There are 16,000,000 empty homes and 500,000 homeless. Office buildings aren’t going to be solving any real problem other than the people who own the building being shit out of luck
More supply is more supply. It’ll probably drive rent down a bit, assuming the plan works. This makes little difference to unemployed homeless people and does nothing to address the fact that many wealthy people see homes as a tool to secure their capital, but it’s not nothing. Hopefully it will help some people who are on the brink be a bit more secure in their housing.
The corporate landlords will just buy them up and let them sit empty the way they have done with at least 4 highrises that I can think of off the top of my head in downtown San Diego. Sure they have rented some of them, but the majority of those buildings sit empty.
No one can afford rent on luxury apartments
Greedy real estate hogs and speculators are criminals imo.
Where did you get those numbers from? Where is your source?
https://www.gao.gov/homelessness#:~:text=Issue Summary,factors like higher rental prices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/business/economy/us-homeless-population-count.html
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/
https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/homeless-population-by-state
www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/report-how-many-homes-are-sitting-empty-in-your-state/amp/
https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/16-million-homes-vacant-in-us
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/vacant-seasonal-housing.html
There’s no kill like overkill lmao
Thanks Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug
Please don’t provide this stat without context. It just promotes cynicism and despair. Reality is complex, and our solutions are going to have to be complex.
Many of these vacant homes are nowhere near major homeless populations. But office buildings often are.
https://ggwash.org/view/73234/vacant-houses-wont-solve-our-housing-crisis
Edit: If you prefer videos, here’s a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xZXdXxYBGU
Are they were they are needed? Would we need to move people across the county to fill them? Or are they kept mostly empty as a form of storing wealth?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
(tldr: 2 sentences skipped)
Joe Biden’s administration has come up with a plan it thinks can help address the housing crisis: encouraging developers to turn unwanted office buildings into apartments.
Converting offices to residential properties can be challenging due to the expense of refitting, as well as complying with zoning laws and other regulations.
But the White House initiative will make more than $35 billion available from existing federal programs in the form of grants and low-interest loans to encourage developers to convert offices into residential.
(tldr: 2 sentences skipped)
Following the rise of home working when the pandemic struck and the reluctance of many employees to start commuting again five days a week, business districts have been struggling.
(tldr: 2 sentences skipped)
Last December Silverstein Properties, one of America’s largest commercial landlords, announced plans to raise more than $1.5 billion to convert unwanted office space into residential housing in markets ranging from New York to San Francisco.
(tldr: 6 sentences skipped)
Conversions are faster than new construction, 20% cheaper, and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, the White House added.
The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This should also help liven up downtowns that become ghost towns after 5/6pm.
More people living there will support more of the things that keep an area lively.
Watching the Biden admin is wild. At one minute he’ll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine and Palestine, but the next he’ll be funding the NLRB and addressing the housing crisis in a way that improves walk-ability.
It’s like, he has two settings: “actually useful moderate” and “KILLKILLKILLKILL”
Unfortunately, this makes him the best US president since carter
I don’t know who you are personally, and you may not realise it, but you’re parroting Russian propaganda. The only one here escalating is Russia when they kept bullying Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. The West have been chastised for letting Putin get away with Crimean annexation, instead of further sanction. Many countries have also thought a charm offensive might satiate Putin, essentially appeasing. But history has shown, appeasement never works because an egomaniac will never be satisfied. Putin thought that he’d get away with it again when he invaded the entirety of Ukraine, but didn’t realise it’s the red line for the West, and the Ukrainians put up a stiff fight.
LOL
Cope
With what exactly?
Russia getting stomped by a much smaller and normally less well equipped army.
If you listen to Russian cope, I’m sure this was all part of their glorious plan.
How are downtown luxury apartments solving the housing crisis?
he’ll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine
Eh???
US politicians only disagree (a little bit) on domestic policy, on foreign policy they’re all in lock-step. that used to feel like a truism, but it’s been proven very true.
Show me on the doll where Biden addressed the housing crisis
Jesus Christ, Hexbear.
Escalating the war in Ukraine? Please explain how the U.S. has “escalated” the full blown Russian invasion of Ukraine without sounding like a fool.
love too fund the NLRB after publicly breaking the power of the rail unions and setting worker power back another decade
Think of the real estate investors! /s
Oh, I’m sure they’ll charge a minimum of $2k/month even for the shittiest of the shithole office apartments. They’ll get their money don’t worry.
Excellent stuff from Dark Brandon. NICE!
The reason for high cost of living in cities was that’s where the offices were…
Now we don’t need offices. So convert them to apartments to lower housing costs in the short term, and telework means people won’t move to cities as much in the long term.
This is actually a good idea…
But the White House initiative will make more than $35 billion available from existing federal programs in the form of grants and low-interest loans to encourage developers to convert offices into residential.
Developers will do this anyway if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?
The developers are doing fine, it’s the average American that’s struggling, stop funneling money to the people who already have a shit ton of it, trickle down doesn’t fucking work
Developers won’t do it though. Otherwise, we’d already have this happening. What they do now is call it a loss and get a break on their taxes.
Which is why all incentives for empty buildings should be eliminated. And if you move, convert or remove the old building instead of leaving an abandoned eyesore
Agreed. This is a good idea overall, but the implementation smells like a bailout of commercial real estate developers to me.
It’s the real estate developers that are in a pinch for building unneeded office buildings and the business that own too many of them. It’s the reason that bosses are bitching about in person work.
Ding dong ding!
But also to a point, it will take a significant amount of work to convert office space to residential. Just utilities alone will be an adventure, and you’d better hope the building was set up with decent truck lines down the core of the structure to begin with. It’s not like “hey let’s throw up some walls, boom, apartments.” You need adequate power distribution, and water/sewer connections to each apartment to fulfill each unit having it’s own kitchen and bathroom. Commercial spaces are generally build to accommodate different usage.
if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?
The Biden administration is doing that also, it just doesn’t make as good a headline.
Always happy to be pleasantly surprised.
Even tho it’s half what developers are getting, it’s better than nothing.
The President has also proposed a $10 billion down payment assistance program that would ensure first-time homebuyers whose parents do not own a home can access homeownership alongside a $100 million down payment assistance pilot to expand homeownership opportunities for first-generation and/or low wealth first-time homebuyers.
I don’t think what they are doing is as strong as you imply.
“Sorry your parents have a home they got in 1996 for basically nothing”
There’s nothing wrong with favoring the people with the least generational wealth first and foremost
I’m happy for those people who will benefit. But try being a kid of parents who have the mindset of “FU I got mine”. I’m not on favorable terms with my parents and won’t see a penny until they’ve passed, if they decide to give me anything at all.
It’s an odd requirement that should’ve been workshopped a little more.
Then why are we giving twice that to developers who own office buildings?
Just like with Covid and the PPE loans, they coulda given the money directly to the people but this is capitalism and the money has to go to your neo-feudal lord now before you can have any of it. Just wait for that trickle down. Trickle down from your boss, from your landlord, from your parents… your need for a place to live can wait.
That is a major assumption there is generational wealth. ESPECIALLY with trans/gay people being family-less in many situations. The down payment could easily be collected via estate tax to where everyone had the option of it but the wealthy paid more in. It can also completely ignore a lack of generational wealth like parents so wealthy they only rent multi million dollar apartments in Manhattan.
How does one “guarantee” a down payment?
The point of a down payment is if you default (don’t pay) your mortgage immediately, the bank keeps it, like they keep everything you pay before you default.
So if the government guarantees it, that means instead of putting (easy numbers) 10k down on a 100k house and having a mortgage for 90k, the government “co signs” and if you default in the first X years, they have to pay the 10k. But since you didn’t pay the 10k, your mortgage is still for 100k
When rent is more than a mortgage payment, this allows people to buy a house without spending years saving up a down payment
Developers will do this anyway if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?
Because that doesn’t do anything but provide guaranteed cash to existing property owners at the expense of people trying to stop renting. Until the supply side issue is addressed, homeownership will continue to be out of reach for most. The best case here would be to convert these buildings into condos or whatever the local word for apartments you own instead of rent is, but just rentals us a good second choice.
Refitting office space to make it liveable is actually super expensive. Commercial spaces don’t have the electric, plumbing, or insulation typically required or expected by residents. It can be cheaper to gut or even tear down the building in order to add the necessary MEP and framing, which is why you see developers are still building new rather than converting old commercial spaces. The money will encourage redevelopment which is far less wasteful and combats sprawl.
That said, I agree with you that you could make the money available to buyers instead of developers, but developers are the ones
paying the bribesdonating to campaigns.Can you back up any of the points you are claiming?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/imyPVFFACTk/?t=1m38s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m mostly speaking from personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt. But there’s a lot of developers writing articles based on their experiences.
99 percent invisible did an episode on it recently.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/transcript
Then those millionaire (from the examples in the link, billionaire) developers can let their building sit empty…
This is America, where a single cancer diagnosis can bankrupt a family for generations. If we were a civilized country, sure, bail everyone out.
But I don’t have sympathy for them when normal people are in such a tight spot.
Like if you’re a cardiologist and you’re helping someone you saw sprain their ankle, you’d be an idiot to keep helping them when there’s five people having heart attacks in the same room.
I’m with you, but you’re kidding yourself if you think the billionaire is going to suffer. They have leveraged the value with banks, and would skip on down the road with their fortunes while the banks that make mortgage loans have to shore up their books at the expense of common folks. Homebuyers, small businesses, and taxapyers will be expected to cover the losses.
The problem is that they are happy to let the building sit empty most of the time
The value of the land and building continue to go up as an investment, even if they aren’t earning money today on the space .
So they don’t actually give a fuck if it sits empty, but society does 
There are people developing solutions to this one of which is essentially building panels that house all the equipment and hookups and installing them at location. This is the mobile home industry trying to adapt.
SIP panels aren’t going to increase the main stack capacity. Commercial buildings just don’t have the capacity for all of the sinks and toilets being used at once. It’s a neat idea, and a low voltage lighting system could save a ton of energy, but you still need to gut the building and add critical MEP infrastructure.
I’m going to choose to agree with you since you seem to know what your talking about. It sounds like what you’re saying is they are built differently and it’s found to take a lot of work to being them up to mass living condition.
$35B sounds more like it’s intended to find a way to make these conversions possible and create a “blueprint” to be used elsewhere.
These conversions are already possible. It’s a big financial decision because you basically have to gut it, but it’s not hard work. (No you don’t have to demolish the whole building like the other guy says). Each building will be different so you can’t make a generic blueprint.
Developers don’t want to touch this. The amount of work it would take to turn an office building into an apartment building is more than you likely realise. Building code for the two are very different so fully gutting the building is first on the list. The amount of plumbing that would have to be added and so on. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I think it’s a great idea, but to get it done you have to make it profitable or the government will have to step up and hire engineers and contractors and operate the building after, which is of course comunism, and so will never happen. Full aside from the political issues, it just makes more sense to knock down the office building and build a whole new one that is actually designed for residential use. Too little too late no matter what happens with the office buildings. It should never have been allowed, from the start, for corporate entities to buy up housing at all. Not apartment buildings, not single family homes. That has to be fixed first.
Dude, yes it’s a lot of work to gut it, no it doesn’t make more sense to knock it down. You gut it. It’s not that hard. You basically have a free shell, foundations and parking and all.
We have that already.
They are called usda and fha loans
The Mortgage Insurance Premium (FHA) and Annual Guarantee Fee (USDA) make either costly in the long run. You get to skip the down payment, but the added cost of mortgage insurance (irrespective of how it’s labeled) hurts lower income borrowers. Both are costly, and neither are necessary. The property is the collateral. The lender loses future revenue and is inconvenienced if the borrower defaults, but they obviously do well enough overall to shoulder that burden.
Fuck yes. As a libertarian it bothers me that I can’t make my home in any space I can own.
I understand not building rendering plants next to houses. Some zoning is okay. But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
Wait why can’t you do this? People definitely live in their gas stations / offices / whatever. It’s just not zoned for that, meaning it wasn’t made for that purpose, it’ll be suboptimal. But like, I don’t think the cops are out to look for your sleeping bag.
This is what most Chinese food joints around here do. They are usually family owned, and they live in the back.
And, lo and behold, Chinese immigrants tend to be successful. They work hard, ignore the rules trying to hold them down, and as a result kick ass and make the world a better place.
Those of us born here tend to be too naive and trusting to break the rules, and we complain about how the system is designed to hold us down.
Except people think the economy is that system that’s been designed to hold us down. No, it’s the law. Law can be useful and helpful but the way we use it is harmful. And it’s the part that is actually designed. Like, we literally have committees dedicated to designing the law.
TOS can be kinda shit, and negotiated contracts in general can be lopsided and unfair, but that is mitigated by competition. A person must select between a handful of cell carriers, which sucks that it’s not more, but nobody’s choosing governments, at least not without dedicating like 10 years of their life to the process of switching.
Thank god we have a federated system in the US, because that allows people to shop around for governments to a quite limited degree.
Anyway. I have high praise for immigrants who are willing to break the rules. I think it’s a sign of maturity to be at least capable of breaking the rules, and I think it’s telling that the set of people who arrived here through a harrowing journey, as opposed to just being born, are the same set of people who give the finger to stupid laws.
Yeah but the combination fried rice has to be on point
Libertarians: Always finding the rarest of occurrences to continue their dismantling of government and the systems that gave them everything they have. lmao
The rarest of occurrences?
Ubiquitous government meddling (in the form of, among other things, rules like “no more than one dwelling per half acre”) in the real estate market has resulted in this housing crisis we all face. People are dying of stress related illnesses and self inflicted gunshot wounds, and the survivors are dealing with enormous amounts of anxiety and hopelessness, because rents keep rising and rising,
Supply is artificially, heavily suppressed and people wonder why prices skyrocket.
Everyone attributes it to “landlord greed” but provider greed is regulated by market competition when supply is allowed to follow market forces.
A person having to spend $1500/mo just to sleep when they’re trying to run a business, when they’re perfectly willing to crash on a couch in their office, means the threshold for going into business for oneself is artificially raised.
I could rant about other markets too but there’s plenty of government-created horror to be found in real estate alone.
Also the notion that the government “gave them everything they have” is ridiculous. The government gave us the Drug War and a nuclear-armed Israel. Other governments gave us The Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, the Trail of Tears, and other unimaginably horrific acts of human savagery.
Humans’ ability to negotiate and make deals to trade resources and cooperate on projects — willingly — is what gave us what we have today.
All problems created by deregulation
How does deregulation restrict the housing supply?
By giving corporations and foreign investors the ability to buy up all they want, create scarcity, and tyrn the country into a high rent environment…you know, LIKE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
Were there regulations at some point in US history that prevented that?
Yes. There have been rent controls and outside investor restrictions. Lots of restrictions were lifted after the 2008 crisis, turning the housing industry iver to banks and private equity firms. And while you might be prone to saying that zoning restrictions caused urban sprawl, it should be noted that developers and real estate corporations wrote those laws and not a government serving the people. Today I learned from my Canadian friends that foreign investors are not allowed to buy Canadian properties. Meanwhile US is selling to anyone with the money no matter where they’re from.
Landlords being allowed to permanently take rentals off the market (by pretending to do construction work on them forever) to artificially reduce supply and drive up prices is a major problem. This practice used to be blocked by inspection laws that were removed.
I have a counter-point that I’d like to hear your thoughts on: at least to some degree, it seems like part of the housing crisis is caused by private equity firms not being restricted from buying up property, artificially reducing the supply of housing that can be purchased by then renting it out, which artificially increases the cost of housing and making it less accessible. More of the population then has less wealth, while smaller portions of the population end up with more wealth, again making homeownership farther out of reach.
Yeah, that’s the proximal cause. A small cartel gains control of the limited supply, allowing them to set higher prices.
This happens all the time. The thing is, free markets have a solution for that. It’s a negative feedback loop that goes like:
- Party A buys up all the Xes, then raises their price by 100%
- Parties B, C, and D, who weren’t interested in making and selling Xes before, suddenly see a profit in it now that the prices are higher
- Instead of putting their resources into producing Y, they switch to producing X, chasing that profit
- With more parties entering that market, supply increases
- This nullifies A’s ability to control the supply
The problem I’m talking about in our housing market is that step 3 is blocked. Despite other companies or individuals wanting to get in on this gravy train, by building their own housing to start producing profit, they can’t because there are laws prohibiting them from doing so.
Now, it’s not impossible to do new construction. But it is far more expensive than it naturally would be.
Like, let’s say a certain area is highly sought after. Let’s say there’s 1000 people who’d like to live there. But there are only 100 units (houses, apartments). Some billionaire buys all 100 units, and now controls the supply of housing. For each apartment they have ten candidates willing to outbid one another. They get to crank those prices up like mad.
The solution in a free market would be that a different billionaire (or maybe a lowly millionaire, or a coop composed of twenty fifty-thousandaires), or a big corporation, or whoever, decides they’re gonna build 500 more apartments.
Now you’ve got 600 apartments for those 1000 who want to live there, and you don’t have quite the same power to ask ridiculously high prices.
But the way our housing market works, it’s either extremely costly (like you need an environmental impact statement and you don’t know how it will turn out and if it turns out against your favor you can’t proceed, losing everyone you’ve invested so far), or zoning says “you can’t do more than ten dwellings per block here” and instead of 500 new units you can only build 50, or it’s just straight-up impossible to get permission to build.
That’s what I mean by an artificially-constrained supply.
The real ideal is for those 1000 people who want to live there, you’ve got 1100 housing units, and now the landlords are in competition with one another to attract tenants. 100 units are vacant and that is a source of negotiating power for the tenants.
But because we’re so stuck seeing that would-be investment — that would expand the supply — in terms of rich people getting richer, (and for many other reasons) we block that new construction and keep supply limited, which is to the benefit of the people who control that supply, and to the detriment to both (a) the people who would like to come in as alternate suppliers, and (b) to the people who need to use that supply.
I mean, even if we don’t want to think about incentives or negotiation, if we only want to focus on physical events in the world you can see, if there’s a housing problem the solution is to build more housing, and laws against building more housing are a problem.
It’s artificially limited, but I don’t think the number of housing units is necessarily how the limitation is imposed. You see, landlords aren’t actually interested in tenants, they’re interested in property values going up. Why? Because land and housing are legally considered capital, the value of which they can leverage for loans. That results in what we see happening in NYC and many other places, where apartments and retail spaces can lie vacant for years because the rent demanded by the owner is absurd, but to ask for less rent would lower the building’s valuation. It’s also why we have far more empty housing units than homeless people in this country, about 27 empty units for each homeless person. If these landlords were honestly participating in the market, or if housing wasn’t considered capital, housing prices never would have gotten this high - and I suspect the same is true of the number of homeless.
The hyper-wealthy basically gave themselves a cheat code decades ago and have been abusing it to the detriment of markets and regular people ever since. We have a government body, the FTC, that’s supposed to put a stop to this kind of market abuse, but the last time it really did its job at all was when it broke up Ma Bell forty years ago. For far too long it’s been content to let corporations that are already far too big and have far too much influence over the market continue buying up their competitors or colluding to inflate bubbles.
As a libertarian
Why are you attracted to children?
But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
Why can’t you? I don’t believe that there is any law saying you need to have a home in a residential zoned area (anti-homeless laws say that you cannot use public space as a home).
As far as I know, zoning laws just say that you cannot sell or rent out a property in a commercial district as residential. That is a false advertising/minimum allowable quality law, much like you cannot sell the meat of an a diseased animal. Commercial areas likely don’t have the infrastructure (schools, utilities, safety) for people to live in.
Offices are actually chill if you take out the cubicles and stuff. They are spacious, neutral, and have a bathroom and roof access.
I worked in a few skyscraper type offices and they are pretty awesome. The view was always crazy and there were always good food options nearby right in the middle of the city. You could make a nice house in there. Just need the bathroom and kitchen to be near the center of the building. You could probably fit 4 nice size units on each floor of my old building. But they would want to make a ton of tiny overpriced ones instead so they will say there isn’t enough plumbing lol.
I like how this is finally acknowledging WFH as something that is here to stay but I’m not sure I understand the connection with the housing crisis. From the article:
New York’s famous Flatiron Building will soon be converted from empty offices into luxury residences
Luxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis. But maybe I’m wrong and there will also be developers converting less prestigious office space into affordable housing…
The other thing I don’t get is this: I don’t know Manhattan but I did work in some (I assume) similar business hubs in the middle of overpriced cities and I wonder: are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer? I mean if they were given the chance to WFH from anywhere would they still choose Manhattan? Honest question and maybe the answer is yes, because of the restaurants, culture, good schools or whatever… I would personally make different life choices if I could work completely remote, though.
They use the flatiron building because it’s very famous but essentially a nuisance at this point having been vacant for iirc over a decade because of a lawsuit.
Ed: since 2019 but that’s quite awhile for the most famous like 2sq miles in America. (Which is also weird but we’ll talk about that another time.)
Ah thanks for the context, I didn’t know! But doesn’t my point essentially stills stand?
As more people work from home and more Flatiron-like buildings struggle to find businesses looking for offices, developers might find “ex prestigious office to luxury apartments” a more appealing conversion than “ex Walmart to affordable housing”.
Also, my understanding of the housing crisis is that people can’t find an affordable place to live close enough to where they work. In my country there are plenty of small towns that used to be very pretty places to live, that have very affordable housing and that are turning into ghost towns because all the jobs are concentrated in a few big cities.
If you take away the offices, less people are going to need to live in New York, San Francisco or London. Plenty of people might still choose to, of course, but there should be less competition to rent the last bed space in a filthy apartment at ludicrous prices. Or to buy a small flat in a converted former office.
Some people choose a location for the amount of things to do. Like the bigger cities offer more bars, fairs, gyms, and other niche stuff. Meet ups are also a bit easier. This could change as people move out of bigger cities.
You’re point holds, I just wanted to point out why they used it as an example.
Former Commercial Zoning = Inner City
People are going to fight bare knuckle for that kind of residence at a reasonable price. They charge out the wazoo for small apartments in that area.
uxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis.
It’ll have a domino effect, more apartments in Manhattan means less people in Brooklyn, Queens, etc. meaning prices go down in the latter boroughs. I live in Jersey City across the Hudson from Manhattan and a large part of the residents here are just people who can’t afford to live in Manhattan.
are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer?
Yes, I used to live in a converted office building in Newark NJ (not far from Manhattan) and really loved it. And yes people will always want to live in NYC and especially Manhattan. Many people, myself included simply prefer living in cities. I’ve also looked for apartments in Manhattan and it’s completely different than anywhere else.
I remember watching the SOHO lofts get built sitting in 78e traffic towards Hoboken every morning.
It seemed to me as if it was an old industrial revolution styled office building or warehouse being converted into apartments.
I hope to see more of that in the future
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Wait, so what do we do with the buildings?
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Corporations already do hold onto buildings without using them. Because typically real estate goes up in value, especially when there’s scarcity, which there will be if corporations are holding property. This isn’t the solution you think it is.
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Converting office space to living space strains infrastructure in ways not intended by the original intent of the buildings. They can’t put thirty apartments on a single floor of a high rise and have those residents use the same four bathrooms per floor that the offices had. Same with sewage. Same with electrical.
Water and sewage is a real question, that’s true. From the projects like this that I’m aware of, fire safety is actually the bigger issue, though. Usually sleeping areas are required to have an easier escape route than would be typical in the middle of a big office building. I guess you can add pipes and pumps without too much modification, and offices use plenty of electricity, although probably not in the same pattern.
As for the systemic issues, governments do manage to get things done sometimes. The exact details of such a legislation are more granular than I really would want to hammer out on Lemmy.
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Nationalize them and let the community vote on the use
Knock them down. Rezone, build shit that’s useful.
Like a skyscraper of the same size but with apartments? The original idea seems pretty practical to me.
One popular option is floor level businesses with apartments above them. Doesn’t necessarily have to be as tall, many of these skyscrapers take a lot of space for landscaping that could be used for square footage. On top of this, other areas could also be rezone and recreated into city parks to make up for the over indulgent landscaping.
Is that something the government needs to figure out? Seems like something will eventually be done with the buildings once the current owners get tired of losing money.
I don’t know the exact situation (and I admit I didn’t read the article). Honestly the Canadian housing crisis is still confusing, and I live here.
A million Grenfell Towers, coming right up
Shut up
Many ideas here sound like the projects built, starting in the 1930s. They had many failures and a few successes.
good idea. low starter capital. increase it 10x, change zoning regulations, and build hong kong style efficiency apartments with shared bathrooms. without that it’s a pipedream
I like Biden. Giving taxpayer money to developers is another thing, but I’m happy to hear that the US govt is off the RTO madness train, at least in this particular situation. There were those articles about Biden wanting federal workers to return though…
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What does OPM and RTO mean?
Office of Personnel Management
Return to Office
