Can Cities Transform 'Dead Downtowns' by Converting Offices Into Apartments? (washingtonpost.com) 220
The Washington Post's editorial board recently commented on the problem of America's "dead downtowns. Tourists are back, but office workers are still missing in action.... [R]estaurants, coffee hangouts, stores and transit systems cannot sustain themselves without more people in center cities...."
The problem? America "is in the midst of one of the biggest workforce shifts in generations: Many now have experienced what it is like to work from home and have discovered they prefer it."
Their proposed solution? The Post's editorial board is urging cities to adapt to the new reality of workers wanting to work two or three days remotely in part by converting commercial offices to apartments and entertainment venues. The goal is a "24/7" downtown with ample work spaces, apartments, parks and entertainment venues that draw people in during the day and have a core of residents who keep the area vibrant after commuters go home.... Office use isn't going back to pre-pandemic levels. Even Texas cities that did not shut down during the worst of the pandemic are 20 to 30 percent below 2019 office occupancy. New York, Los Angeles and D.C. are still down more than 40 percent. This a classic oversupply problem. Cities have too much office space, especially in the older buildings that companies are fleeing as they seek out new construction with more light and flexible space.
Mayors and city lawmakers have reason to be bold in seizing this opportunity. There's growing interest among developers and investors who want to be a part of the office-to-apartment revolution. They are already eyeing the easiest buildings to convert: The ones with elevators in the middle, windows and light on all sides, and the right length and width. The challenge for city leaders is to generate interest in the buildings that are "maybe" candidates for conversion.
The Post's suggestions include announcing targets for new residents living downtown, and speeding up city approvals like permitting and rezoning. "America's cities are ripe for new skylines and fresh streetscapes. The best leaders will get going soon."
The problem? America "is in the midst of one of the biggest workforce shifts in generations: Many now have experienced what it is like to work from home and have discovered they prefer it."
Their proposed solution? The Post's editorial board is urging cities to adapt to the new reality of workers wanting to work two or three days remotely in part by converting commercial offices to apartments and entertainment venues. The goal is a "24/7" downtown with ample work spaces, apartments, parks and entertainment venues that draw people in during the day and have a core of residents who keep the area vibrant after commuters go home.... Office use isn't going back to pre-pandemic levels. Even Texas cities that did not shut down during the worst of the pandemic are 20 to 30 percent below 2019 office occupancy. New York, Los Angeles and D.C. are still down more than 40 percent. This a classic oversupply problem. Cities have too much office space, especially in the older buildings that companies are fleeing as they seek out new construction with more light and flexible space.
Mayors and city lawmakers have reason to be bold in seizing this opportunity. There's growing interest among developers and investors who want to be a part of the office-to-apartment revolution. They are already eyeing the easiest buildings to convert: The ones with elevators in the middle, windows and light on all sides, and the right length and width. The challenge for city leaders is to generate interest in the buildings that are "maybe" candidates for conversion.
The Post's suggestions include announcing targets for new residents living downtown, and speeding up city approvals like permitting and rezoning. "America's cities are ripe for new skylines and fresh streetscapes. The best leaders will get going soon."
Obviously. (Score:2)
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll counter with a "not easily".
The structure of an office building doesn't easily lend itself to conversion to a residential building. Plumbing for one, is a big issue. Natural light is another. Because workers have to suck it up of they want a paycheck, lots of office buildings are very wide, with minimal natural light. It's a hard sell to be offered an apartment with only 2 windows, on the same side of the building.
Zoning is a stupid problem, but it's still a problem. As are building codes which are different between residential complexes and offices. Residential building codes often require that there be a fire escape and/or point of egress in case of emergency. The giant open floorplan I used to work in on the 4th floor just couldn't easily accommodate that on 2 or 3 sides.
Anything is doable, if you throw enough money at it. But I bet that in a lot of cities, it would be cheaper to tear down and rebiild office spaces than retrofit them into apartments and get them up to code.
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It's a hard sell to be offered an apartment with only 2 windows, on the same side of the building.
Unless you have a corner suite or a penthouse that is pretty much all of them.
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you'd be surprised how many people are willing to put up with a single window in their apartment as long as that apartment is affordable.
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I think you'd be surprised how many people are willing to put up with a single window in their apartment as long as that apartment is affordable.
True that. Especially if that apartment is in a good location.
Also, another thing is that, unlike cheap apartments, I never was in an office building and heard noise from people above or below me.
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Well, yes, but to be fair, there are usually only very few kids running around in offices.
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A commercial building converted to residential might also come with a parking garage that could accommodate two vehicles per apartment. Remember, the density of office workers is higher than the density of apartment residents. An office worker gets around 64sqft while even the smallest normal apartments are usually 5x that, and a two bedroom apartment will typically be 10x compared to what an office worker uses. Even if the residential conversion loses a lot of common-space that the office uses, if it ha
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Well.... look at mister sunshine, posting.on slashdot from the beach while topping up his tan.
Re: Obviously. (Score:3)
But why would you want to live in a city like that when there are no jobs that require you to be there. The only reason people lived in the cities, is because work needed to be centralized and businesses were dependent on the fast exchange of information that only is possible in a city. Once the Internet came along, the fast exchange of information and centralization was largely virtualized. The pandemic drove solutions to the last problems in mass business communication (Teams, Zoom etc) in overdrive and
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You don't get to enjoy the symphony or fine dining or stage plays in the wilderness. You don't get well-stocked libraries or art museums.
You also don't generally have quality mass-market medical care in the wilderness, outside of a few exceptions where the clinic also serves as a vacation resort.
And you're ignoring the fact that there's lots and lots of work where the worker actually does have to be there, including those who are highly paid white-collar workers there to support the blue-collar workers on
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The only reason people lived in the cities, is because work needed to be centralized
Not true at all. Many people enjoy urban life.
In SF, many people live in the city and commute to the Peninsula, East Bay, and even SV to work.
The same is true in NYC. Plenty of people commute into Manhattan from NJ and the outer boroughs, but plenty of people commute in the opposite direction.
I grew up as a country boy but later lived in downtown Shanghai for several years and loved it.
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I think you'd be surprised how many people are willing to put up with a single window in their apartment as long as that apartment is affordable.
This is true, but only as an initial consideration. After all, if a place isn't affordable, nothing else matters. However, after affordability is met, other considerations start mattering. School quality, backyards, playgrounds, ball fields, noise levels, air quality, parks, hiking trails. Also, high density housing usually implies limited or no car parking, which necessitates a good mass transit system, and unfortunately, in the United States there are very few cities aside from New York City and San F
Re:Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Office buildings are built such that few internal walls are in any way load bearing. Most of them are fairly thin aluminum studs with sheetrock attached. Adding and removing internal walls to customize an office space is a common operation. That includes running additional plumbing for sinks and in some cases showers.
I have seen a number of generic commercial spaces that had raised floors added for equipment cooling as well. No reason you couldn't run plumbing that way.
It's a significant refit, but nowhere near the cost of teardown and rebuild and makes more sense than leaving a bunch of skyscrapers to return to nature.
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Yeah. You've probably heard of macerating toilets. You can mount those right against the new walls you setup, and they grind the waste so it can travel on a thin enough sewer line that will go in the new walls.
You would plumb your sinks that way, and showers would have an elevated floor pan with the same idea - run the plumbing inside the new dividing walls.
Re: Obviously. (Score:2)
Macerating toilets are limited by code for good reason. Thereâ(TM)s more to plumbing than just having shit get out of the bowl effectively. Thereâ(TM)s an entire engineering problem youâ(TM)ve got with venting, water pressure and supply. People going to the bathroom in an office for 8h/day is not the same throughput that you need for families cooking, cleaning, washing and using the bathroom, pouring fat and other stuff down the disposal.
An office needs about 6 bathrooms for 150 people (30,00
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With commercial buildings with much taller ceilings, you'd just retrofit the 'floor' to be a couple of feet above the structural floor, with all of the plumbing in that raised floor. You'd use ramps to get up to that elevation to maintain accessibility. No need to go with funky toilets or other specialty systems.
Re: Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
The downtown of my local metro area has other issues:
The legacy of decades of hair-brained 'revenue generation' scheming, and the inevitable lack of available public parking, one way streets, shit police behavior/presence, and a greedy saliva dripping mindset from city officials about 'getting money'.
They *ALWAYS* want to 'just skip' the 'regrowth' part, and jump straight to the 'and then we extract every goddamn nickel!' part.
This is WHY they consistently refuse to make what few parking garages are down there public access and free, why they refuse to tear out parking meters, why they plug their ears and make loud "i can't hear you!' noises when you mention affordability being NECESSARY to attracting *ANYTHING* to move into downtown, etc.
The sunk costs fallacy overhead is practically insurmountable. They will NOT budge on the 'And THEN we take every last nickel!" part, right at the gate, because of how hungry they are to justify those sunk costs.
If you ask me, the many urban renewal projects for American Downtowns, their failures, modes of failure, etc all have these basic things in common, including the myopic and greedy administration styles in charge.
The whole idea of 'moving people downtown' is to puy them in proximity with shops, so that the city can then tax the shops. (And charge rent to the people living there). It does not seem to occur to these people that the people moving downtown will be poor and desperate, or that the businesses there would be stuck trying to play uphill games against a labyrinth of city officials and groups, just to repaint an ugly and dilapidated exterior. The costs of doing business are catastrophically prohibitive; that is WHY the downtown DIED.
In many cases, they would simply be better off demolishing the 'historic city center!', razing it to the ground, then selling the plots for development after ripping out all the one-way streets, parking meters, and other 'we gotta gets the moneys and controls the peoples!' BS.
Until you can get those heads out of thier respectively protective anal coverings on these simple matters, efforts to 'revive' downtowns in the US are doomed to a wasteful spincycle of unworkable initiatives, doomed from the start.
Re: Obviously. (Score:2)
It seems like you just described New York.
Louis Rossmann recently moved his business from NY to Texas due to the business-hostile climate in NY.
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I miss Louis's many rants about commercial real estate on his bike around NY.
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You're not going to make a vibrant, livable city by turning everything into a parking lot.
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This is WHY they consistently refuse to make what few parking garages are down there public access and free,
Undoing all that is a great way to get overrun with cars and utterly clogged up with almost stationary traffic.
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I was in Vancouver last year and our AirBNB was a converted office building. Worked just fine.
Re: Obviously. (Score:5, Informative)
Fire codes fuck things up, too. By law, a bedroom has to have a window... So if there's only one window, that's where the law requires you to put the bedroom... and put the rooms where you actually CARE about natural light and a view, like the living room, or the home office where your spend most of your daylight hours, in the windowless interior.
I've seen Miami building department officials reject a developer's proposed floorplan for a deep, narrow 1 bedroom unit because the official decided the bedroom was "too big". The official's rationale was, "the tenant will use the nominal bedroom at his living+dining room, and use the nominal dining room as a sleeping alcove." That's why units like that always have absurdly tiny bedrooms.
This is the same reason why nominal "dens" aren't allowed to have a door or closet, and why large walk in closets in the windowless interior of a deep condo aren't allowed. To building officials, any room that could potentially be used AS a bedroom has to satisfy the requirements OF a bedroom, regardless of what you call it on the floorplan.
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Yes! Everyone thinks square-footage, but they never consider how different office building is from an apartment when it comes to the utilities.
Plumbing:
- Toilets
- Bathroom Sinks
- Kitchen Sinks
- Showers/Baths
- Dishwashers
- Clothing Washers
- Appropriate Metering
Electrical:
- Appropriate Metering
- Refrigerators
- Stoves/Ovens (I assume you don't want to pipe in natural gas)
- Washers/Dryers
Sewage/Trash
And so on. Office buildings aren't built to become residential buildings. They would require massive gut jobs and
Re: Obviously. (Score:2)
It's often the other way around, houses built close to the factories half a century ago for workers.
Then today outsiders buy the house and complains about factory noise and dirt.
Re: Obviously. (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly some parts of Los Angeles make me think it was hit by a nuclear bomb a few years ago and the media just ignored it just like they do with the routine gang violence. I think that, when given the choice, people would rather not live in a progressive utopia, because despite their promises of the contrary, it more resembles a dystopia. But it's ok, because the politicians who are all paid more than the president of the United States, are there to remind you that rich people are the cause of all of your
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You should have seen New York in the 1970s...
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But it's ok, because the politicians who are all paid more than the president of the United States, are there to remind you that rich people are the cause of all of your problems.
The modern right's fear of elected government while at the same time worshipping economic elites is truly baffling to me. Comments like yours illustrate this well, the left doesnt show those you put on high enough respect and made up claims like "the left hates the rich" or "the left blames all problems on the rich" logically then follow as apparently it's okay to demonize and make things up about those who don't show enough piety to our betters.
Re: Obviously. (Score:2)
But the article claims all the jobs and businesses have left and their workers are working from home in the country. Why would you want to live in a shitty apartment, converted by some government agency when for the same price you can live and work on a nice 2 acre tract of land in Iowa
Re: Obviously. (Score:2)
Because in a densely populated city (the goal of these conversions), you can walk or ride a metro to hundreds of restaurants, clubs, cafes, shops, museums, art galleries, churches, parks, theaters, etc.
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you can live and work on a nice 2 acre tract of land in Iowa
I think you just answered that yourself there.
Great idea but (Score:2)
Will they only do it if they can charge exorbitant above-commercial rates?
Do real estate developers care about homelessness more than the business losses they can file?
The plan might help availability, but I have doubts on any help towards affordability,
unless it is some old office building that is in too poor of a condition for commercial use anyway.
More predatory profit seeking, as is expected.
The first hint was the phrase "entertainment venues".
Are we short on those in any city with big buildings?
The sec
Cars out, social areas in (Score:5, Interesting)
Car-free random areas with nooks and plazas and weird angles, with plenty of bars and cafes open for long hours are what make many European cities so pleasant, and human, and busy.
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If shops were allowed at the base of each building as well, it could organically grow into a place people do want to be. People would start getting apartments that are even in the same building as where they work hybrid remote.
Re: Cars out, social areas in (Score:4, Informative)
Shops in the base of skyscrapers don't do nearly as well as most people think. There really isn't a whole lot of market demand for small spaces with limited parking for business serving mostly customers who live within walking distance.
If you go somewhere like Chicago, the only skyscrapers with thriving "ground floor retail" are buildings where an escalator on the corner plunges into a 3 story high basement containing some big box store like Target, Best Buy, maybe a grocery store like Kroger, etc. And even then, 90% of the customers parked in the garage and took an elevator down. Regardless, you end up with 2 sides of block-long wall along a sidewalk, and 2 sides that might as well be.
Miami had god knows how many new skyscrapers with street-level spaces ostensibly for retail stores. Most of them are vacant, and pretty much everyone expects them to stay that way because the building's developer made no provisions for free short term customer parking, so nobody sane will open a shop there. You can only get away with *so* many art galleries and one-person law firms before the rent value falls below what investors are willing to even bother with instead of leaving them vacant indefinitely.
Seriously. Downtown Miami has *staggering* amounts of vacant first floor commercial space in its new skyscrapers that literally nobody wants to rent, it even in condos and apartments that are fully rented or occupied, because there aren't enough people within walking distance to sustain the business, and parking is too expensive or too much of a hassle for anyone who isn't within walking distance to bother with.
I know people who live in downtown Miami who literally get in their car and drive 8 miles to Dadeland to shop at stores that technically exist a mile away from their condo, because parking at Dadeland is free, while the store a mile away is too far to walk to and charges $2-10 to park, so they say "fuck it" and drive to the store with free parking.
Re:Cars out, social areas in (Score:5, Insightful)
And noisy, and polluted, not conducive to getting sleep or privacy.
LOL, not at all actually. Bars and cafes are incredibly quiet compared to actual traffic. Give me a car free entertainment area over a road any day of the week.
For this in action you can take a look at the Netherlands. It has among the quietest city centres in the world, and absolutely no shortages of bars, clubs, cafes, restaurants, or shopping in easy walking distance from anyone who lives in the city.
Can't leave your windows open to get fresh air
a), it's cold outside, and b) that's what heat recovery mechanical ventilation is for. Opening windows sounds like something archaic that our ancestors used to do.
But hey, if you prefer living like a rat in a cage, go for it.
That sounds horrible. That is why I don't put myself out in the middle of nowhere and fence myself in. You live in a house. I live in a city. I own a house, rented out to people who prefer that lifestyle. I for one am glad to be rid of the insane restriction of the burbs.
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I for one am glad to be rid of the insane restriction of the burbs.
What restriction? Other than not letting your grass grow three feet high you are free to do whatever you want. Want to paint your house purple with green spots? Go for it. What to have a black toilet? No problem. Unless you're stupid enough to live in a place which has an HOA, there are no restrictions on what you can do with your home. Nor is there someone stomping around on your ceiling in the middle of the night. No drunks howling o
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bonus points, the place I work at isnt in a city center, I don't have to get near 45 min of that hell hole of bums and hipsters
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Hipster bums, will insta for food
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What restriction?
Lifestyle restrictions. You have to get in the car and drive places to be anywhere that's not in your house or garden.
Also... black toilet? Is there something about black toilets which prevents installation in cities?
No drunks howling outside your open window (why is it archaic to get free cool air?), no din of cars honking their horns, no drunks puking on your doorstep.
If you get a flat in the dodgiest area of the bar district that might be your experience. It's not mine.
Re: Cars out, social areas in (Score:2)
I donâ(TM)t think you actually have ever lived in the city center of Rotterdam, Amsterdam or Brussels. It empties out once the tourists leave and it becomes pretty dangerous to go outside, bus stops and other public transport are just places where crime victims are forced to congregate. Cars are too expensive, so people spend a LOT more time commuting. And yes, you can drive a bike, but it gets stolen on a very regular basis.
I used to spend 4 hours commuting for an 8 hour work day (shift work at a call
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Maybe I'm weird but I much prefer to wear a sweater and open the windows to let the breeze blow through than to use mechanical ventilation. Even a little noise is fine.
As for pollution, that's why you shouldn't live near a major road.
My parents live in a house next to a freeway. Due to the noise, they're pretty much forced to close the windows and use mechanical ventilation,
Re: Cars out, social areas in (Score:2)
"Amsterdam" might only be ~883k by the DUTCH definition, but an AMERICAN would look at a map of the Netherlands, mentally draw a line from the easternmost suburb of Rotterdam to Markermeer, and call literally everything west of that line "Amsterdam" (with a population that's probably several million).
To someone from the Netherlands, a house 5km from central Amsterdam isn't IN Amsterdam. By American standards, 5km from "downtown" is "the edge of downtown... but still downtown"
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We know how it works. E.G. San Francisco has a population of 815k. However, Amsterdam has a population density of 4.4k people per square km...whereas San Francisco is 7.2K per square km. The Netherlands also has a total population of only 17.5 million...which is about half the population of the individual U.S. state that contains San Francisco.
Notice how I converted to square kilometers...and didn't try to make a flimsy differentiation between "AMERICAN" and "DUTCH" measurements.
Long story short...Fuck o
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Because the states, like California, can do nothing to solve problems.
Right.
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It's real easy to bullshit when you ignore the facts.
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> >
> "with plenty of bars and cafes open for long hours are what make many European cities so pleasant, and human, and busy."
> And noisy, and polluted,
You cut off the "CAR FREE" part of the sentence, then complained about the pollution.
You're not very good at this discussion thing, are you ?
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Usually things get very bad (Score:2)
I live in a medium-sized city. Maybe it’s different in the mega cities. But I suspect it’s the same. Owners will hold onto skyscrapers even if they’re less than half occupied.
Re: Usually things get very bad (Score:2)
In New York the potential property value is so high that it's worth to hold on to a condemned building.
Proof of concept accomplished (Score:3)
Elon Musk is, once again, ahead of the curve -- turning the Twitter San Francisco office into Downtown apartments, where the "hardcore" employees can work, sleep and live in not complete discomfort. Elon Musk Has Outfitted Twitter’s Headquarters With Bedrooms For Employees [forbes.com]
Elon Musk's “extremely hardcore” vision for Twitter seems to have manifested itself in sad little conference-room sleeping quarters at the company's recently depopulated headquarters.
On Monday, employees returning to work at the company’s San Francisco location were greeted by modest bedrooms featuring unmade mattresses, drab curtains and giant conference-room telepresence monitors — a significant upgrade over the Therm-a-Rest+sleeping bag situation showcased by one Twitter employee in November. One room even has a plant.
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There was a time where I wouldn't have minded a place to sleep in the same building where I work. Not forever, but there were a few months where it would have been really useful (provided it was done right, meaning that nobody will come knocking for any reason).
However I recognize I'm in the minority. Probably less than 5% of employees at any company would want this. This is something I would have asked the company for, on my own initiative. For the company to just install them with the expectation that the
No - apartments aren't the issue (Score:2)
Most American cities are not laid out or designed in a way to cope with people densely living in a city centre. Tearing down services they rely on to make way for parking while eliminating the concept of multi-zoned buildings made downtown a great place to work, a crap place to get to and a horrible place to live in.
Simply throwing apartments in doesn't address the underlying problem that there's a reason Americans largely don't want to live in American city centres. You don't just need apartments. You need
Totally different buildings (Score:3)
Too Expensive To Do So (Score:2, Insightful)
Converting office buildings is generally REALLY expensive. Offices are generally built with a single mens and women's bathroom on the floor. Maybe a kitchen somewhere. The amount of work to install bathrooms with proper drains in every apartment unit is a HUGE cost.
It's generally cheaper to knock the building down and start fresh.
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It's cheaper to knock a building down and build another one than to run some new plumbing? Go on, pull the other one, that's complete nonsense. I've added plumbing, I've never put up a building.
Re: Too Expensive To Do So (Score:2)
OP is a handyman plumbtrician. Why is the water not going down the pipe, just put a pump in it.
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It's been done. But yeah, it ain't cheap. And neither will the rents be when the work is done. Converted lofts rent for crazy prices here in Seattle. So if it costs money to re-do the plumbing, the landlord will recoup the costs. The neighborhood will be for the wealthy. And once they move downtown and begin voting their best interests, the poor (and middle income people) will quietly be escorted out.
It isn't going to be a hipster artists colony like many are hoping for. That tends to happen off the books
Personal Observation (Score:2)
A personal observation; when the local council decided to allow franchise shops to open on Sunday, CBD shopping collapsed and council fees skyrocketed. The council suggested repurposing the now-empty upstairs offices for residential use but the buildings were erected in 1920s: With narrow stairs and one-room offices and a lack of private car-spaces. Plus, the buildings had heritage status so re-modeling is not allowed.
Nope (Score:2)
Look at Denver, downtown is full of meth heads, heroin addicts and homeless. The only way Denver is going to come back is with action getting rid of homeless people and throwing druggies underneath the jail.
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The subject says "Transform Dead Downtowns". It didn't say to what.
Board up all the empty office buildings. Junkies pry plywood off the doors and move in (and off the street). Housing for the homeless. Check.
Junkies manage to burn down 1920s buildings protected with heritage status. Clear a whole block that way and developers can come in and start with a clean sheet.
Why not mixed units? (Score:2)
I've seen small multi-story mixed unit living/shopping areas, that seems to work well.
So how about you leave some floors in downtown high rises open for apartments, and some for business use?
Imagine being able to ride an elevator into the office! Or being able to take 30 minutes at the office and get a real nap in in your own bed.
Or, even just floors of shared working spaces like UpWork has, where people could take a break from home apartments and being able to have an office area you can use when you like
Re: Why not mixed units? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with "ride an elevator to work" is that companies lay everyone off and go tits up every time the economy hiccups. So... You buy a condo in the building where you work today, enjoy elevator commuting for a few months... maybe a couple of years is you get lucky... then you have to get a new job elsewhere, and you're back to square one with a hellish commute that might be even WORSE than if you lived in mid-suburbia.
Trying to live where you work it's futile if you own, and point-blank long-term IMPOSSIBLE (even if you rent) if you have a spouse who works. Eventually, one or both of you will end up having to take a job 20+ miles away.
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death of the city (Score:2)
Cities create a concentration of wealth.
The digital age can bring in a new age of decentralisation
and dispersing wealth more evenly.
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Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.
do something about crime and they will come (Score:2, Insightful)
Who wants to live in a downtown area where the crime is? I can name many cities where you cannot walk the downtown streets without eventually becoming a victim. Would you feel safe coming home from work or a night out to your downtown home in St. Louis, Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and many others? It is a major reason why some businesses are moving out.
Re:Probably... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, look at how people are throwing a fit about Airbnb's in cities...
Airbnb hotel rooms take housing away from people. They exacerbate the problem of people finding a permanent home rather than renting. That's why people are upset.
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a permanent home rather than renting
Renting permanently is ok, the problem is Airbnb also takes apartments out of that pool, when a landlord notices how much more profitable it is to rent it to travellers at a daily rate rather than to families on a permanent basis. Airbnb makes it impossible to find apartments to rent at an affordable price.
Re: Probably... (Score:2)
AirBnb might look appealing, but it's not always that due to bad visitors and that it might break zoning laws or city ordinances.
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Renting permanently is ok, the problem is Airbnb
I continue to see people say this, but I have yet to see a single scientific based study
I did not say it was better or worse than something else, just that "it's ok". It's not by itself something that makes your life bad. What makes life bad is Airbnb destroying the rental market.
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There are people buying homes and turning them into airbnbs, which pay the mortgages. This increases the cost of housing, even if they rent them full time through airbnb they have to cover their costs so it makes it more expensive. And they're willing to pay more than people who aren't planning to make them an airbnb because they will pay for themselves. The whole purpose of airbnb is to enable unlicensed hotels, that's where their bread and butter is, the supposed sharing economy is a lie.
Re: Probably... (Score:2)
Perhaps that means hotels are overregulated.
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How exactly are hotels overregulated?
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Renting permanently is ok, the problem is Airbnb
I continue to see people say this, but I have yet to see a single scientific based study that proves this.
I'd guess the reason why you never saw "a single study" on it is because you never looked for one. Here are two. Now you can say you HAVE seen studies on it:
1: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... [ssrn.com]
2: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... [ssrn.com]
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In my city, various regulations such as height limits, maximum floor area ratios, minimum setbacks and minimum parking requirements artificially limit our density to about 1/9th of European cities. Meanwhile, Airbnb occupies about 3% of the housing stock. So regulations are about 90% of the problem and Airbnb is about 3%.
But sure, throw in some more regulations and see if that fixes the problem caused by regulations. What do they say about someone who does the same thing over and over again while expecting
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minimum parking requirements artificially limit our density to about 1/9th of European cities.
You really think US housing is more regulated than Eurpopean?
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I understand the argument...but either way the property is paid for. I also understand that people argue this drives out certain businesses in favor of others...but, that is how markets work.
No, it's how cities fail.
Urban areas can't survive if workers can't afford to live there, and public transportation is a bad joke.
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These corporations have in fact strangled their own profits by building too many commercial units and not enough residential. The commercial space sits empty because there's no workers, as there's nowhere for them to live.
Re: Probably... (Score:2)
Good, the market at work, let them go broke and the cities will empty themselves out over time. Perhaps someone will tear down the buildings and put up some residential units if there is demand.
As the article contends, right now there is no demand for these units as commercial space, and the people that lived in the city to be in the commercial spaces also moved out. So there is no use for the space, nobody wants to work there, nobody will want to live there, because the work is not there. Convert it into f
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In theory that is true, but what happens if you just can't get the business suits filled? At that point, it is better to get some money rather than none at all. I have already seen this in action since my old office was in a mall that had 3 towers and two towers had been converted to apartments.
Re: No. (Score:2)
Just look at some places like New York whete it's somehow more profitable to have a condemned empty building than one with tenants.
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Or the city just won't rezone as residential.
Re: No. (Score:2)
Because NY requires you to pay the only tenants willing to live there.
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A mall is a lot smaller than a high rise.
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It was 3 towers joined by a mall. I could sit in my office desk and see into the apartments of the next tower over.
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because commercial real estate is much, much more profitable. And profit is what matters.
No. The mere existence of commercial real estate isn't profitable at all. You actually need tenants. Sure you can sit there dreaming of riches while getting nothing, or you can take a smaller cut of residential tenants. Those are the offers on the table.
Yes. (Score:2)
It certainly depends on circumstances, but it is happening right now
Over $1.2 Billion in Office-to-Residential Conversions Proposed for Chicago’s LaSalle Street Corridor [costar.com]
City Would Offer Public Dollars To Help Reduce Unwanted Workspace, Increase Affordable Housing
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In many cases, it's not. But the owners are so crazy leveraged that an honest assessment would show them to have a negative net worth. But as long as they all pretend that they might one day actually be able to rent out their long vacant (in many cases over 10 years) commercial space for the crazy prices they ask, the loan officers will pretend right along with them to avoid the big on paper losses to go with the big real losses.
If someone flinches and reduces rent to a level that might actually attract a t
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Yeah that's a completely insane thing that I just learned about recently. Just absolutely nuts that you can use a made up fantasy prices
"I have this one bedroom apartment ready to be rented out as office space for $1m/year. It's been empty for 5 years, but any day now!"
"Ok, your loan to buy more property is approved!"
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What has been the case over the past couple decades is financing. Some years the banks are funding converting old office building to hotels. Others to rent apartments. The other years condos.
The other part of the equation is who will live there. When I was downtown we had bars and movie
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Landlords keep rentals empty because of how financing on commercial real estate works. If they rent to someone who pays less, they have to put up cash to ensure they meet the equity requirements of the load (because if you're in the business of commercial property, you pull out whatever equity you can, as often as you can, to buy more property). That can easily run six figures, out of pocket, immediately.
But if they leave it empty, they can deduct an amount from the load payment proportional to the lost inc
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I take your professionalism and substitute my own.
Doesn't bother me if someone's cat jumps on them mid call or if a kid wanders in or even if someone is cradling a baby. Good reminder that my co workers are all real humans with real lives not corporate robots.