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Comment by BenFranklin100 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

LA is one of the most underdeveloped cities in the US. It is ripe for much denser housing in its urban core.

As stated, you'd need to purchase the expensive land and then turn it into housing. This is done in Los Angeles, but the property that is built isn't cheap affordable housing.

He didn't say it would be cheap affordable housing. He said it "will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing". Which makes sense. Normally new buildings are the luxury housing and over time, as they become outdated, they become the affordable housing. Building new "affordable housing" is a fools errand, since it costs almost as much to build as luxury housing. You just build more housing period and let nature take its course over the decades.

Yep. And don’t we have to wait for the new expensive housing to trickle down and become cheap. If enough new housing is built, the older housing becomes cheaper almost immediately.

About 23% of downtown Los Angeles is parking lots.

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/how-much-of-your-city-is-...

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.

It's the converse of what you claim. The denser an urban area, the easier it is to switch jobs and still maintain a reasonable commute. Sprawling metros like Boston have already fractured into sub job markets: Someone living in the North Shore area cannot switch to a job in Metro west without enduring a crushing 3-4 hour daily commute. By comparison, someone living in the Back bay can switch companies located in the Seaport to the Financial District without too much disruption to their commute. This becomes more and more true the denser the environment and supporting mass transit increase.

Great for you you love WFH. Go move to the burbs and let the cities build homes for those who don't. No one is forcing you downtown.

Offices are great for in person meetings. A group of people in a room with a whiteboard can discuss things much better than the same people on zoom. If you are just on zoom meetings all day then in person isn't useful at all.

That's the one thing missing from all online right now but it's completely killed because the team I'm on doesn't have any other developers on my team in my city so any whiteboarding has to take place online and we don't have smartboards or something like that that can do whiteboarding well online. The closest we use is Mural but that's not quite as easy or good.

If you don't have everyone in the same room then in person is meaningless. Even one remote person means everyone needs to be remote. The benefits of in office only apply if every person needed for a meeting/decision is in the same room at once. One person missing and you lose all benefits.

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.

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.

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.

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

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