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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

I think this article perhaps misses the real story. That being, office parks first built in 25+ years ago are reaching an age where their long term leases are expiring and they need to be renovated for the first time since being constructed to attract new tenants.

While it makes sense to renovate an old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details from decades past you have to wonder what the fate of more recently constructed buildings will be. It's hard to see any situation where the 90's office park building will ever be valued for it's structural appeal to the extent that people will want to gut and remodel it instead of bulldozing.

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One common occurrence where I live is that county and cities are buying up the old office parks and even strip malls to convert them into government buildings. Most are ideally located as well as being offered up for sale cheaply. Seen even a few charitable organizations buy up parts of a strip mall for the cheap space by square foot.

Besides the age a lot of REITs cashed out awhile ago and I am not sure the market is there. Plus people are even further out and those who tended to move had the means to do so and their spending went with them.

Suburbia certainly isn't dieing.

I've seen this also. Also community colleges (for example Austin community college in Austin Texas) are doing the same.

Medical malls, too, perhaps?

Unfortunately for some zoning prevents you from living in those spaces. A friend of mine tried to get a zone variance to turn an office building into essentially a multifamily dwelling and the city turned him down flat. They suggested he could buy the property, tear down the building, get it rezoned, and then build dwellings there. But not go in and convert a perfectly usable space into a livable space. Sigh.

Similar issue here. What I wanted to do was take a warehouse (zoned light industrial), essentially cut it in half, and live next to my workshop.

Explaining that this is common in my home country, it'd take at least one car off the road during commute hours (mine), etc. was in vain.

Lots of people do that type of thing here too, but un-permitted. If you wanted to be really particular, you could probably get a permit for the work itself (plumbing, kitchen, etc) as long as it wasn't specified as residential.

This is what we've come to though - the government has taken away our rights and sell them back to us with permits.

>This is what we've come to though - the government has taken away our rights and sell them back to us with permits.

Perfectly stated. Perhaps especially in this case with "zoning" laws. Dealing with a bunch of crap myself in trying to find commercial properties. Unbelievable the number of codes and rules...

>This is what we've come to though - the government has taken away our rights and sell them back to us with permits.

Ah yes, my inalienable right to zone property as I see fit because I want to redevelop it. So often forgotten.

Yea most local governments are slow and obtuse with zoning, but it's not as if the concept of zoning is a violation of your rights, or even that bad of a thing. Criticism is fine, but using hyperbolic statements about how the government is stealing our rights is just asinine.

The government is telling you that you cannot use your own property as you see fit (with the threat of being kidnapped or stolen from).

Zoning is to prevent a paper factory from opening up shop next to an elementary school, not to give themselves a job by creating arbitrary rules.

So what is it; Can I build whatever I want on any property I own, or can the government stop me from building a paper factory next to an elementary school?

You've thrown out two contradictory statements. If you agree with zoning in certain circumstances then you can't hold that property is a right for use by owner as they see fit(without the threat of being kidnapped or stolen from). Just because the current zoning system in most locales is overly bureaucratic, or even corrupt, doesn't mean the idea of zoning should be done away, or that property is a right the government can't interfere with.

Criticism is one thing, but framing this as an issue about the government taking away our rights is not productive.

Easy, I don't know if any jurisdictions have this notion, but most people would agree that industrial buildings are less pleasant than commercial buildings which are less pleasant than residential.

Forbid people from building factories in commercial zones, or restaurants in residential zones without permits, but don't impede the reverse. If people want to live in an industrial zone, let them.

Sure there are downsides to this, a developer could buy up part of an industrial zone and build houses on it, which might reduce the efficiency of the industry around it, and would require the residents to petition to have their area rezone to avoid someone building a paper factory next to their elementary school. But as discussed, there are downsides of the current approach.

You're still arguing about the details of how zoning should be implemented, not whether it's a fundamental right.

Japan has something similar to this. You can build buildings of a higher restriction (residential being more strict then industrial) in a lower restriction zone.

This article describes it rather well.

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

I'm in favor of this, but to play the devil's advocate - what happens to the 20% that remains after 80% of an industrial zone has been converted to residential?

It's going to be like when people buy houses next to the airport then complain about the noise

Being a fundamental right doesn't mean limitless. Free speech is a fundamental right, yet you will get into trouble when you yell fire in a theater. And of course property right is a fundamental right, we just sacrifice some the of the property right in the form of zoning laws to achieve other goals, similar to our other rights. When somebody asked us to sacrifice our rights without enough reason, it is a violation of the rights.

It's called a Variance, and in my county(Marin county) they are never issued anymore. They used to be issued to "good ole boys", but those days are even over.(I'm glad that's the case. Why should just rich boys, or networked boys get what they want?)

If you are living a commercial zoned space; realize that the government can come into your building(at anytime), slap a red tag on it, and the tenant is out. (My father had an illegial mother in-law unit in his garage(done well, even ADA accessible), wasn't even charging rent.

Well this building inspector found out about it. Knocked on my father's door. My father let him in. The guy told my father he needs to tear out the illegial unit. Well my father being the sensible Irishman, took the Inspector, threw him on the ground, frisked him, and called the Cops. My father had no idea these guys had so much authority. He thought he was being set up for a home invasion? No in reality, he just "lost it". He knew--he was in the Trades. He got mad--it happens to the best of us? Well, since this was years ago, and my father had his best friend(an Oakland cop) come to court; my father got off scott free. White privlege? (That day, my father realized too much government power is just wrong. I never heard, "They probally got what they deserved!"

While I'm at it; my rich neighbor, decided to build a three bedroom house on his property. Property his parents bought him 40 years ago. He has 20 acres? It was right after the 2008 crash. He needed rental income to live his lavish lifestyle. He thought he was a Titan, and "More people should get creative in down economies?"

He got all the permits. He spend $850,000 building the place. It was ready to rent! His first renter told him he would gladly move his family in, but there's rent control in detached homes. He could only rent to people at or below the federal poverty level, and rent was tied to this metric in some way? Instead of getting $5000/month---he could only rent it out for around $800. He was floored! Beyond angry. It's still just sitting there. (This is the only rent control we have in Marin County. I'm still a fan of some form of rent control though.) He told his mother she could live in the detached house for free. She said, 'I bought you your mansion, those fancy cars, antiques, and for all your stupid failed businesses(Businesses that kept him thinking he was completely self made? No one helped me out? A real Horato Alger's; I'll sleep in the mansion, and you sleep in the detached house!' Love that mom! Really, she set this dude up for life, why shouldn't she expect to sleep in the mansion? (I don't care if your parents made you wealthy, but admit it, and help needy family members? I've only know a few rich boys who weren't in denial--George Sorrows comes to mind. He frequently states, 'My wealth is completely due to my father's generosity, and connections! He's an interesting man. He's also an author. He believes his wealth prevents people from taking his writing seriously. He might be right?)

Cheers! (Make sure you are not overpaying rent. I know dudes who don't tell tenants about rent control. They wait until the tenant figures it out.)

"He got all the permits. He spend $850,000 building the place. It was ready to rent! His first renter told him he would gladly move his family in, but there's rent control in detached homes. He could only rent to people at or below the federal poverty level, and rent was tied to this metric in some way? Instead of getting $5000/month---he could only rent it out for around $800."

Sounds like, with spending all that money on the building, he could have taken 10 minutes to call a real estate lawyer and find that out.

My dad was on his city's zoning board for a few years. What he learned was that a variance was only supposed to be used in cases where the intent of the zoning ordinance was inapplicable, such as some physical obstacle in your property, or as an extreme case, a person who had no back yard and wanted a fenced-in place for his toddler to play.

But "hardship" cases were supposed to be rejected. What really happened was that the board approved every case, and my dad quit the board after that became apparent.

A current example is video game bars, like Barcade. There are often antiquated restrictions on video game arcades in zoning law that are aimed solely at kids, to prevent truancy. They make no sense in the modern world, in a place aimed at adults. Check out this list of variances this place needs:

"Variances to allow 50 game machines were a maximum of three are permitted, 2 game machines per 100sf of area where a maximum of 1 is permitted, no side or front clearance for game machines where 3ft and 8ft respectively are required, no attendant for 50 game machines where 4 are required and no off-street bicycle stalls where 24 stalls are required for a 100 seat Café with 50 game machines. A"

That's certainly valid. I'd suggest it's a case where the remedy would be to update the zoning laws, so it's done in a somewhat more transparent fashion.

A developer just got my state to pass a law saying that a particular property in my neighborhood is exempt from our city zoning laws.

An argument for that idea of making laws expire by default unless renewed.

Taking your description literally, there is no legal way under any reasonable zoning code that a zoning department could issue a variance to allow a prohibited residential use on a property zoned and currently occupied by an office building. The variance is a mechanism for relieving a hardship that runs with the land by allowing limited non-conformity (e.g. setbacks on a non-conforming lot or the continuation of a previously legal but currently non-conforming use).

On the other hand, though local regulations can vary, it is unlikely that tearing down the building would be a prerequisite for a rezoning application. It sounds more like just ordinary planners doing their job and seeing what they can get a developer to do...their job is a bit like a cop trying to get a confession: they're allowed to mislead to maximize results. In fairness, an office building probably puts more money into the city coffers [the term of art is "highest and best use"] than a residential development and thus discouraging downzoning is not unreasonable.

Finally, planning departments are a bit like compilers: using the right or wrong terms to describe something is often the difference between being able to do something by right and flat out denial. Every city seems to have their pitbull real-estate attorney who gets stuff through the planning commission via their craft where out of towners and novices will fail. The public access channel makes them easy to identify.

Agreed. I spent two years getting a piece of property split in an unusual way. It was totally legal, just weird enough that it encountered friction at every imaginable level. Everyone at the city, county level, even attorneys that should have understood reacted with "whoa, wait a minute" at each stage.

At the end it was worth it, a nice return for the time spent. But not easy, and certainly not clearly understood.

Care to elaborate?

I'd love to know more about what you did, if you'd be willing to share the story? Sounds fascinating.

I had a 6.2 acre lot in an area that was zoned for 3.3 acre lots. I could not get a variance, so I purchased a tiny sliver of useless land from a neighbor. It was a strip of land on a gas line easement and thus totally unusable. It only connected to my property for 10 feet of property line, but I was able to purchase the neighbors unusable land (he had 4.5 acres to start with, losing .4 left him with 4.1 and still over the 3.3 minimum). So I combined the 6.2 and .4 acre lots into one and then re-split them.

So the order of operations was: 1 Buy 6.2 acre lot 2 buy .4 acre slice of easement 3 get lots surveyed and combined 4 survey lots again for split 5 apply to county for split 6 get split but have to sell both halves on the same day because mortgage company would not release the lien on only one half of original property. 7 $$Profit$$

about 2 years and made about $100,000 net. Total sale was $440,000 of both properties and one house.

I think you mean "any American zoning code", not "any reasonable code". In Japan, zones are additive: if commercial use is permitted, residential use is also permitted.

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/japanese-zoning.h...

That said, in Japan the idea of converting a building from one use to another is virtually unknown. Buildings aren't built to last, so it's cheaper and easier to tear them down and rebuild to your liking.

Stacked zoning exists in the US and was very common in the wave of local zoning adoptions in the 1920's. Over time, other forms have tended to replace it or be selected for initial ordinances. I suspect Japan's history of zoning like many of it's political institutions arose under rather different circumstances in the 1940's, hence it is national law rather than local.

Anyway, I qualified "residential" with "prohibited".

Even without zoning it's not entirely straightforward, although at least possible. Houston has no formal zoning, but there are building/safety codes, so you can't just live in part of a warehouse as-is. You have to redo the whole thing to be up to residential code.

>dieing

Just curious, this is the second time I see this today. Is this a mistake, or is it a regional alternate form from somewhere?

> county and cities are buying up the old office parks and even strip malls to convert them into government buildings. Most are ideally located as well as being offered up for sale cheaply.

The point of the grandparent comment is that these buildings are old and in need of expensive maintenance. Why should any government body move in such a building? Can they provide the needed maintenance cheaper that the current owner would do? Or will they move their offices in a decrepit building?

I don't think so. This quote is key: “I now say that brainy youngsters are trending urban and urbane, away from your grandfather’s office parks.”

Real estate analysis is showing that for the first time since it's been measuring more people are looking for housing in denser, more urban environments than in the traditional suburbs.

An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars. Comparing these quiet & dull campuses to a vibrant city really makes it hard to imagine working in them any more.

People follow the jobs, jobs don't follow people. A more likely scenario is that those jobs are just gone, not that they moved downtown to catch the special snowflakes. Or downtown addresses have replaced campuses whenever executives get together to dick wave.

>An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars.

Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children.

The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.

> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children.

I think it might be simpler than this. They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up. On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids.

As someone a bit over 30; exactly this.

The numbers do NOT add up and haven't at any point in my life. Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job?

None of our social structures (including laws and tax incentives/disincentives) or market valuations reflect the necessary liquidity imposed by current job market.

I happen to think that more nicely constructed MDUs are a good housing option (insulation could always be better).

>Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years?

I can't help but feel that you're describing some mythical ideal that never really existed for most people. Yes, for a long time, a lot of manufacturing jobs were pretty stable and people worked for IBM for a long time. But, even in that case, even if the jobs were stable, people tended to move around the company a lot. The military, which has always been a large employer, is an even more extreme example of jobs being relatively stable but mobile.

By the way, according to this Economist article from a couple years back, US workforce mobility has actually gone down significantly to a degree not explained by demographics: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-m...

>Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job?

And what happened when there was more typically one worker and he (the common case) lost his job?

But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs.

Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional.

I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today.

Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing.

So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.

>They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up.

That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Raising a family was always tough - when I was young my parents scrimped and saved in a way that I've never seen among millennials. Everybody did, and it was considered just part of parenthood, especially in the beginning.

It's not that younger people can't raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents, it's that either they don't realize how tough it was back then or they're just not interested in making the same sacrifices.

>On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids.

Sure, but it's far cheaper to rent a small apartment in the suburbs and commute than it is to rent in the city.

Yes, commuting sucks. But it sucked in the 20th century as well. My dad spent more than an hour on the road each way. Every day. That't the kind of sacrifice I'm talking about. In addition to the commute my dad brown bagged his lunch every day, made his own coffee (Folgers), drank PBR non-ironically, did his own plumbing, painted what needed painting, mowed his own lawn, and fixed the family car himself when it broke down. If you live that kind of lifestyle today you can afford a family in the same way my parents did.

I'm not making a moral judgement on the other peoples' procreation choices. All I'm saying is family was a priority for previous generations in a way that it isn't today. It was part of being an adult.

>...in a way that it isn't today.

I submit that you're comparing unmarried and childless people of today with married and child-bearing people of yesteryear.

Do the other comparisons and you'll find that you are off base -- people today do make enormous sacrifices to start families at a young age, and people in the 50s to 80s who were single with no children did live lavish lifestyles.

To the extent that there are differences between the primary peer comparison -- married couples raising children -- it's mostly a byproduct of the fact that people wait longer and have smaller families.

Waiting longer is some combination of less social pressure to pop out kids (a good thing! Having kids because of an obnoxious parent's pestering is how you end up with broken families, divorced or otherwise) and a better understanding of fertility/access to medical care (also a good thing).

Smaller family sizes are, IMO and as someone who grew up in a large family, a good thing as well. Keeping the size of one's family manageable means having the time to both build up a career and also heavily invest in the upbringing of each child.

I think that's far more commendable than the "pop 'em out, pay for shit, parent on the weekends and leave wifey in the kitchen the rest of the time" mentality of a huge portion of the baby boom generation. And also more commendable than leaving yourself penniless and jobless in old age for your children to take care of you.

It's possible to raise one or two or maybe three kids well. Doing a good job at raising five or six means someone has to give up a career, and even then you're probably just barely keeping up (i.e., not doing the best possible job at fostering intellectual and emotional health.)

>Do the other comparisons and you'll find that you are off base -- people today do make enormous sacrifices to start families at a young age, and people in the 50s to 80s who were single with no children did live lavish lifestyles.

... which was my point. People in their 20s today have it no harder than their parents and grandparents. They're simply choosing not to have families in larger numbers.

The quoted comment does not contain the concession you seem to think it does. On the contrary, the quoted section of my previous comment simply states that people in their 20s today have it at least as hard as their parents and grandparents. I'm silent (here) on the question of whether it's harder today.

> They're simply choosing not to have families in larger numbers.

This is only meaningfully entailed by the data if you believe that, historically, everyone who had kids "chose" to do so. I don't think that's accurate, especially if we go back past 1970-1980 or so.

Remember that birth control has only been universally legal in the US for barely a half century. And normalized for a far shorter period of time. In fact, I'd argue that in a huge portion of the country, it's still something of a dirty secret in that you wouldn't necessarily want your employer or extended family to know about it (and we've recently had a supreme court case about this...)

Birth control was readily available by 1970. Presumably you've heard about "free love" and all that?

> Birth control was readily available by 1970.

1. Singling out access to birth control is a red herring. Mainstream gender norms and mainstream social pressure to have a family have changed a lot since the 1970s. Especially in more conservative parts of the country.

2. Birth control was fully legalized in the US in 1964 by Supreme Court mandate; 2015 - 1964 = 51 years (barely a half century, exactly as I stated above...).

3. There's a difference between legal and available.

4. There's a difference between available and socially acceptable. Although things have gotten significantly better over time, stigma and conservative views on sex outside of marriage continues to prevent contraceptive use among significant populations (most significantly anyone under 18 with conservative parents, but IME even married people into their 20s who had a conservative upbringing). In many ways, we are STILL fighting the battle against stigma associated with use of contraceptives. See the debate surrounding contraceptives and the ACA, or sex education in public schools. Or ask a Catholic priest.

Again, things have improved significantly and continue to improve. But assuming that 1964 or the wave in the 1970s were watershed events across the country is a bit niave.

5. Again, singling out birth control is a red herring. It is no doubt an important contributing factor in both the time to first child and the size of families. But the social norms surrounding women -- especially in conservative parts of the country -- have changed significantly since the 1970s, and that's also an important contributing factor.

Concretely, I'm not sure that "subjected to coercive social pressure and not provided with a college education because they're already married and that's the point" exactly counts as "choice". That might not have been common in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s, but it definitely was in rural Georgia...

I think a lot of people are REALLY underestimating the 'access to birth control' part of the equation. People wait longer today to have kids because they can CHOOSE to wait.

Indeed! That's (part of) what I meant by access to medical care. I think that people also tend to not view having a child in your mid 30s as unnecessarily risky, which I think 20,30,40 years ago was a more common belief/concern.

The combination of the ability to choose to wait and the belief that you can wait and still have a family is, I think, a potent one.

> That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Raising a family was always tough.

I'm not saying it wasn't tough, but housing prices were much lower relative to incomes in the 50s and 60s, even in a place like San Francisco. Several of my relatives own million dollar homes there, and none of them are college educated or had spectacular careers or anything. Their only advantage is they were part of previous generations. Not a single one of them could hope to buy their current homes if they were starting their career from scratch today. Relative to housing costs, they enjoyed incomes that today would be in the range of a $300k+ base salary.

We look back on their lives and don't see them as particularly posh because we're blinded by the astounding pace of technological growth. You could make a million dollars a year but you couldn't have a microwave oven before it was invented.

> Yes, commuting sucks. But it sucked in the 20th century as well.

Sure it did, but it's a lot worse today because traffic congestion has progressed to unprecedented levels. It's not just about time spent commuting -- it's also about how stressful the commute itself is. Whenever my dad visits here in Houston, who used to do a big city commute in the 70s and 80s in Dallas with no problem, he freaks out because of how bad the traffic is.

relative to housing costs, they enjoyed incomes that today would be in the range of a $300k+ base salary.

Do you have a source for that? I can believe it in certain cities (like SF), but then again, SF wasn't as desirable a place to live either (SF population was dropping in the 60's and 70's).

>I'm not saying it wasn't tough, but housing prices were much lower relative to incomes in the 50s and 60s, even in a place like San Francisco.

What do you mean even? San Francisco has to be in the top five in terms of growth in the value of property over that time period. There's no way incomes could keep up. But that's an outlier. Housing in the East Bay is very affordable.

>Sure it did, but it's a lot worse today because traffic congestion has progressed to unprecedented levels.

That's kind of an uneven thing. As I pointed out in another comment, the traffic in Southern California is better today than it was in the '70s. Texas has gotten the lion's share of the country's growth in recent years - I'm not surprised Houston is bad.

>The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago.

While it's not universal, there are large areas of major coastal cities (among others) that middle-class+ people would have hesitated or flat-out typically not have lived in 30 years ago that are now considered highly desirable.

That said, it's easy to overstate the US Millennials want to all live in the city trend. FiveThirtyEight had a piece a while back that basically concluded the urbanization trend is largely exaggerated. The more accurate statement is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to live in a handful of particularly dense urban locations (think Brooklyn).[1]

In fact, they say that, among all adults 25-34 the percentage in urban locations overall has actually declined a little. The data is complicated to interpret but their bottom line was that: "Millennials overall, therefore, are not increasingly living in urban neighborhoods. Rather, the most educated one-third of young adults are increasingly likely to live in the densest urban neighborhoods. That’s great news for cities trying to attract young graduates and a sign that urban neighborhoods have become more desirable for those who can afford them. But the presence of more smart young things in Brooklyn is not evidence that millennials are a more urban generation."

There are a lot of trends going on in parallel that make it hard to draw clear non-anecdotal conclusions about where people prefer to live. I also think a lot of people on this board probably find it easier to work remotely or to cherry-pick a job in easy commuting distance (whatever their preferred mode of commuting) than is the norm. Furthermore, in many cases, preferences for dense cities, suburbs, and the country are sufficiently deep-rooted that a lot of folks have trouble understanding how anyone could see things differently.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...

> Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars.

Actually, many of them did. Talk to some old people in the US suburbs about what life was like when they were young in the '50s and '60s. Most grew up in a dense city and then voluntarily left it for the suburbs. Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. When cars went mass-market as America suburbanized, densely built urban areas and the use of public transport were increasingly associated with poverty and being trapped in the archaic past.

If you lived in the suburbs and commuted by car, it was prestigious, it was modern; it meant you were doing well for yourself financially, and were forward-looking to a brighter future with new and better ways of doing things. It was the 1950s cultural equivalent of working at a startup and living in a gentrifying hipster neighborhood in San Francisco today.

No doubt someone will reply that these perceptions was all manufactured merely due to General Motors malfeasance and marketing campaigns. That may be true, but that's entirely beside the point. Those campaigns worked because many young people then actually did agree with their content, and were very happy to drive everywhere.

>Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success.

You're overstating that quite a bit. Sure, driving for twenty minutes beats taking public transportation. But sitting in stop and go traffic for a couple hours every day is awful and people always realized it.

How much stop and go traffic was there in the 50s?

I don't know about the 50s, but by the sixties traffic was as bad in some places as it is today. Traffic in Southern California, where I grew up, is actually better today than it was in the 70s.

That's about when it started getting bad. The term "Sig Alert", for an unplanned lane closure, originated in LA in 1955. It takes its name from Loyd C. "Sig" Sigmon, who created a radio-based notification system for the California Highway Patrol:

Sigmon developed a specialized radio receiver and reel-to-reel tape recorder. When the receiver picked up a particular tone, it would record the subsequent bulletin. The device cost about $600. The LAPD's chief, William H. Parker, was interested, though skeptical, warning the inventor, "We're going to name this damn thing Sigalert." More practically, he refused to use it unless the receivers were made available to all Los Angeles radio stations — it could not be a KMPC monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_Alert#The_origin_of_the_Si...

Bad traffic was mostly limited to a few large cities such as LA then. In most of the US, it was not nearly as bad.

It was also believed that traffic was a fairly minor infrastructure problem that could easily be resolved by widening the highways, adding a few more lanes here and there. (Turns out that when you add lanes, it just causes that many more people to drive on that road, but this was not yet widely apparent at the time.)

>In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.

Thank you Obama and HUD. My nice, small city has had several gang-related murders in the last few years, all within subsidized housing.

Yeah sure. The real story is that the younger kids have lousier paying jobs and items like cars are prohibitively expensive.

My dad had a loaded up Mustang that cost like $2500 in the late 60s, at 19 or 20, paid for by bartending. The equivalent car today is probably 2x-2.5x more in real terms.

The city is coming back because it's the undervalued and people are priced out of the newer suburbs. People end up reproducing, so the permanent underclass and garbage schools will probably send most of these folks to the older suburbs.

I remember paying over a dollar a minute in the '80s for a phone call to my sister in the same state. Air fare was crazy expensive compared to today, as was anything electronic.

Some things have gotten more expensive, and other things have gotten cheaper. Overall it's a wash. If it seems like life is more expensive it's because people buy a lot of things today that we didn't have back then. Things you don't really need, like cable TV and $5 coffee.

It's not "a wash". Housing and education are dramatically more expensive than they were a few generations ago. Gone are the days of paying for your degree waiting tables with enough left over to put a down payment on a house. Now you can look forward to a mountain of debt for an education and mortgage that you might never pay off in your life time.

It might be "a wash". Housing and education are more expensive, but food and entertainment costs are way lower. The cost of most things inside your home, like appliances and televisions is cheaper. Tools, hardware, and common home repairs are also cheaper.

It's very hard to get an exact 1:1 ratio, as many of us spend hundreds of dollars on cell phones that didn't exist back then, or thousands on computers, but naming two economic things that have gotten more expensive doesn't invalidate the myriad of things that have gotten commensurately cheaper.

For the bottom 50% of earners, real wages are more or less the same now as they were in 1970. They went up for a bit from the 90s to 08, but they are back at 1970 levels now. Because wages have recently fallen, people in this group feel very poor right now.

For the top 50% of earners (increasing the closer to the top you get), real wages have increased a lot since the 1970s.

Between 1940 and 1985, most people were able to save about 5% of their income. Between 1985 and 2012, this decreased to become negative (i.e. most people live on debt).

Medical care, education, and energy have increased in cost several times over since 1970, and these costs are not captured in the real wages I quoted. It may be these costs explain why people have a lower disposable income, demonstrated by decreased savings rate.

> Housing and education are more expensive, but food and entertainment costs are way lower.

While that's true, it's certainly not "a wash." Housing and education are probably people's two biggest lifetime expenses. Even if housing prices doubled and food prices were cut by two thirds, the outcome would be higher overall expenses.

Personally, rent in a small apartment is more than all my other expenses combined.

The problem is that, based on the factual numbers, this isn't true -- it's not a wash.

Housing, Education, and Healthcare (things everyone bought "back then") have gotten dramatically more expensive, far more than the other categories have dropped. It's not a wash, and the numbers back that up :

"The current average family of four spends: - 21% less on clothing - 44% less on major appliances - 69% more on housing - 90% more on health care Than the average family spent in 1970's.

http://www.yale.edu/law/leo/052005/papers/Warren.pdf (these numbers are graphed on page 16)

Things like education, health care, and rent are all baked into the inflation numbers. If inflation and income growth are relatively constant (and they have been) then, yes, it is a wash. All she's proving here is people have more money to spend on the things that matter to them.

> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families

Do you have any evidence to support that, or are you just engaged in standard Millennial-bashing?

Most people in my peer group certainly plan to raise a family in the future, they're just being responsible and waiting to have kids until they are at a good place career-wise.

There are two factors that determine how much money you have. Being "at a good place career-wise" is only half the equation. Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent.

> Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent.

There's no requirement that you stay in the same place which made your career.

My personal plan is to work in NYC for the next ten years and then take the accumulated savings to buy a house outright in a nice town.

A few years ago, I was quite surprised by the number of younger co-workers who lived in the city instead of the burbs.

Anyway, it didn't last. In every case except one (confirmed bachelor), they moved out to the burbs as soon as they our spouse got mugged or were going to have kids and realized they needed to be in a district with decent schools.

Would they still prefer the burbs if those issues weren't issues? They're just the hipsters who jumped ship (I mean no disrespect; they selflessly gave up the city life they otherwise wanted) before it got cool (and conditions improved).

While I don't doubt your story, here in Brisbane living in Fortitude Valley is safe, close to everything, and quite fun all things considered. Multiple new residential apartment buildings have gone up or are going up (driving my rent down, which is brilliant for me), and there are numerous families that live here too, interestingly.

Everything I just said actually agrees with your main point however, as the best schools are just up the road from here, and it's much safer than I've heard a lot of big cities in the US are. It's interesting to see so many people move into this area now, as I've been here for years and love it; it's great for me, more development of better facilities have seen this grow by leaps and bounds.

Exactly, I see this as the same situation as shopping centers and big box retailers. The cost of renovation etc, is not low enough compared to the cost of building a new building in a better location for the current times.

On top of that, the DC metro area is becoming very public transit oriented. Most employers consider good access via public transit an important feature when looking for office space.

Being in an outside suburb based upon the current design of the metro transit system means that someone from northern VA will have to travel all the way into DC then transfer back out the Maryland which makes for a significantly longer commute as opposed to an office more centrally located along the metro lines.

> On top of that, the DC metro area is becoming very public transit oriented. Most employers consider good access via public transit an important feature when looking for office space.

While at the same time the Metro is going to hell.

I disagree. With the new funds coming in, improvements are being done on the metro constantly, they seem to be rebuilding tracks every weekend. On top of that, the new 7000 series train cars are a BIG step up from the old ones. I had a chance to ride in one the other day, and it addressed many of he problems of the older cars. Once the roll out of the 7000-series cars is complete and they take the old cars offline, there should be a big reduction in the amount of delays (which are mostly due to cars having issues).

Got kicked off two trains yesterday for doors that would not close and just bout missed my MARC train. I rather walk the 2 miles to Union Station than ride the METRO.

WMATA is improving in some spots but there are still A LOT of problems with the metro as it stands. There are regularly major delays, they still haven't fixed the automated control since the fatal accident in 2009, there have been more reports of smoke in the tunnels since the fatal incident this year, and they're having to deal with a a bunch of financial irregularities.

I hope things improve but as of right now it doesn't look like they've turned the corner.

Exactly, DC is quickly becoming a public transit city.

In this case the building was more than a mile from the closest metro station. Doesn't sound like a lot, but try walking it every day in DC summer heat. Not fun.

I've noticed that many buildings built during particularly faddish architectural trends tend to very quickly become maintenance nightmares, with repairs costing more than a tear-down and rebuild. It seems lots of these office buildings all over the country were built quickly, to low quality and now nobody wants to move into them. It's not just SV that has this problem.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building the FBI is currently HQ'd out of is 40 years old, and by all accounts should have been razed to the ground 10-15 years ago, only slow government processes keeping the Bureau in it at all.

It's expected to cost $850m-$1.1b to renovate and fix all the problems in the building and bring it up to Class A space (with inflation over time the total number would creep towards $2b). The government has decided that it would be cheaper to move the entire Bureau HQ to another site and build an entirely new building than fix this one.

Except there aren't tenants to renovate for which is why they are sitting empty and not being renovated. The long term tenants don't want new paint and carpeting, they want to be in the city.

Maybe it's hard to see, but these things have a way of coming back around. In 50-60 years the office parks that still exist might very well be where all the hip YC startups of 2066 want to be.

Or they'll be vast wastelands, with YC startups employing remote workers scattered across the globe working from their homes over their high speed Internet connections.

Maybe they will bulldoze them and build parks in their place.

I can dream.

I too hope for that future. Megacities for some, sustainable homes for others, the rest of the world returned to the wild.

Unfortunately, I think the more realistic outcome would be that the rest of the world would be turned into farmland or pastureland.

Possibly. We're already providing more than enough food in the US with existing farmland (although the problem is it isn't distributed properly to people who need said food). Pastureland could be reduced with meat grown in vats instead of raised on farms (or people simply shifting from a meat-heavy diet).

The population trajectory appears to be ballistic, with us hitting the apex in the next 5-15 years (educated women have less children and prolong having children until later in life; almost all first world countries are already below replacement rate, India and China won't be far behind).

In fact everywhere of any significance except Africa is already at or bellow fertility rates of 2. As you say education and low child mortality creates smaller families.

The problem is not population (or even food production) but energy consumption. But that effects our first world lifestyle so no one in the first world wants to take it seriously.

> The problem is not population (or even food production) but energy consumption. But that effects our first world lifestyle so no one in the first world wants to take it seriously.

The first world is rapidly getting more efficient with regards to energy usage, and while I can't speak to the rest of the world, the US is quickly deploying renewables. With wind generation alone, we can supply 10x our annual energy consumption.

Enough sunlight hits the earth ever 5 minutes to power the entire world for a year. Its not an energy problem, its a capture and distribution problem.

Sustainable homes are a joke in poor taste. Cities are vastly better for the environment than the same number of people in so called ‘green’ homes in low density areas.

Nothing wrong with low density areas if the homes are sustainable and transportation is electrified.

Sure, you can minimize global harm from pollution etc., but locally even something as simple as a house cat can have large scale impacts. Further, people want large changes like dams to reduce flooding, drainage etc.

Aesthetically, it might seem more natural than asphalt, but lawns are a long way from ‘nature’. Realistically to have anything close to 'nature' assuming zero farming you’re looking at ~1 person per square mile if that.

> Aesthetically, it might seem more natural than asphalt, but lawns are a long way from ‘nature’. Realistically to have anything close to 'nature' assuming zero farming you’re looking at ~1 person per square mile if that.

Not sure I terribly agree with your person per square mile argument. Yes, lawns are a terrible waste (footnote: did you know that lawns trace back to medievel times? How much land you could afford to grow lawn on was a measure of wealth) and should be heavily disincentivized. But at the same time, if my house is zero net energy (solar power, solar thermal for water, tight envelope), and the transportation of myself and the goods I acquire are provided via renewable energy (electric cars/trucks powered by clean renewables), there isn't a strong argument against rural living.

Roads in low population areas take up a lot of space and kill a lot of wildlife.

The buildings weren't built robustly enough for that. They're cheap crap and often have horrible lighting and energy efficiency. (Not to mention that if you must drive to it, it's inherently bad for the environment.)

Also, no quality lunch spots nearby. You're probably limited to things like Applebee's and Subway.

Most of them will probably go away, but I wouldn't scratch them off. Things have an uncanny way of coming back when people stop trying to make something of them, when they become abandoned and creative folks are allowed to do as they wish to the structure.

No one wants to work in these builds right now because (as you pointed out), e.g. horrible lighting and ambiance. But if you came back to it, and knocked some holes in the roof (easy to do, because, again, they're cheap crap), then suddenly, it could actually turn into the sort of dorm that we'd actually wanted to be in.

More like 5-6 years. As Gen Y goes through their 30s, forms households and has children they will value these places more.

I think it is all about location. East German concrete slab highrisers[0] are being renovated into fashionable lofts, despite their unfashionable image and continuous deterioration - where they are placed in the city centers that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau

Could they be converted into cheap housing?

I've seen one building like this in watertown ma. I think it was converted during a downturn. I used to walk by it, "riverbank lofts"

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.368276,-71.198303,3a,90y,169...

But while it could be done, most offices don't have the insides separated out (wiring,plumbing) installed and non-opening windows. And zoning.

It can be done, but it might not end up being cheap.

This is not usually possible because of the cost to run plumbing. You have to gut the entire facility in order to put kitchens and bathrooms in every apartment and it just isn't (usually) cost effective.

True in practice, though shared bathrooms & kitchens are no impossibility.

Yes, it costs some money, but it's been done countless times in old warehouses in cities and towns around the world.

Of course, I don't think modern office buildings will have the appeal of "exposed brick" and "thick wooden support beams", but maybe the people of 100 years ago would have thought the same about those buildings.

These places have slab floors, and jackhammering sucks, but that isn't the end of the discussion. They typically have really high ceilings, so false floors aren't impossible. Clever architecting can group plumbing-required rooms together. Also, if we're talking about low-income, alternative housing for singles and couples, is a janitor-included shared bathroom down the hall even a problem? Many of the old hotels that are used for this purpose also have this.

Lack of opening windows is a bigger deal. Replacing all the curtain walls and stripping the place down to concrete gets suspiciously close to new construction costs. The land had better be worth it.

I've seen in down quite successfully in dense urban locations for condos but that only worked because the land was highly valuable and the building had grandfathered exemption from zoning / sightline laws for height.

The insides of most office buildings would need a lot of rework before they were acceptable housing. And the end result would be ugly on the outside , and it'd be located in a deserted office park.

It seems like in most cases it'd be cheaper to either tear them down before rebuilding, or to just start building from scratch in a more desirable location.

Office buildings can be very hard to convert to residential uses.

Office tenants want large, unbroken floorplans, so most office buildings built in the last few decades have a lot of interior space that's far from any windows. Residential uses need windows for every unit.

Adding plumbing for individual kitchens and baths, creating separate HVAC zones, etc. adds more costs and complications.

>old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details

That's not why we renovate factories. We renovate them because they are in a location we desire (big city centers). The suburbs are a cultural and transportation wasteland for the most part and have nothing but cheap land. Its just unpleasant real estate. Sadly, a lot of smaller companies migrated out to the suburbs because the CEO could simply make a call to move the business closer to his house. This land just makes more sense as residential, or at best retail, and really should have never been turned into offices in the first place.

Yeah it is. If there weren't anything desirable about the existing structure it would just be torn down and rebuilt. You are confusing the location decision with the decision to demolish vs. renovate.

>Sadly, a lot of smaller companies migrated out to the suburbs because the CEO could simply make a call to move the business closer to his house.

Perhaps. But it's probably also where most of the employees lived. If you're talking the 80s, for example, very few of my co-workers lived in Boston/Cambridge and commuted out to our offices on 495 about an hour away. I'm quite confident that, had there been a vote to move the company offices into the city, the answer would have been a resounding no.

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