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Comment by underlipton | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a high-rise office elevator bank smaller than a residential one.

Dishwashers are negligible; microwaves are a souped-up gaming PC and run a lot less; ovens and dryers are more of a concern, but as with HVAC, I'd like proof that an office's draw (with all its attendant equipment) is more than the what you'd have with a dozen (tops) condos. Plumbing and sewer are the only legitimate concerns I've seen yet. And yet: will, way.

>you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again

These numbers never include externalities like the carbon and refuse footprint of demolishing and rebuilding. How many million metric tons of steel and concrete do we need to dispose of if this becomes a de-facto national policy?

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Most non-mechanical equipment electric loads in standard office buildings are receptacles. This is small. Per NEC, I think it's counted as 180VA/receptacle. So the 208/120V panels are sized for that.

Also, the lighting is probably 277V in an office. This precludes any owner-installed fixtures, the super has to do all of that. Moving it to 120V means more transformers, for which there isn't room without sacrificing rentable space.

HVAC, assuming CW/HW to VAV boxes, has the pumps sized for the number. Which may be less or more in residential, depending. It also precludes (or at least makes very difficult) the ability to meter HVAC usage per apartment.

The point isn't that is is impossible. It's just expensive. That expense has to be borne by somebody.

I vote for the construction companies to be held liable. That way any future office buildings they construct will be more easily converted to housing.

Tearing down good buildings and building new is wasteful and causes more pollution then repurposing. These for profit corporations externalized these costs upon us repressing.

Planning for those who plan to use planned obsolescence to generate a profit.

I don't understand your point:

Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.

In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.

What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.

Interestingly, he's not all that far off in a sense. Many commercial buildings used to be built to be multi-functional. The old school classic 3-story brick, with a shop on the bottom, maybe a workshop above, maybe residential (plus rentable space) on the third.

But once you choose high-density, you don't get much in the way of do-overs. For much the same reason that once you choose thinness as a positive metric for laptops, you lose a lot of flexibility.

Yes it's all about tradeoffs, but I think it's useful to accept (e.g.) in the laptop case that having thin and portable devices isn't necessarily a bad thing and it's likely that a good chunk of consumers will want that even if we create economic incentives and policies to encourage recycling and reuse.

I personally don't think it'd be bad to have a larger chunk of buildings be more versatile but you'd lose some of the economic efficiencies (agglomeration effects and positive spillovers) from the concentration of firms in business districts etc.

In every scenario you win some and lose some, and it's not always clear to me we should go all in on any of the bets.

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