141–150 of 413 posts
- How much of it is the mayor playing politician?
- And how much of it is the mayor trying to inspire others to stop sitting on their residential or potential residential stock?
[1] Other comments are covering the finer - and more difficult - points of converting office building to residential.
We need more creative thinking like this, not just in Boston, but in any city where there's a glut of office space. (In North America, that includes NYC, San Francisco, Toronto, Winnipeg ...) The devil, of course, will be in the details. But incentives like this can really help get things moving in the right direction.
Certainly, if there are entities that are going to win from this, there are entities that are going to lose if they don't act.
I'm confused. Why is this program necessary? If building owners are sitting on vacant space because the demand for office space has dropped, while the demand for housing continues to rise, aren't they already incentivized to convert to residential space just based on the market conditions? Not sure why the city has to subsidize the property owners.
Most office buildings are not architecturally feasible to convert to residential. In fact, because of zoning laws, many/most can't even be converted. Would you live in an apartment 15 feet wide and 50 feet deep? No. That's why most office buildings dont work You have to redo all the mechanical, plumbing, electric, and then entirely refinish the building. Its literally cheaper to build new than deal with the nightmare…
For laughs, I just measured the width of my home's hallways and rooms. I don't see why 15x50 feet apartment isn't doable especially for a bachelor/new couple starting out. Assume an apartment with a 3 foot wide, 50 foot length hallway, subtract another 2 feet width for walls/piping/whatever, and then you can hang 5 rooms that are 10x10 feet from the hallway. Enough for a living room/common area/kitchen/2 bedrooms. Might get a bit cramped but very usable.
I assume I'm missing something here since this doesn't seem to be too bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office space rents for more per SQ ft than residential, so landlords have incentive to keep it vacant in the hopes that markets come back.
I work in CRE - anyone reading this completely disregard this silly comment. it is laughably stupid
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office space rents for more per SQ ft than residential, so landlords have incentive to keep it vacant in the hopes that markets come back.
I work in CRE - anyone reading this completely disregard this silly comment. it is laughably stupid
https://www.apartments.com/blog/what-is-the-average-rent-in-...
around 4$ sq ft for commerical in LA
https://www.colliers.com/en/research/los-angeles/2022-q2-dow...
CRE is WAY higher in the top tier areas of SF, for the obvious reason that historically high startup capital outpaces all other residential price pressures.
This differs in other localities.
There was a cool OddLots episode recently where they talked to a guy who does Office to Residential work and some of the complexity. One thing he talked about, which I didn't know anyone did, was to actually cut through the ceiling/floorplate of buildings to basically "donut" them. This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either und…
This looks like the episode of OddLots you're talking about: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-a... They talk about converting 180 Water St by adding an internal atrium; it's also one of the conversions illustrated in the recent NYT article about the difficulties of office-to-residential conversions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
Its a delicate balance with these things. Residential brings life to the monotonous business areas and helps to improve housing supply (often not by an awful lot) but on the other hand, once you lose office sites they are generally gone forever (because of multiple ownership you can almost never convert from residential back to office) and even though the office market is taking a big hit from working from home / rem…
> even though the office market is taking a big hit from working from home / remote, the broader trend of the past 100 years is more and more jobs being concentrated into fewer and fewer office district that have to be larger and larger in critical mass. Well, the question is whether we hit an inflection point which changed the future drastically and invalidated data based on prior trends or not. So, does remote work…
There was a cool OddLots episode recently where they talked to a guy who does Office to Residential work and some of the complexity. One thing he talked about, which I didn't know anyone did, was to actually cut through the ceiling/floorplate of buildings to basically "donut" them. This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either und…