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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

The article goes into this:

> The city of Seattle estimates that, with aggressive incentives, conversions could generate up to 6,000 housing units over the next seven years. At a rough approximation, that would use around a fifth of the city’s present office surplus.

> But “potential” is doing a lot of work here.

> Newer, larger office buildings, like the U.S. Bank Center, are hugely impractical for conversion, thanks to massive floor plates, centralized plumbing and other utilities and a host of other constraints.

> The preferred candidates are typically smaller, older buildings, especially those with C- or E-shaped floor layouts, which make it easier to create smaller units with adequate windows.

> But these buildings can be prohibitively costly to bring up to seismic and energy building codes, said Jen Pasquier, a Seattle developer who wants to convert the 10-story Liggett Building, at Fourth and Pike, into 93 apartments.

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There have been some attempts to convert office buildings with large rectangular floors into long, narrow apartments so every apartment has a window. It's possible, but difficult.[1]

Plumbing and sewerage turns out to be a huge headache. Large office buildings often have all the plumbing and sewerage in a small vertical core. The rest of the building is just flat slabs on columns. Adding a sewer line means punching through the floor and hanging pipe in the space above the apartments below. If you're in SF and want to see what that looks like, park in the 4th and Mission garage on the lower level, where you can see the plumbing from the restaurants above hanging from the ceiling. Also, sewer lines are gravity fed, with a 2% slope typical. Long pipe runs get lower along the run, so you probably have to put them along a wall. Then you have to hide and soundproof that stuff, although you might be able to get away with leaving it exposed if you market to hipsters or sell it as low-income housing. If the original building has enough ceiling height, it's easier.

Then there's HVAC, exhaust ductwork for kitchens and bathrooms without windows, partitioning the electrical distribution for the individual units, fire breaks between units, etc. Overall, it's maybe 30% cheaper than a new building, and all custom work requiring experienced people. If botched, it can be more expensive than a new building.

One company that does such conversions admits they're building tomorrow's slums.

And then there's the fundamental problem that if jobs are leaving the downtown core, why have more housing units there?

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-heres-what-it-...

A few years ago I was involved in purchasing a commercial building for split purposes. After viewing several spaces it became clear how critical plumbing location were to thinking about how a space could be used. We looked at a few where owners had attempted to change the layout in strange ways. In the end we decided our two goals were not well suited to a single building so we leased a production space and purchased a smaller building for other purposes.

Another issue is that a lot of those office buildings use post tensioned cables in the concrete slabs so making a hole needs to be done very carefully to avoid the cables. Not only do the cables provide a lot of structural support but breaking a cable is like cutting a stretched rubber band except with steel cables and with literally tons of force stretching the cables.

The regulatory process in Seattle is fairly painful, which raises the bar for even some of those smaller, older buildings. It'd help to change that, even though it wouldn't consume the majority of the surplus.

So convert those buildings to giant dorms. Lots of younger people would be more than happy with such an option (as long as it's priced accordingly of course)

Can also combine with capsule hotels.

There was a great episode of the Planet Money podcast a few weeks back that talked about boarding houses https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5851902/housing-afforda... they're apparently illegal in most places

In the 2010s Seattle briefly legalized SRO-like "pod apartments" of 300-400 sq ft, and several were built. A friend of mine rented one for several years and it was fantastic. But nothing makes NIMBYs throw a shitfit like the word "SRO" and they were eventually made illegal again.

SROs done right would be such a huge, easy win for so many cities. When I was fresh out of uni, I rented rooms for cheap with all utilities included. It was great, given the price.

Large parts of the floor would be illegal to hand to anyone due to lack of natural light: They are only reasonable for offices because most of the floor doesn't have full walls, or said walls are transparent. They are also in locations where you might not want to live anyway, as there's minimal commercial support around the building for the services you would need if living in a weird, limited apartment.

It's a bit like how suburban commercial areas are now in trouble because there are fewer companies interested in the big box anchors, and without them many a strip mall stops making economic sense. But there at least the anchor is just a big empty box, not an 8 or 9 digit investment.

> Large parts of the floor would be illegal to hand to anyone due to lack of natural light:

This is weird regulation to me. Why it is not allowed for apartment, but it is OK for office? Both buildings are sheltering humans, just during different stage of being awake.

Like the GP said: in offices the floor is often a big open space where light from windows can extend a long way. But once you start dividing up that big space into smaller residential units with walls, that light gets blocked.

I don't think bedrooms really need windows and in some ways they're preferable with the light & noise reductions.

Even if that's solved the bigger problem is earthquake code. These older buildings aren't up to modern code and significant renovations would require structure changes.

Bedrooms are where people spend majority of their time when awake. It is where kids play, do homework, adults work from home, watch youtube, read internet.

Unless we are talking about super large appartment with tons of rooms, they need windows

1000m² with one window wall: do you think that's an open-plan office or an apartment? And you can't really split it into ten, an apartment with e.g. 5m of windows and 20m depth doesn't work.

Seems like a creative opportunity. Each floor could be apartments on the outside with a shared workspace or coffee shop or gym in the middle. Or even do stuff like hydroponics.

From a landlord’s point of view, efficiency is about how much rent you can get for it, either directly or by making nearby units more attractive. Hidden away on an upper floor doesn’t seem very attractive as a commercial space?

If they can’t rent the interior for much, that’s going to make replacing it with a new building look better because it’s more efficient.

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