufactured R&B beats at 2AM when I needed to be at work at 530AM are not fond memories. It was powerful motivation to take my career more seriously.

Why buy a nice suburban home and invest in your future when you could instead live in a windowless former office building with hundreds of other families?

This is conventional wisdom, but it always felt odd to me.

Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces. In the beginning, they were low cost because of some undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not possible?

Lofts evolved from old factory and warehouses. This was in an era before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting. You needed lots of windows to light factories and lots of vertical space for convection cooling to work. Factories were at the edge of town and that town grew into a city. Eventually, the edge was closer to the center than the suburbs. And a new generation wanted to be city dwellers.

Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some of the most in demand housing because of the large space and natural lighting.

Because industrial space needs room for very large machines, which means large volumes and good access to them.

Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of small volumes and poor access.

Old (like early 1900s old) industrial spaces are radically different structures than commercial office real estate from the 80s and 90s.

Because buildings that were already old 50 years ago were built before elevators and other massive height building techniques. Look at old factory pictures, usually about three or four stories max. That’s much more adaptable than a gigafactory or a World Trade Center.

the buildings built 100 years ago to be converted 50 years ago are very different from the buildings built 50 years ago to be converted today. Improved efficiency and optimization for purpose in building design plays some role in that.

I feel like this is not that terribly different than row homes in the city. They only have windows in the front and back and the back might just be a view of the building backing up on them from the other street. These houses already have a long skinny footprint and it works fine. It doesn't seem that hard to do the same with office buildings. Additionally, amenities like a gym, laundry, community room can all be placed in the center of each floor as desired.

But a row house has a front and back door. In an office building, the entry would be in the middle. You could divide each floor up into four apartments - two long apartments stretching the width of the building, say on the East and West ends. Then two smaller apartments with windows on only one side on the North and South ends of the building.

It would result in fewer units, but you could introduce "courtyards" that would act as corridors of light. It would depend on the depth of the building. You could potentially do it over two or more stories.

Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work. Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc

A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try. Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.

None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building. Those spaces are currently used for elevators and utilities.

Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.

Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction.

So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability.

Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.

London has several "co-living" [1] housing units at this point, that are basically upscale house-shares for people willing to pay extra to not have to deal with the hassle of house-shares.

Yout get a self-contained flat, but kitchens etc. will be tiny, and then on top there are shared spaces like co-working facilities, lounges, cinemas, gyms, and staff arranging social events etc.

I'd imagine former office buildings could work well for many of the amenities for projects like that.

[1] https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/lifestyle/coliving_london/1...

There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking.

The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.

Japan just used fiber optics to run sunlight to inside apartments for natural light in skylights. Obviously the apartments are cheaper typically, and as long as people get exposure to light like this they are generally ok.

I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. I don’t think the problem is whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in place to encourage it.

I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue.

It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to solve these problems end up being against the building codes. Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how clever your technical solution is.

Windows are not just an aesthetic thing.

In the US windows are also a required means of egress from a bedroom in case of fire. Technically the requirement is two means of egress of any type, but in effect this means the door and the window, where someone can be rescued by a fire truck, escape onto a different path, etc.

You can also install solar tubes to do something similar.

If you read the article carefully, you'll see clues to why this developer can make it work in spite of conventional wisdom:

1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates.

2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.

Doesn’t even have to be novel, especially if they can combine floors to make taller spaces in the inner column.

Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on. Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you’d find in a mixed use city with cheap real estate.

Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to simulate outdoors.

> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each.

One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture, some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even with doors.

Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows.

And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves. Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have windows.

The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use as a buffer for something which becomes unused and inconvenient.

Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for non-living purposes.

Isn't that the norm already in US? I am from Europe and I have 3 living space rooms with windows taking two outer walls and inside there is bathroom and storage area with no windows?

Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?

Fire codes and building codes are an impediment to modifying distance from openable windows, for bedrooms.

Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written the way it was for a reason.

> means changing the national fire code

Skyscraper windows aren’t usable for egress. This is a solved problem.

I can absolutely see the safety argument for distance from a window. Fair! But I will say, as someone who made his windowless basement his bedroom even though I had other options in my home, I love a super dark space to sleep.

If SRO units weren't illegal, they could be simpler conversions, since full plumbing would only be needed in one central place per floor.

See https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encam...

Most offices already have break rooms. Sinks and dishwashers are fairly common in them. Make them a common area with a shared stove... Odds are the residents will pitch in and buy some cookware and set a policy of clean up after yourself.

I don't think the shape of office buildings is a problem, you can just have stores and storage on the inside and apartments on the outside.

The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to have plumbing ubiquitously.

> Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing.

I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall.

I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.

What about common spaces? Put the dwellings on the outer edges, and use the middle of each floor around the elevators as: gyms, libraries, swimming pools, saunas, indoor sports/games (pickleball? table tennis? air hockey? retro arcade machines?), meeting rooms and small-event spaces for residents? maybe a food court with 3rd party vendors? All kinds of creative things can be done!

If the build ing is too wide, could we still do a mix use ? With residential on one side, and office on the other side / interior of the building ?

R R R R R R R

R R O O O O O

R R R R R R R

The best thing is actually to carve out the Os in your example, thus you don't pay property taxes on that space.

C = communal space/corridors/elevators.

E = empty

R R R R R R R R

R C C C C C C R

R C E E E E C R

R C C C C C C R

R R R R R R R R

SROs could use regular buildings with centralized plumbing. Bedrooms can do without natural light. Zoning laws can be changed.

These problems rely on a particularly rigid definition of what housing is. If your house had a back room with no natural light, that would be be far from convenient. But would you accept it if it cost half as much? I bet you would.

There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?

Charlie Munger did it.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind...

I know there is an HN thread.

I think a big benefit would be reworking code to make a way to safely allow interior units. They wouldn't be nice without natural light but it's a way to make a lot of units available cheaply.

> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

Yes, the wealthy can have apartments with windows around the outer parameter and the poor can live in the center with no natural sunlight.

Separate the internal hallways, convert the outside to residential, keep the inside commercial but redevelop it to support mixed office buildings and retail. Give the bottom floor a mall entrance.

In cities where people are renting out living rooms, closets as sleeping areas I think windowless units would definitely be viable. Hong Kong has cage bunks, SF has adult dorm rooms.

Pickleball courts!!

What they would do with a space like this in nearly every place on earth except America is make it a marketplace.

Can the right LED panels make up for the lack of daylight in the interior areas?

Just a reminder that lofts used to once be the least desirable places to live. It wasn't until people figured out how to live in them that they became cool and desirable.

Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a building for natural light and your office and workshops in the unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these buildings excel at providing.

Water and sewage drainage is also a big deal. Almost impossible to retrofit for 150 bathrooms, around the buildings, when you originally had 20, around the elevator columns.

Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in NYC for 40 years.

We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really important consideration, in almost any human venture.

I don't buy it. Pipes are IMPOSSIBLE to increase the size? Or at some point you hit some city service with no motivation to actually provide service/infrastructure and fix the problem at that end?

I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff.

Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster.

Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space.

And, you know, incentivize minimal use of water.

Much of the OP addresses that question.

Storage, laundry facilities, gyms, office-spaces (gasp!). Less-than-optimally used is still better that completely unused.

It would be pretty fantastic to have some office space still, since now it will be possible to live right next door. Or same door even!

Charlie Munger was an advocate of residential buildings that have virtual windows (letting in "artificially created sunlight") instead of actual windows. Before his death he proposed such a residential building for UCSB:

https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa

https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive...

Needless to say, conventionally minded experts of all stripes vociferously objected to it, including architects:

https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munge...

...But I wonder if maybe cities should conduct small-scale tests of Munger's ideas to find out if they help put all that abandoned office space to good use.

I don’t get the point. From what I can see, dorms construction often costs around $70,000. Munger was advocating that we get rid of windows and put students in exceptionally tiny rooms, and the cost will be about $267,000 per student? How is this an advantage?

Charlie Munger was a weird freak who fancied himself an architect. The only thing that qualified him to design a ridiculous building for UCSB was donating an insane amount of money to UCSB.

A few months ago Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this:

> 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...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk

I've seen a conversion done a few years ago, say, 2019, right next to where I live, just south of Prospect Park. A blocky office building has been converted to a residential building, and then has been rented out very quickly. It's not a tower though, a relatively easy conversion. Large windows must be attractive for some though, especially those facing the park.

Admittedly, it's Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and the adjacent blocks are residential.

I've only seen one successful project that was able to convert a business office to residential apartments/condos. If I remember correctly, the building had been vacant for a while (it was built in 1986) and the company who bought it got a really good deal and so the conversion was able to happen without having a massive amount to overcome in order to be profitable. The building just had the perfect layout and structure that made it suitable for a conversion. Ironically, the developer filed bankruptcy during the 2008 housing collapse and several other conversions he was aiming to do also went under.

Here's some information about the project: Cloud 9 Sky Flats: https://www.homes.com/building/cloud-9-at-sky-flats-minneton...

A recent article about one of the condos going up for sale: https://www.startribune.com/corporate-office-turned-condo-in...

I may be overlooking a downside but it always seemed obvious to me office and apartment buildings should be intermixed. Separating living, shopping and office into different zones always felt strikingly absurd. I am happy to live in a place where it's not the case so my office building is less than 15 minutes walking from my home, as well as a supermarket, a swimming pool, a forest, a university and everything else one can imagine wanting in their life.

Here in Oslo, the mixed-use Vertikalen[1][2] recently officially opened. Ground floor is a cafeteria and a restaurant, followed by a several floors of offices, and the rest above is all residential apartments.

While the looks can be argued, the mixed-use seems like an interesting idea. Not aware of too many other such buildings here, so will be interesting to see how it fares.

[1]: https://www.archdaily.com/1016072/vertikal-nydalen-snohetta

[2]: https://vertikalnydalen.no/

American cities have developments like this now (Baltimore and Philly for example), but it requires acquiring gentrifiable land/buildings, the capital to renovate them, and demand to pull in the middle-class hipsters to live there.

You’re right. What I’ve heard is that this is basically another area with misaligned incentives: for any given project offices are cheaper to build, have fewer permitting concerns, and cheaper to manage (a few big commercial clients versus hundreds of renters), and cities may prefer them if they’re tight on capacity for things like schools – but if everyone does that, your city is unappealing and excessively exposed to the business health of a few companies or industries.

I think the separation happens organically, and is driven by efficiency.

The environment needed for maximizing work is often at odds with the environment for maximizing leisure.

Separation does not happen organically. Rich people and governments are in charge of city planning and they make wrong decisions based on making profits.

In city where I live some rich dude contributed to our city governor’s campaign or something. Now governor has to “return the favor” by relocating thousands of government employees from downtown area which is close to a lot of people’s homes to outskirts of the city where nobody lives and where that rich dude owns office space for rent.

https://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/article281...

Wasting hours in traffic every day/week won’t give you any time for leisure.

It's doesn't happen organically. It is usually designed by city planners (or equivalent functions depending on the city). It makes most sense to have mixture of residential and commercial buildings in the same area so that there is no foot traffic vacuum depending on the time of the day. Foot traffic vacuum creates space for potential crimes. (e.g, if you separate commercial and residential, the commercial area will be more likely crime ridden at night and residential area will be more prone to crime during the day).

Well it hurts the efficiency of both when people have to spend 2+ hours of every work day commuting.

Unless you're in the business of selling gas or cars...

Or single family homes with a large yard and a white picket fence 1+ hour outside of the city...

"maximizing" seems to be the problem here.

Plumbing (Kitchens & Bathrooms)

The huge issue in conversions is the amount of plumbing needed (and associated cost).

It's not uncommon that an entire office floor might only have 1 restroom area & 1 mini-kitchen.

But that same floor, configured as apartments, might have 10+ apartments ... which means 10x the plumbing for bathrooms and kitchens that didn't exist before.

And having feeder plumbing that can support that 10x (or more) increase in water/waste volume.

My office is a former slab-on-grade warehouse that was converted into offices, laboratories, and manufacturing halls.

They installed eight multi-stall bathrooms where once there was a single room in the corner with one toilet through the revolutionary act of running PEX and digging a trench in the slab for sewage.

It is trivial to do the same in a high-rise. If anything it will be easier because instead of digging a trench you can punch holes in the floor and route plumbing and ventilation through the plenum (or whatever is up there).

Water supply and power isn't a problem because here's a secret: commercial spaces almost always use more power than residential, especially in the extremely esoteric and rare cases where workers have computers and copiers. Hell all of these buildings have phat 3-phase service. A dude watching Netflix and using his microwave in a space that once housed a dozen workers, half of which had space heaters under their desks because the HVAC was set to 70 in the summer will be a break for the transformer.

It’s not even just the obvious plumbing providing hot and cold water, and the drain pipes carrying away waste water. You also need vent stacks for all the drains. You also need to put in a whole lot of hot water heaters and the associated electrical work to handle their demands.

Frame additional walls within the room that include additional plumbing lines, branching from existing lines as needed. Granted, you lose space but at least you'll have a fully compliant residence, no?

It's not whether or not it's possible, it's the cost of doing it.

Can you run plumbing through the ceiling of the floor below? I'd think there's plenty of free space there but it would mean you have access to your neighbor's pipes.

That's how it's done now.

I once had a clogged drain in my apartment. When it was fixed, I was politely asked not to run the water until they could inspect the ceiling in the unit below. They wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to leak on my neighbor below.

General building/fire code but even be a larger issue. I suspect you could probably solve the plumbing side of things but meeting building code might be the larger challenge.

I've seen plenty of "apartments" (really just a room) in NYC on Tiktok that don't have proper restrooms (though they do often have a small sink)

I think they can use/invent something like dirty water towers in NYC. use that for whatever the NYC use it for. Water there really proven dirty so it doesn't matter.

The thesis isn't about "downtowns" across the country but a particular developer in NYC. Older buildings have more usable space because they aren't subject to the same standards as new buildings.

And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.

The target demographic doesn't care about windowlessness:

New York remains a place where many ambitious young people go to start their careers, if not to stay, and this demographic is ideal for the hotel-style conversions for which office towers are most suitable. Moreover, Berman said, “young people are social—they don’t want to sit in the middle of a forest on a Zoom call.”

Renters are now used to the layouts of chain hotels, where there’s one window by the bed, so Berman’s bathrooms and kitchens didn’t need to be sunny, and the kitchens could have a minimal footprint. “Our demographic doesn’t cook,” he said. He referred to the other rooms without windows as “home offices.”

Avinash Malhotra, an architect who has done several conversions with Berman, noted that a single office tower can be carved up into hundreds of little units, as in a hotel. “He is not making housing for the homeless,” Malhotra said. “But I often joke among my employees that what we do is slums for the rich.”

Yes and no. Lots of new residential can save downtowns. Just build new residential however. It's not that much more expensive. The existing office can continue to be used as commercial real estate, especially by the new residents.

Together, this will help create walkable, vibrant downtown with no need for a car to commute to work. The only thing preventing this is zoning, which currently bans most new residential.

Sure, but this is less possible if your downtown is already full of commercial real estate in towers already. Yes, you could argue further zoning changes on the remaining plots could be turned into towers, but it doesn't provide a guarantee the office space will get filled.

No downtown area in North America is full. Every city has vast swaths of underdeveloped land that can be turned into nice, new housing. Zoning should be changed so developers can make the call on what is profitable and not profitable, not NIMBY politicians or internet commentators.

As a side benefit, the new housing will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing.

Depends on what you mean by Full. Here is Los Angeles the downtown core is completely built. You'd need to tear down existing structures and purchase the land to do so.

There are a lot of cities that don't have much undeveloped land in their downtowns left. Add in things like work from home for your traditional office workers and you've got a lot more office space than you need so there's a push to find some use for these buildings before the bottom completely falls out of the office real estate market.

One of the great NIMBY myths is that there is a lack of developable land in urban areas. Without exception, every North American city has vast swaths of underdeveloped land where shorter, outdated buildings can be torn down and replaced with denser, more modern, energy efficient housing.

WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in person, and relatively few people have the luxury of an at-home office, especially those within urban areas. Perhaps you're happy with your employer pushing office costs onto you, but I prefer an employer that provides me with an office that I can walk/bike to instead.

There are vanishingly few cities in the US where a walkable/bikeable commute is even a real option even if you're willing to move deep into the downtown and move each time you get a new job. The costs of having my own office are far offset by not having to drive at all most days and I'm only ~15-20 minutes by car from my office.

I work in a large multi-site company so I'm either at home on zoom for meetings or in the office on zoom for meetings hearing 60 other people also have zoom meetings. There's vanishingly small benefits for coming to the office for me because the people I could conceivably benefit from in person collaboration with are hours away so no matter what my day lives on video calls and Teams chats.

> WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in person,

I'm increasingly convinced this is simply not true for most jobs and it's being pushed by a) middle management who like in office because they can wander by and check in on everyone easier or b) the real estate arms of companies trying to justify extremely expensive leases they can't get out of. Personally I think b is the ultimate reason because it looks bad to have this cost sitting around with no 'justification'.

Anecdotally our leadership was effusive with praise about how productive we were during the 2 years+ of complete work from home and yet no matter how much feedback they get that people aren't happy with RTO we've been slowly ratcheting up the number of days required in and increasing the level of tracking of adherence to this new policy no one but the C-Suite seem to want.

I think you're ignoring that fact that once you remove the commerce function of a city, a lot of the factors that create a vibrant culture go away.

If it's not a place where people make money / strive / want to make something of themselves, it's either a retirement community or a vacation town: just in sustaining mode.

I think BenFranklin100 is implying that new residential would be in addition to commerce / office.

The residential helps businesses stay open 7 days a week, instead of closing for the weekend when no one is at work.

Ah, I see.

What I'm missing: if business scales down, thus population and culture scale down (unless populated by people independent of these things). This means higher vacancies of existing residential, so how much new residential is needed?

I guess what I'm ultimately wondering: what's the "critical mass" of a city? At what point, does the commerce/social engine get small enough that it's no longer sustainable? We already saw many US cities were "weekday-only" cities, devoid of anything interesting, before the pandemic.

That is exactly what I am saying. Lots of new residential not only helps drive demand for the currently underutilized office space, the increased 24/7 foot traffic will drive demand for restaurants and other local businesses.

I was recently in Dublin, and tbh, you are right. There's so much space that could actually be used for large residential buildings, but no, instead people queue and compete for halls in the ground.

s/halls/holes

Absolutely 100%. There is no reason why office buildings cannot be rezoned and regulations loosened to allow for all office buildings to be changed into affordable housing.

The only problems are a lack of political will with regard to zoning and codes. A common retort is, "well some apartments won't get access to natural light" or "utilities are in one place".

In many countries where housing security is tight, there are people who live inside apartments without windows.

Secondly, share housing where kitchens and bathrooms were used communely (aka a dorm) used to exist for many working class poor. Again, if the choice is the street versus a share house the choice is obvious.

No one said affordable housing needs to provide natural light, private bathrooms, and kitchens. Until the political will exists to return to what used to be normal for America and in many respects the entire world homelessness will continue.

Sometimes a roof over ones head and a place to sleep is all the homeless want. Price it accordingly.

A big issue is what we're building rather than how much we're building or what we're converting.

There is way too much ultra-luxury buildings getting built in NYC. It's simply too profitable and there's little to no incentive to build (or convert) apartments normal people can afford.

Another problem for NYC in particular, a lot of the buildings that exist already would be illegal to build now. I get the desire to avoid streets being in constant shadow from surrounding buildings but large footprint buildings are simply a more efficient use of space once you factor in things like elevators, fire escapes and electrical/mechanical ducting.

The NYC government works at the behest of property developers so this is unlikely to change.

Why do you think the luxury buildings are a "big issue"? People who can move into those buildings will move into them. This frees up the lower priced apartments they previously (or otherwise would have) inhabited.

I wouldn't make the assumption that the people buying luxury units will be moving out of lower-priced units.

In Canada's major cities, for example, we see such luxury and non-luxury units being bought as stores-of-value by wealthy foreigners trying to avoid risk or capital controls, rather than as something to be actively lived in by them or anyone else. Supply is consumed, without any being relinquished.

Even when the owner might reside in such a unit, it ends up being more like a dedicated hotel room for them. They'll simultaneously own luxury residences in other cities and/or countries, and travel between them. Again, supply is consumed (in multiple markets), without any being relinquished.

The luxury market really isn't like the broader housing market.

Because many are used as vacation homes or just money laundering. With wealth inequality at historical world records, the rich can just buy both, and they do. Lol

They aren't living in them, and the way zoning and development rights work in NYC, it means that fewer high rises can be built for normal housing.

What about house flippers?

I lived in Manhattan for 10 years from late 90s into the late 2000s, live in NJ now. A major trend I have seen is NYC skewing more and more towards the rich/ultra rich and ignoring the rich and middle class. We recently visited NYC for the first time in a couple of years, and it seemed like everything was transformed into Gucci and YSL and Bulgari etc etc.

I don’t know how this is sustainable given that Manhattan is an island.

they just opened a Chanel in the Upper West Side

The reason why it's more profitable to do ultra-luxury is that regulations increase fixed costs, which make it less profitable to do projects that would have had lower expected returns, like affordable apartments.

This is an interesting argument. Can we quantify the harm done by regulation? Which regulations should be repealed first?

There was a big value drop during the pandemic which is still ongoing because of home office. Turning them into housing could indeed be a good option for people in big cities, but the real estate market cares about money and housing is not the best option for them.

The other option is empty offices

Im not sure about the laws in the US but here in Germany for example if you rent an apartment and pay your rent you can’t be kicked out.

The set of laws is different for office buildings and apartments.

Are you saying they can't evict the office tenants in order to convert the building? I'm sure any transition from office -> condos will be long, messy, and expensive. Still better than dead, empty cities though.

They'll manage to eventually enforce a massive RTO.

The most pro-office scenario I can imagine is this:

- There's a massive economic downturn resulting in job losses, power briefly shifts from the employees to the employers, and the incumbent office-heads indeed insists on RTO.

- But they would soon go out of business competing against new employers that are remote-only and have far lower overhead, killing RTO again.

EDIT

One other scenario that just came to mind is an extreme amount of new building and revitalization in cities. If they build enough units, and enough big, nice units, and spruce up the place a bit, living in a city will become cheaper and more practical.

If I can live in a huge nice condo with decent rent, no homeless people on the sidewalk, and close to the office, I wouldn't mind RTO so much.

As it is, city living only makes sense for those in their 20's or those who are truly dedicated to the city lifestyle.

Let's not "save" them, which is just an attempt to bail out the landlords who have been gouging the rents and manipulating building codes and laws, sabotaging rail, and doing everything in their power to keep rents artificially high.

Step 1: Let all the landlords go bankrupt. The buildings will be repossessed and owned by creditors, but still there.

Step 2: New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty lot.

Any other plan is an attempt to transfer wealth from the people to the landlord class to save their skin. Hard pass, let them use their 75 years of ill gotten rents.

“ New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty lot”

If no one truly buys them, you don’t get an empty lot. You get abandoned, dilapidated buildings and all the associated social/environmental problems that comes with that.

Or the city could just invoke eminent domain, buy it at a very low price if the owner can’t demonstrate it having a high market price, restore the building and democratically choose an equitable process to rent it or sell it, hopefully favoring existing citizens.

But of course, we’d have to be a lot more aggressive about invoking eminent domain for this to be effective. To that end, it would make sense to also establish policies ensuring it’s easy to invoke it fairly and transparently - ie, easily allowing other parties to bid against the city for higher prices in cases where eminent domain is to be used this way (stipulating that those parties also take measures to restore the building, etc).

Your city will rather go bankrupt. Just take Detroit as a guide.

That sounds like privatizing the losses and socializing the profits and we just can’t have that here in the good ol’ US of A /s

That's working great for St. Louis! Empty husks of building that have sat empty and unmaintained for years being bought for cents on the dollar is definitely a sign of a healthy city

St. Louis has paved 27% of its downtown core, maybe we stop designing our cities for cars and design them for people, if we want them to not be empty.

https://parkingreform.org/parking-lot-map/

First off, St. Louis isn't empty because of muh car centric infrastructure, it's empty because of deindustrialization. Secondly, parking lots are in fact a better use of space than empty, dilapidated office buildings.

The world could definitely use more places like City Museum, which would never have happened otherwise.

I think there's a lot more pent-up demand to live in New York than (even pre-decay) St. Louis.

What you are advocating for is the system that has gotten us to the point where nobody can afford housing.

You let rich interests create a situation where they make more and more money for doing nothing. In this case, sitting on downtown real estate. They use the money to manipulate the system to tilt the economy more and more in their favor. They kill off attempts to introduce rail. They fight against increasing capacity for housing or office space, because when demand goes up and supply stays the same they get higher rent for doing literally nothing but continue to own the same properties. They bribe politicians to force you back into the office downtown for no reason.

This is literally called rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Landlords have been doing this for thousands of years to the point it is a fundamental economic principle.

Then, when they get in trouble, and they might lose some money, you have to bail them out or they will ruin your cities. They are going to ruin the cities either way. If you bail them out they will take the money and then do none of the things they were supposed to do in exchange. They are only going to do whatever puts the most money in their pocket, and they play a long game.

Here is a counter proposal:

- Tax any vacant building at a rate high enough that any owner will be forced to put the building into use or sell it to someone who will. This applies both to buildings that are 'abandoned' as well as just sitting empty due to lack of tenants.

- Tie property tax rates directly to the rate of supply. Whenever an action is taken that artificially increases property values, increase the rates to offset that increase. If the planning commission kills a new apartment building that would increase the number of beds in part of the city by 1%, increase tax rates by 1% (1% of the current rate). This will penalize existing landlords (and homeowners) for rent-seeking and NIMBY. This can be done at the state level and the funds can be earmarked for low income housing and job programs, or parks.

- Offer tax incentives for things that lower property values but increase quality of life. These would include housing programs, railroads and stations, high density housing, etc. This would help balance out the rent seeking behavior of landlords and de-align their group interests. For example, if I own a large apartment complex and there is a proposal to build another large complex next door to mine, I am opposed to it. More housing will lower my rents. However, if I get a permanent tax cut when the new complex is built, it will not take much of a difference in tax rate for my profits to increase (since the lowering of marginal rents will very small from one building and spread over a wide area, whereas the tax benefit is concentrated in the area where I benefit). Landlords would then be forced to use their influence to try to steer new development to be near their own properties, rather than using their combined influence to kill all development.

I am a landlord and I honestly don’t understand how this knowledge isn’t better known. It’s free money, if you’re not taking it I am.

What an utterly hostile and naive view. We need rental buildings and thus we need landlords. There are many many scenarios where one may want to rent instead of buy. You need a place only for a few years, you need a place while you explore to decide where to buy, you don't have the money to buy yet, etc.

If your next suggestion is that all landlords be government run or run as a coop, no freaking thanks to the first and while coops are great I don't think only coops is a good solution. If you want only wealthy homeowners and the rest of the population living in communism style housing, very hard disagree.

You also don't know anything about co-ops. Frankly I think you are completely uneducated on any of this stuff.

Go look up GHI in Greenbelt, Maryland. It's one of the oldest and largest co-ops in the USA. Housing in GHI is a fraction of the cost of the surrounding neighborhood, and the cause is that you cannot rent out GHI units. Only owners can live in their own units, which means speculators and landlords are simply banned from bidding up the costs. As a result, the cost to buy a unit there is a fraction of what it is right next door, maintenance on the units is better, crime is lower, services are better. It's a 100% walk able community that is run democratically. It's really a model for how housing could be built all across the country, but I guess you are the expert, we should keep doing what we do now and just let a couple billionaires complete a monopoly on having a roof, and hope that they only ask for 100% of our income and not more.

No, I'm fine with landlords until they capture regulators and legislators and turn economic competition into stagnation for profit.

I'm not so sure New York City is a valid comparison with other cities (in the US) wrt "downtown" living. NYC has a long, solid history of this kind of living that most other cities just don't have. For example, transportation: NYC is perhaps the only city in the US where you can live a completely full life without a car. Most other cities have developed around cars as the primary transportation method, so if you want to live any sort of normal life, you're probably gonna need a car. If you live on the Upper West side in Manhattan and want to see a friend in Hicksville, Long Island, it's a simple subway/train ride. However, if you live in downtown St. Louis, and you wanna see a friend in Oakville, South County, you're not getting there without a car. And I think most cities in the US are like this - maybe exceptions are San Francisco and Chicago? Maybe?

That isn't quite true, but close. Most cities before about 1950 developed just like NYC. However NYC had subways that were not torn out unlike most cities with streetcars that got ripped out. That difference meant that NYC stayed dense in the core, while other cities were forced to become less dense in the core because the residential options didn't work.

Sadly, it's probably cheaper or a similar cost to tear down the office buildings and just build new residential housing.

It's more than just a density problem. People need to be locally consistent.

They need a place that caters to their culture(including the town or city itself - micro culture) - they need a place to hang out with people of like mind, they need hobbies and places to go, they need restaurants, events, parks, quiet places, loud and busy places, areas to connect with nature, areas to focus on business or meet fellow enthusiasts. It's not a numbers game .... it's human emotions and reality.

we need hospitals and daycares and public pools, arcades, shops, zoos, heritage sites, pop ups, concerts, etc ...

it's more than just walls + plumbing and electrical codes.....

New growth cities have a supreme advantage here, because they can redistribute prior growth strategies into their current growth models. The faster these newer cities are currently growing the less they will be disrupted by loyalty to prior growth patterns. Older cities are doomed to empty at their cores unless they have something unique and specific that is cause for perseverance. There is no illusion to any of this. Wishful thinking and nostalgia won't fix it.

Its just economics. The answers to over coming economic disruption are always the same: be where you are not expected or do that which others cannot.

Nope, absurd property-speculation driven tax burdens and chaotic zoning inevitably drive out both residential dwellings and business competition.

Cities were traditionally a side-effect of communication hubs, trade collocated with rail/shipping locales, and centralized labor-driven stable factory lines. Communication is now decentralized due to technology changes since the early 90's, trade is now settled with online brokerages/logistics, and factories were either outsourced or moved into more favorable tax districts to maintain competitive posture.

Most modern cities are now running unsustainable theme-park service economies. Note municipal districts are never stripped of jurisdictional tax boundaries, and this still holds true even for areas in economic decline due to mismanagement/arrogance.

Have a wonderfully awesome day, and I thank god it is not my task to try and fix these issues =)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Archived: https://archive.is/Rg8g2

Save from what exactly? This is phrased as if the current state of affairs where nearly all real estate is owned by investors whose only goal is to milk it for maximum value at the expense of the working class and common people. What exactly do we need to save these down towns again?

I don't see how downtowns without offices would thrive. The main attraction of downtowns where people live are that they don't need cars because work and social lives are within walking distance.

The idea quickly falls apart once you need a car to get to either social events or to work.

Remember the reason that offices are empty is because people are working from home. So there is no "commute to work." Social and shopping needs would still be met inside the city.

The main attraction of living downtown is there's lots of life with the people around: plentiful meetups for whatever you like, more neighbors for friends, more people to socialize. There's a large, living, breathing, constantly-changing ecosystem that's self-rearranging of bars for all tastes (including non-alcoholic); chain stores and indie ones; parks for to frolic; restaurants and food trucks of all shapes and flavors; entertainment venues; parades to savor; sports games, stand-up, concerts and shows; city festivals, conventions, expos; all that and more within walkable distance.

If your work is nearby, that's just chef's kiss, then.

You're overthinking it. The equilibrium is that there would be fewer offices, not no offices.

Work that isn't in an office?

It's funny, I've been writing for years that the CRE market is terminally doomed and we might as well turn the skyscrapers into affordable public housing. Refreshing to see this reality leaking into the public consciousness.

I too have been waiting for the inner city CRE market to crash for a long time now, but conversions of skyscrapers are generally impractical for all the reasons listed in this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292219

So we might have to wait until it makes economic sense to demolish and rebuild before life returns to the cities

A simple note: why people should want to live there? If there is no more work in cities except for city services, witch happen to be more and more bound to some bigger/external entities, so no real margins to evolve for any local company, why be there?

Yes, there are many desperate enough to flock anywhere if they see a possible accommodation, but how can they survive locally?

After the '80s logistic revolution and then TLC/IT progress finally making offices useless in cities there is no viable economy anymore. The new right density for the economy of scale are single-family homes and small buildings spread enough to have room to change but not too far, intermixed with homes enough to avoid the US suburbs error. We can't have a new deal in dense cities.

P.v. works best for self-consumption only and we heading toward cheap enough batteries to make almost-autonomous homes the norm in a large slice of the inhabited world (30kWh capacity per home at minimum), we can collect and store and clorate enough water to make semi-autonomous homes and various shops. It start to be cheaper than creating large aqueducts. We start to being able to treat sewers enough to been able to have local treatment instead of a sewerage network, we are not there, but near enough. The world change and we have to change accordingly meaning we can't keep up the immense infra we have made for cities while people move around to escape too frequently flooded areas, too hot areas and so on. We need infra for industries, and many industries need a certain size to be viable, but the trend it's clear we need to produce modern way to live less and less dependent on complex services existing on ground networks. We still need roads, personal air mobility and last-mile air mobility is still far despite certain claims https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but we know where we should go. Smart cities can't work like the old Fordlandia can't. Classic cities already not work anymore, so we do not have other options so far and we need to evolve anyway.

Because cities are awesome: density gives you choice.

In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly have several options for what school to send them to, many probably within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have one, unless they want an hour-long bus ride.

Same goes for restaurants, and social activities -- and people! (i.e., potential friends)

Cities are drastically more efficient. PV does -not- work best for personal consumption, that's actually the hardest way to go because you're not sharing available resources. Same goes for almost everything else you listed.

What's not awesome are cities defined by gridlock and huge highways, something that is itself addressed by increasing the amount of residential space relative to office space.

> In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly have several options for what school to send them to, many probably within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have one, unless they want an hour-long bus ride.

I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I live in about as suburban of a town as you could imagine and there are 2 public elementary schools, a charter school, and a private Christian school within about a 15 minute walk. Within a 5-10 minute drive there are probably 5 more high quality charter schools, a few more private schools and who knows how many more public schools.

Well, choice to consume, but nothing more. I was living in a big dense EU city, after others big&dense, now I'm living in the French Alps, at a short-range from the see, but high enough to have good climate, nature, still having services not like in a big city, but still enough, including good enough FTTH, roads, grocery with drive services and so on. Before?

Well, before I can choose restaurants from all over the world, some fitness centers, some events, always and only services to consume and no real personal activity. Traffic congestion, lack of space and so on complete the game. no, thanks.

In social terms my social life here with FAR LESS people around is IMPROVED because being less we are more social, we meet much more with different people instead of being in bubble if friends, very isolated from all others humans around. Surely mean cultural level is far lower, but due to the general cultural degradation these days to find interesting people for interesting dialogues internet is the sole means, we are too rarefied to meet IRL casually.

Schools? Here every school have large green space and plenty of outdoor activities, yes not at walking distance but who care? Primary schools are normally in 30km radius on good roads, high schools are more rare, but not that far away and if young start to going out of home to study is a good thing for them. Universities became a bit more costly since you must be around them but again it's not that special.

Cities IMO are SOLD to be efficient, and they are definitively not. Starting from the office model where you have a place to live, almost unused during the day, and a place to work almost only used during the day, and we build such mid/high rise buildings to use them only a bit less than half a day, wasting time for commuting, how efficient.... Oh, sure, to farm humans is efficient, to live farmed inside definitively not.

P.a. actually work ONLY for self-consumption because on scale sharing energy is a nightmare for the grid, we do not have superconductive links, sharing means sharing locally, so have a locally very unstable demand for big power plants, the worst scenario for network stability, they can't keep the frequency with significant p.v. on grid. Instead IF we focus on self-consumption p.v. offer options to heat large quantity of water to have them in the night, when needed, to have geothermic heat pumps, heating the ground in summer to balance the heat get in the winter and so on.

BTW cities can't exists without much highways: there anyone eat, and the food came from outside.

Hasn't RTO (return-to-office) mandate solved the issue of empty office towers. Other day I read 90% of employers have forced RTO. And for companies with significant downtown real estate they are really aggressive with 100% compliance.

I know many people whose companies have an RTO mandate, and would put themselves in that "90% of employers with forced RTO" group … but where the rubber meets the road, many are not in office and enforcement is more of an unspoken agreement with a manager about being in from time to time.

So, public face / private face stuff.

Commercial real estate is in a much worse place than they care to say.

No. There is a bit of a crisis with commercial real estate. Locally there are several stories of large businesses slashing their footprint, say, in half or selling buildings outright.

Ah good to now. I was thinking about this and come to conclusion that city govt, builders, employers which are all powerful entities and they all looking to fill office buildings. But I do not see a powerful counterbalancing force on this issue. Because employees are typically on receiving end of this my way or highway policy.

Depends on the company. 'RTO' might only be 2-3 days a month.

1) smaller office complexes around the perimeter of downtowns make cheap tear downs while businesses concentrate into most desirable office space.

2) older buildings are more viable for residential conversions, if subsidized into positive economics

3) permit + incentivize residential construction - you'd be surprised how much of typical US downtowns are made up of parking lots/structures which can easily be scraped for housing.

Lastly as people do fill into downtowns, that will naturally convert into the ecosystem that serves those people - for all but capital intensive projects which will need to be spearheaded by municipalities and developers alike.

> Although fewer people may want to work in Manhattan, more than enough still want to live there.

And if you can live closer to work, there's a better chance you'll want to show up in person instead of telecommute.

Turning office buildings into apartments or small businesses (or both) could be a good solution. there's a severe lack of housing in a lot of cities in many countries

Turn them into low income housing and service centers for the poor.

Not to be cynical but this is an invitation to rampant criminality in city centers.

Rather than this relatively low-effort idea, just think about the other marginalized groups for which appeal could be curried: - orphans and widowers - statutorily limited peoples - losers of the womb lottery - the soft in spirit - students of life - unhoused migrants - homeless encampment simulator

And failing this: - displaced urban wildlife - tear it down and make space for plants

It is expensive to convert a building. Not exactly low cost, nor low income capable.

I like this idea. I would even settle for the mixed income housing that a lot of development companies here (DC) were supposed to build when they received subsidies from the government.

Mixed income and mixed use is my preference.

The Austin Plaza Saltillo project is a great example. Shops at the bottom make it useful for the whole community. Parking is in garages underneath which promotes walk ability. When you see someone going to their place you don’t know if they are on food stamps or are a tech millionaire. There’s less stigma and more respect for all neighbors.

This is a recipe for disaster.

Yes, lets concentrate poor people in tall apartment towers in downtown areas. What could go wrong?

I love Judge Dredd.

How come nobody ever talks about industrializing the suburbs? I live 6 minutes by car from the small scale manufacturing concern where I work. It’s kind of amazing.

Yes certainly, now that people have realized they can work from home, the corporate jig is up. Time to convert those offices into more residential buildings!

How would that fix the broken governments, schools, and rampant crime?

The cities I live near seem to have no problem attracting young singles and couples. Young urbanites I've worked with have all moved out when (a) they have kids and realize how bad the schools are, (b) when one of them gets mugged, (c) they get married to a non-urbanite, (d) they want local governance that is at least slightly sane.

It's insane that so many cities will spare no expense to avoid doing things that actually matter, no amount of resources is spared to ensure serious drug addiction, homelessness and crime runs amok.

I've looked at the cost of converting office space to residential, and every time, it was slightly less costly than a tear down and rebuild - and in one case it was a lot more. And that's before you deal with parking. The other issue was taxes: the city would not get the same tax revenue out of the building and wasn't very interested in the project as a result.

can you explain why parking would be an issue? Typically offices are more people-dense than residential. So converting office to residential should reduce the number of parking spaces needed.

There's lots of stuff in the article about the feasibility of turning the buildings into apartments. But I don't see anything convincing about it saving the downtown. It seems to me that a lot of people who do leave downtown areas are leaving for non-housing issues - lack of services (police), high taxes, bad schools, etc.

I think you might be conflating two issues. Housing in downtown isn't desirable for a populace of people (probably true for those who need more space and/or want to think about issues like schooling etc.) and downtown isn't being used (even for office use).

The idea to turn office towers into apartments tries to address the second issue without explicitly trying to solve the first (which is make downtown more desirable to live in).

Are we rapidly brushing past the question “do we want and need to save downtowns in the first place?”?

I have not really thought that through; at first blush it seems obvious that one would want to save these downtowns. But also some of the best innovations arise out of the creation that follows destruction.

I’m open to clarifying opinions on the matter

I do think the simple fact of offering hyper-dense communities (especially in cities that lack them otherwise, like many midwestern cities, say) makes any downtown attractive as a living option to a certain group of people who want the "15 minute city" experience. Doing so tends to transform downtowns into actual communities as well, as opposed to places with many low quality vendors that cater to duller, less personable 9-to-5 routines.

And then of course there are knock-on effects to placing people like that (typically young professionals and artists) together like that to rub shoulders, talk about ideas, start businesses etc...

> Residents would be provided with compact HVAC units under certain windows, as in a motel.

Sounds like https://vxtwitter.com/GoodGuyGuaranty/status/175753305627604...

> And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.

https://archive.is/Rg8g2

You'll hear the owners and developers crow about how it's not worth it.

No, only safe multi-modal infrastructure and improved safety will. Fix that and the highest and best use of properties will sort themselves out.

Non-starter due to fundamental differences in slab between commercial and residential. Not financially feasible to convert

That article says "we're building slums for rich people".

Will we be able to afford them is the real question.

Why should we "save downtowns" is another

No because it's very hard and costly to do so and even then the units have to meet habitability requirements.

who bought the office towers during covid and wants to sell/repurpose them? ya

why would people want to live there if there are no jobs there

Save? Absolutely not.

Evolve? Yes.

return to office boomer cto policies are in full swing though

TL;DR: No.

Large buildings with controlled ventilation offer the prospect of better control over air composition, in particular reduction of CO2 levels. As CO2 rises this could become very important.

I don't understand that argument too much.

If you turn office towers into apartments, where are people gonna work?

May work in some cities that benefit of high tourism or are high status enough (Manhattan, city of London) that you'll always fill them, but it just doesn't scale beyond them.

Ain't nobody dreaming about living in downtown Columbus or Cleveland or Detroit. You live there if you work there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com