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Remote work’s toll on cities

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Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#71

Post by synu »

danielrpa wrote: post #18

Cities exist to serve people's needs. The 2 existing models are a relic of a low technology past: suburbia with long car commutes to downtown, and dense cities built around facilitating mass daily movement to the office through subway/public transportation. Instead, we need self-sufficient neighborhoods catering to different lifestyles and needs (some higher density and walkable, others still car-centric but encourag…

Where are you referring to where there are only two city types? I live in the Netherlands, neither of the two existing models you describe sound familiar in any countries around here, although our cities were certainly designed in a low tech past.

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#72

Post by mortenjorck »

deltarholamda wrote: post #34
koheripbal wrote: post #22

> cities must let developers convert office buildings into housing This is an Activist piece - not an Analysis piece. You cannot trust facts reported in an article that's advocating change. It cherry picks a number of facts in order to further the arguments.

> convert office buildings into housing Can't be done. Office buildings of significant size are not engineered for 24/7 human occupation. The sewer will be inadequate. The water will be inadequate. Retrofitting this would be spectacularly expensive, if it's even possible, as mechanical and plumbing chases are sized for the original design requirements and are difficult (if not impossible) to alter. It may be possible…

> Can't be done.

It can be done and has been done, but what the article fails to recognize is that it is spectacularly expensive—the original build-out, of course, but also the maintenance (I’ve seen this firsthand in the stratospheric HOA fees in the one class-A office-to-residence conversion I toured in my condo search).

Office to residential will happen, but it will be at the top end of the market. It is fundamentally incompatible with affordable housing.

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#73

Post by wonderwonder »

ricksunny wrote: post #64

poor-man's market research: Would you (not your belief about others) be interested in co-working / co-living locales, in different countries (think Costa Rica, Tenerife, Zanzibar) with excellent maintained QoS connectivity, and (higher tier offering) where your right to work (local work visa) for your home-country employer / clients was looked after by the company hosting the network of sites? Goal: to liberate you t…

Prior to getting married and having kids, absolutely. After, not at all unfortunately

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#74

Post by courgette »

synu wrote: post #71
danielrpa wrote: post #18

Cities exist to serve people's needs. The 2 existing models are a relic of a low technology past: suburbia with long car commutes to downtown, and dense cities built around facilitating mass daily movement to the office through subway/public transportation. Instead, we need self-sufficient neighborhoods catering to different lifestyles and needs (some higher density and walkable, others still car-centric but encourag…

Where are you referring to where there are only two city types? I live in the Netherlands, neither of the two existing models you describe sound familiar in any countries around here, although our cities were certainly designed in a low tech past.

Thanks for remembering about most of humanity.

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#76

Post by thegginthesky »

mistrial9 wrote: post #62
xnx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urban planners and other entrenched interests are a huge obstacle to progress in the US.

humorous way to say it, since architects and their cousins, urban planners, have had vast and creative ideas for decades, while local government, real estate sales and their colleagues, real estate lending have crushed their hopes with coffee each day. source: professional urban planning office in California

Yeah, GP has no idea what they are talking about.

I lived with urban planners and architects for 20 years, read books about zoning, about the effects of urbanization on aquifers and rivers, about the differences between cities that grew organically like São Paulo or Mexico City vs cities that were bulldozed to fit a central plan like NYC.

Never ONCE in my life I had read contemporary literature or heard a urban planner defend suburbia, or advocate for single use zoning only, or even say neutral things about American Suburbs. A majority of Urban Planners and Architects across North America, South America and Europe (my sample) are very much against it as it's not sustainable, creates traffic and other myriad of problems.

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#77

Post by yieldcrv »

parineum wrote: post #33
pjlegato wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct. US zoning laws have banned the construction of dense urban neighborhoods and required car-centric suburban neighborhood plans since about World War II. Mandatory density limits and setbacks and numbers of parking spaces and square feet per occupant and other zoning regulations make it illegal to build anything other than low density suburbs. Many people still want to live in a dense, walkable neighbor…

> US zoning laws... That's an incredibly broad statement since most zoning is handled on the state, county or city level. There are plenty of places in the US where someone could build an equivalent SF or NYC and yet they don't. > The few prewar walkable cities that still function such as New York and San Francisco are very expensive as a result. You seem to be drawing a causal link here, walkable leads to desirable…

> I suspect that SF and NYC being the both historic and a hub of two giant economic engines of the US, the tech and financial sectors respectively, has a lot more to do with the pricing of those areas than their walkability.

Demand - from various sectors over time, sure, but also geographic constraints

Each are different enough to only talk about in isolation, but of the commonalities you can't dismiss how interrelated the density and walkability are. A byproduct of the geographic constraints with a constant need to fulfill the demand.

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#78

Post by gruez »

snowwrestler wrote: post #55
deltarholamda wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> convert office buildings into housing Can't be done. Office buildings of significant size are not engineered for 24/7 human occupation. The sewer will be inadequate. The water will be inadequate. Retrofitting this would be spectacularly expensive, if it's even possible, as mechanical and plumbing chases are sized for the original design requirements and are difficult (if not impossible) to alter. It may be possible…

Building infrastructure is scoped for maximum occupancy at a point-in-time, not over time. And maximum occupancy is typically denser in an office than residential. Put another way, what matters is the maximum volume the electrical, sewer, HVAC, elevators, emergency power, etc can handle. If it is scoped to handle 1,000 people for 8 hours of a day, it will do just fine for 300 people 24 hours per day. > Also, when som…

> Building infrastructure is scoped for maximum occupancy at a point-in-time, not over time. And maximum occupancy is typically denser in an office than residential.

That... depends? On one hand, an office building scoped to handle 1000 people for 8 hours a day might handle more peak toilet flushes than 300 people for 24 hours a day, but the latter might get way more peak shower/dishwasher/sink/washer use than the former.

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#79

Post by ricksunny »

wonderwonder wrote: post #73
ricksunny wrote: post #64

poor-man's market research: Would you (not your belief about others) be interested in co-working / co-living locales, in different countries (think Costa Rica, Tenerife, Zanzibar) with excellent maintained QoS connectivity, and (higher tier offering) where your right to work (local work visa) for your home-country employer / clients was looked after by the company hosting the network of sites? Goal: to liberate you t…

Prior to getting married and having kids, absolutely. After, not at all unfortunately

Thank you for that feedback, helpful to understand that segmentation :) I'm guessing that traveling with family / setting kids up in local schools or remote learning is a non-starter?

Re: Remote work’s toll on cities

#80

Post by courgette »

avalys wrote: post #53

These conversations are kind of like the airplane on the treadmill problem, where there are (approximately) two orthogonal sets of assumptions/preferences that lead to obvious but incompatible conclusions, and people end up yelling at each other over the conclusions without realizing the difference is just the underlying assumptions. Personally - I don't want to live in a city, or a town, or even a neighborhood. I do…

I don't find suburbs boring. I find them soul-less.

I grew up in rural France. Small village have shops, bars, services like post-office, hair-dresser and whatnot. It's not a dichotomy between things and absence of things.

Suburbs would be fine in my own personal book if they were offering basic services and a sense of comunauty.( not in warehouse operated by large chain, but by people living there and earning a livehood out of it )

Totally get your point about being left alone, but I still want the place I live and raise my kids to be a network of humans sharing a sense of belonging. Not private lots next to each other.

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