McKinsey said cities could adapt to the declining demand for office space by “taking a hybrid approach themselves,” developing multi-use office and retail space and constructing buildings that can be easily adapted to serve different purposes.
There is no value lost unless you’re an owner being forced to sell. Employment space is not worth anywhere near what the value of housing is. Call this what it is, a market correction.
Oh no, more space that could be transformed into housing.
Less traffic and pollution 😔
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A more serious problem than getting per-unit plumbing into buildings is the fact that commercial real estate is designed fundamentally differently than residential - as in the fact that there’s a large amount of interior space which would be entirely without windows. This is often illegal, but even if permitted it’s quite undesirable. Just look at what happened to Munger Hall - it was considered cruel enough that they cancelled the plans for it.
99% Invisible did a great episode on this subject which I highly recommend that you listen to: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/
I’ve seen multiple factories and churches in multiple places get turned into apartments. I almost rented a loft in an old flour mill in L.A. If they can do it with a flour mill, they can do it with an office building.
Seriously… I don’t care if I had to use a communal bathroom as long as there was an agreed upon cleaning plan. Hell, it could continue to be office cleaning services that get paid by a tenant fund for all I care. Keep them employed in some capacity, why not.
Having ten apartments on one floor requires less toilets and plumbing than having 100 people working on one floor.
Installing a bathroom is easy. Installing ten bathrooms is easy.
These buildings aren’t being converted because it’s impossible to do or because living conditions would be harsh if they were converted - these buildings aren’t being converted because people calling the shots don’t want to miss out on those fat profits they’re still hoping to make.
I agree. My comment was more to imply, “I don’t even care if they convert it, just let it happen.”
Some buildings already have showers and shitty gyms, too. Some even have full kitchens already. Some are logistically fully livable as-is, maybe with with very minor tweaks and some compromises on living style.
If some buildings are THAT close to fully usable, it’s obviously bullshit to say it’s not a viable solution. It wouldn’t solve all problems, but no solution solves all problems.
(also it’s not like office buildings are fucking DESIGNED to be easily remodeled or something…)
My guess is that developers don’t think enough people would accept a communal bathroom for it to be profitable. It’s also possible they don’t think low income people are deserving of housing, so they won’t spend money to benefit them.
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99% of the work done?! Tell me you have never been involved in residential vs. commercial construction.
The structural and civil engineering, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, telecom, my god… it’s full of fail.
And let’s not forget permitting for all that. Ya’ know, because of the difference in safety and privacy concerns in those two wildly different environments? And BTW, we’ll have to get buy-in from local government to bypass or ease a thing or three. Or 20.
LOL, notions like this are the exact inverse of conservatives saying, “government should be run like business”. Private enterprise and government have very different goals and roles. We don’t have a magic wand to convert one to the other.
And letting either one win out? Well, we see how capitalism is going for the private sector. Happy with that? I ain’t. Rather do a 180 and let the government run it all? Nah, I lived the Cold War. A strongly legislated balance is the only sane thing idea we got at the moment. Europe, despite differences and faults, seems to have a handle on these ideas.
You can take a business building and convert it to residential, but how much you want to spend? And that spend is not just in dollars, it’s in energy. “Stop the wasteful pollution! Let’s waste MORE on stuff!” I’m not an engineer, outside of IT anyway, and that counts for fuck all in this discussion, but maybe it would be cost and energy efficient to tear down and start over? I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I really don’t know.
I ain’t got answers, but back on point, making commercial buildings into residential? I have serious doubts and concerns.
(Not on your ass OP! Just using your comment as a jumping off point for more discussion!)
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Modular bathrooms and cabins are easily manufactured and easy to install in an open plan area that is stripped back.
Same as the ones used in ships.
https://cruiseshipinteriors-expo.com/prefab-cabin-design-in-cruise/
These are flash cruise ship ones but much simpler bathroom and cabin arrangements are available for commercial shipping.
It would be straight forward to strip down an open plan office. Do a 3D laser scan. Do some algorithms ….then cram as many prefabricated modules in as the HVAC and plumbing allows.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The research adds to a string of recent signs that lasting changes to working habits because of the pandemic are hurting the value of commercial real estate — a market also under strain from rising interest rates.
(HBCYF) announced plans to halve the size of its global headquarters, giving up its imposing tower in London’s Canary Wharf business district for a much smaller building close to the city center.
McKinsey looked most closely at nine “superstar” cities with a disproportionate share of the world’s urban gross domestic product, namely Beijing, Houston, London, New York, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Shanghai and Tokyo.
Waning demand for office space has driven down landlords’ asking rents, with US cities suffering the sharpest falls, McKinsey found.
Foot traffic near stores in urban areas remains 10-20% lower than it was before the pandemic, partly driven by growth in online shopping.
In an interview at Bloomberg’s Technology Summit last month, San Francisco Mayor London Breed proposed remaking the struggling city’s downtown by tearing down abandoned retail space, including Westfield mall.
The original article contains 534 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Oh no. Anyway
Won’t you think of the long term consequences?! Something like twelve yachts might never get built now! And that one yacht company’s CEO might have to pull the ripcord on his golden parachute!
Turn them into housing
Good. Bring back the small town.
So what? The market decides what is needed or not. Business need to stop whining, stop with the silly ‘return to office’ mandates that are killing their productivity and reducing their quality of talent, and adapt.
It’s business. Adapt or die.
Damn rent-seekers
Business is risk, highness. Anyone who says different is selling something.
And business is always selling something. They’ll never admit they’re bad for us.
I (don’t really) like to imagine how if someone were to invent a star trek-esqe teleportation device that beams people from place to place, how the auto manufacturers, road infrastructure organizations, and a probably countless other industries would be up in arms about their “losses” without realizing how stupid and short sighted that stance would be.
It’s like we’re unable to outgrow anything as a society without toddler-tantrum-like backlash from those who have benefitted from us being beholden to the current status quo.
The internet largely killed high speed commercial flight.
It should’ve kill the cubical a long time ago. But middle management culture is so entrenched it took a deadly highly contagious virus to kill it.
Teleporting is just one small conceptual step beyond (and unlikely large technical leap) what we already have.
Given that the star trek teleporter most likely atomizes and simply copies the individual. Id have to agree with the auto manufacturers on that.
I don’t think that is settled science amongst the fanbase.
It may not be “settled science” in the series’ canon but it’s the only logical conclusion one can come to when applied to the real world. That’s how all our current information transfer works. It’s dissected and a copy is sent bit by bit.
The argument against it is that if you believe in philosophical materialism, and the transporter reconstructs the person exactly as they are on the other end, then they are exactly the same person as before. They may be “dead” in the medical sense in between, but people do get resuscitated from being technically dead, and we don’t consider them to be separate people afterwords. Without invoking some kind of soul that’s separate from the body, it’s difficult to argue that they are anything but the same person.
A fantasy hypothetical that teleportation was a thing, and you already side with the car manufacturers because of the hypothetical bads of teleportation.
Play with the original hypothetical my dude :)
If they hadn’t specified it as being Star trek I wouldnt have had a problem. 40k teleportation may send you through literal hell but it doesnt kill the original. And stargates are basically wormholes.
You are using various sci-fi universe laws as justification for your opinions of the idea being stupid?
You won’t imagine something because of 40k teleportation, a fiction. A fiction preventing from imagining a fiction?
Yeah just like all the astroturfing done on EVs
You should look at the history of public transit in Detroit, and trains more broadly in the US. Its the same thing.
The Great American Streetcar Scandal comes to mind.
I used to live in a tiny rural town of about 3,000 people, and even it used to have a trolley line. They tore it up when they built the highway, and now the only public transit available is one bus twice a day, and only for people who are disabled.
One of the old trolleys is still sitting next to the fire station, mocking everyone who drives by.
I feel @glitches_brew is sooo close to getting orange pilled. While it’s not teleportation, we have the technology for high speed rail. Even my weekly commute of ~110km on conventional rail is about the same time as driving and I can get work done/watch videos/sleep instead of focusing on driving!
Most of the people I see commuting by car, at least in America, are also not focused on driving.
I ride a motorcycle and I can confirm.
I saw someone eating a bowl of cereal in the driver seat a few days ago. It’s terrifying out there.
I’ll take that over the guy watching porn in stop and go traffic on a busy, high speed, narrow road outside Boston…
Look into the history of Robert Moses and why the bridges are so low in Long Island
Hint: it has to do with busses and racism
socialism for the capitalists, harsh rugged capitalism for the rest of us
Socialize the losses, privatize the gains
The market decides what is needed or not.
Silly thing. Capitalism only matters when it’s good for business.
Listen, we bailed the banks out once.
If you make a bad investment, you make a bad investment. Literally, eat it.
Lol, they decide who gets bailed out and when. Spoilers: They pick themselves every time.
The Fed exists to make the rich richer at everyone else’s expense. Every decision they make is self-protection, and it will always work, because they have all the power, and you and I none.
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People should put pressure on employers to let them choose if they want to work from office, or home. Homeoffice FTW!
Working from home has been both amazing and isolating. However, say I was close enough to an office, my entire team is spread out so I still wouldn’t be around my team in person to collaborate.
Nothing beats using my breaks and lunches for things like laundry, exercise, weeding my garden, etc.
That’s the thing. Flexibitlity of choice doesn’t work. If you want to have a productive office culture, teams need to be in the office. My ideal would be 3.5 days in the office. 3 days for the general policy, .5 days for those ad hoc things like meetings or other things. But working in the office sucks and is equally isolating when you have no team in the office and are on hours of back to back video calls with headphones on the entire time because there are no conference rooms. I think 3 days let’s you have 2 days at home to do the laundry, exercise, etc.
But I need to be in the office to collaborate with my teammates who are in the other side of the planet via Teams!! /s
Isn’t that the truth. I have colleagues in Washington, Oregon, California, New York, New Jersey, and Texas. Zero in-person collaboration potential.
Hey, are you my former employer? Only it wasn’t the other side of the planet, it was just Texas.
Oh no, think of the businesses.
Won’t anyone think of the landlords?
What did it add to residential?
Oh nooooo. Anyways.
So what’s the downside?
The downside is that WFH is an extremely competitive market. It is incredibly difficult to snag a remote job for a company you do not currently work for or have never worked for.
Sadly true. It is telling that there are so many more people wanting 100% remote over in office. I wonder if HR has cottoned on to the reason for the difference in application rates?
My friend has switched jobs twice, both WFH gigs, since the pandemic. She didn’t seem to have too much trouble. IDK his good she is in her field though. She handles hiring people.
She likely has had experience with WFH before which makes it easier, but I can still tell you that she probably applied to like 500+ different places to get those interviews.
Not before COVID.
People would also pay less for home.
Again I ask, what’s the downside?
People have more time for themselves by not commuting?
Most companies are trying their best to get people back in the office, but this strategy is tough to pull off with other companies poaching talent by just not caring.
I’ve noticed many more job listings are prominently promoting that they are 100% remote and plan to stay that way. When I’m looking around for the next opportunity they are on the top of the pile.
Any company even hinting at “in office” is going straight in the bin. Unless they are gonna pay for a car, parking, gas, insurance, travel time, and lunch.
Even then it would STILL need to be a hell of a lot more $$ than a100% remote to make me want to deal with office people and not be able to wear comfy clothes.Companies that are fully remote will have their pick of the best people from around the world, while companies that insist on being in the office will have to deal with whatever leftovers are close enough to commute.
Of course, the companies that make people come into the office will no doubt complain to the government about this and get laws changed to force people to work for them. Because we aren’t in a market economy anymore, we’re in a corporate feudal state.
Yeah, what a terrible way to hamstring your recruiters from the competition, it literally costs nothing to make your company and environment way more attractive to candidates.
This. I was part of two mass walkouts from two different companies, both of which were over-invested in office space and decided to try to force employees back to the office despite productivity gains from WFH. One had signed a 10 year lease on an office space in Jan 2020 and had been paying rent for two years for an empty building, the other owned the parking garage next to their office and was trying to bilk employees for $12/person/day to park.
Now I work for a company that doesn’t have an office. I’m told some employees live close to one another and occasionally meet up at their apartments, but I’ve also been promised that I’ll never have to do that. If they reneg, I’ll walk again. It’s as simple as me never setting foot in an office again under any circumstances.
What gets me is that there is every likelihood that the productivity increases cause a larger increase in profits than the losses they are taking from the bad real estate deal they made. Financially, they could probably eat the 10 years of rent or sublet it and reap further productivity gains as the organization continues to adapt and come out so far ahead. Fucking management myopia.
in the short term, increased productivity will offset the rent. hell, baseline productivity was supposed to be enough to offset the rent or they would have never signed the lease in the first place. in the long term, the lease expires, they don’t renew it, they get increased productivity and decreased costs, along with their pick of the best and brightest employees worldwide rather than just those within commuting distance who couldn’t get remote work.
Thing is, while we’re waiting for all of these smart plays to pay off the stock price has gone up, but by 10% less than projected so c suite has fired all the mid and upper level managers.
