161–170 of 413 posts
You take what you can get, but in my area it seems most new housing is either smashed up against a freeway or a mish-mash of car-dependent ADUs. Future generations deserve better.
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Depending on what you do with the interior, they can actually be great apartments. Much quieter than street facing, put a nice little courtyard in the center.. etc.
It definitely needs to be designed properly. I once worked in an office where all the windows face a plain interior courtyard. It was terrible as nothing ever moved and you could only see the ground, more windows, and the sky.
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There are so many cities (I'd say it's the majority in the world), with mixed use zoning which work wonderfully. Lower floors are offices or businesses and upper floors are apartments. Why is this so difficult?
I swear, it's impossible to please people. People are complaining that mixed use zoning on Taraval street in SF is wasting space because the street-level floors are wasted and they should be converted into apartments (many business have shuttered and ground floors remain empty in some mixed use buildings).
Where I live, we have short term reuse laws that allow retail spaces to be used for residential, social, or other uses on a fixed basis. Typically a few years. The idea being to review the reassignment when the local needs change.
We get a lot of kindergartens that use these spaces, but also pharmacies, social clubs, and offices. Easy to move in and out.
There's a very good NYT article with great visualizations on the process of and obstacles to converting office buildings to residential: 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…
> 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 I am not a town planner, but this makes little sense to me. Can you not have mixed use?
The clustering nature of businesses wanting to be close to each other. Most commercial areas are limited in expansion and a big 'critical mass' helps to drive the success of all the businesses.
Office workers dont like to look out at residential uses (hanging laundry etc.).
On the economic side its important to note that office-only zoning is effectively a government subsidy to encourage business. If they have to compete with residential some businesses will die and others will struggle.
There's also issues with sudden change. If you convert zoning from office only to mixed use quickly expect 10 years or so of no new office buildings leading to flight of the best businesses seeking premium accommodation and office buildings start to run down and other building also seeing a lack of investment as their owners eye tearing them down soon.
If the market swings back towards office over time it will be harder to respond to. As I say also its easy to convert office to residential but almost impossible to convert back.
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…
There's a very good NYT article with great visualizations on the process of and obstacles to converting office buildings to residential: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
These projects are so interesting from an architectural/engineering standpoint, but then they hit you with the "rethink the rules that say how much green space an apartment needs or where its windows must be." I highly doubt the best long-term policy for a city's residents involves even less greenspace and natural light.
I hope we don't just settle for substandard housing cobbled together from ADUs and converted office buildings... I would like to see governments stepping up to raise the funds to buy out neighborhoods at a fair price and converting them into efficient, humane urban areas. You take what you can get, but in my area it seems most new housing is either smashed up against a freeway or a mish-mash of car-dependent ADUs. Fu…
I think this is fantastic. Boston desperately needs more housing. Let's get some increased funding for the T as well while we are at it.
Property tax represents 72% of Boston's municipal revenue[0], and this initiative provides a property tax reduction of up to 75% for up to 29 years, so unfortunately this initiative will not help with T funding. [0] https://data.boston.gov/dataset/revenue-budget