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
The Biden administration is doing that also, it just doesn’t make as good a headline.
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They’there’s nothing wrong with favoring the people with the least generational wealth first and foremost
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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.
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?
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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.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.
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.
$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 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.
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.
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.
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
mixed offices and apartments in the same building sounds good… would cut the commute
I lived in a building thay was mixed residential/office space in Buenos Aires. It was really good, during the week you saw movement in and out so it felt alive, ar night and weekends was pretty empty and calm, and you could throw parties without bothering the neighbors.
lets defy the government and do it either way
I worked in an office once that was large enough thst you could absolutely live in it without being caught
Just live at work! I can see the LateStageCapitalism posts writing themselves
in the same building as a floor used for an office wouldn’t be living at work
vibes based analysis
I see no way this could go horribly wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Mixed use buildings for actually quite common in much of the world and can work quite well. See what you do though is you put them on the market for anybody to rent, and not force people to live in your company housing.
If you go into any major city you’re going to run into mixed use buildings.
I think if companies are interested in cutting commute times, they’d normalize work from home. Doesn’t seem to be the case sadly
All high rise office buildings should be incentivized to have residential space. Let’s try and fix the housing issues and reduce cars/traffic at the same time.
There are sometimes some strange issues with office construction.
There might be no plumbing in the locations people will want for toilets and baths and kitchens in the individual suites away from the core of the building. Same goes for retrofitted laundry facilities.
HVAC systems (in the US anyways) are often centrallized and might need a lot of retrofitting to make it work like a condo/apartment.
Kitchen ventilation
Windows might not open, can’t get to a fresh air source
Aside from that stuff, the issue of empty office buildings while we are experiencing unsustainable housing markets is begging for a solution to address the demand.
There will probably be a handy sum to be earned for construction companies who get efficient at conversions.
I wonder if it would be possible to require all future construction to be designed in a way that it could easily be switched between commercial/residential. Like each floor of an office building has to have plumbing roughed it to support x number of toilets/showers on each floor, stuff like that.
Short answer is nope. Commercial and residential building codes are very different, as are the engineering requirements.
it’d be a lot of work resolving all those issues… but definitely doable. just have to find the maniac with money and drive that wants to do that
It’s not that there might not be plumbing, it’s that there is zero plumbing in most office buildings aside from one clustered section for floor where there’s 5 to 10 toilets for each gender.
On top of that, you have completely different mechanical systems. An office building for instance may have one single mechanical system for the entire building, whereas an apartment would need separate mechanical systems for each individual apartment.
Then you have the kitchens, bedrooms and interior partition walls that are vastly different than an office building, plus the requirements for exterior windows which precludes larger office buildings with deeper floor plates from being converted at all without demolishing the interior portion of the building. Curtain wall systems that may or may not be compatible between an office and residential building (non-operating windows)… Not to mention the stair and elevator systems are probably not going to work either.
So in the end you’re probably looking at gutting the building down to the structure and removing every piece of the building including the outer envelope, roof, all of the electrical plumbing and mechanical systems… In the end it may or may not be cheaper just to build a new building from the ground up.
Source: am architect. And yes, I have done conversions like this in the past.
Also offices don’t require that all the rooms have access to natural light the way residential buildings do. That’s why office towers can be thicc blocks while apartment buildings often need to be U-shaped.
Yes please. Let’s give corporations a reason to convert their office buildings into apartments so we can all go back to WFH. Plus, the more housing we have in the city the cheaper it gets.
I’m hopeful that a lot of these will turn into condos so people can get into ownership instead of renting.
This is another proof that office buildings are an anachronism.
And I want politicians to start living in trailer parks, projects, and section 8 housing in the parts of town that their policies are destroying.
And take public transportation!
So are you against retrofitting office buildings?
I think that at least one should be saved for just paintball.
One floor should reserved for roller skating.
One floor should be reserved for running around barefoot on broken glass while bad guys chase after you to keep you from interfering with their elaborate heist.
if you’re my upstairs neighbor: job done
Good reddit humor.
It is just called humor, here. And would you have preferred laser tag ?
Only if it has a roller rink with it.
Now I’m imagining laser derby matches.
Dude, if you had an actual course with lots of paths through that could be sick.
Above a bowling alley, below another bowling alley.
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.
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.
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.
All problems created by deregulation
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.
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
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.
Offices are actually chill if you take out the cubicles and stuff. They are spacious, neutral, and have a bathroom and roof access.
Biden wants to give money to wealthy landlords so they can build luxury apartments using our tax dollars, so they can rent them out and increase their wealth.
Anyone saying “We need to build more houses” rather than saying “We need to fill the existing houses” has no interest in solving the problem.
It all sounds good, but im so jaded now all i can think about is how will the rich find a way to make sure this doesnt lower cost of living for the lower class.
Easy, developers will only build luxury real estate. It’s what’s been happening in urban centers for a decade or two. Way better margins on luxury real estate.
A million Grenfell Towers, coming right up
Shut up
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.
Where did you get those numbers from? Where is your source?
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
If utilized as it should be, this Is a really good idea. It creates desperately needed housing, indirectly supports work from home, rescues downtowns struggling from customer loss, helps prevent default on tons of property loans (and preventing something akin to the 2008 crash).
