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Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

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Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#281

Post by gnulinux »

MildRant wrote: post #5

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.

Boston housing/rent is extraordinarily expensive. It's up there with SF, Manhattan, certain areas are even more expensive them. It's absolutely ridiculous. My girlfriend is from NYC and we both love the city, and visit it frequently. To our great astonishment Boston is oftentimes more expensive than NYC while being a fraction of the size. American big cities really can be enigmatic.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#282

Post by jkeisling »

jonathanlb wrote: post #243
worthless-trash wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't we all subject to death though ?

If it's in your power to prevent people from dying tragically in a burning building- you wouldn't?

Basic economics: The optimal number of people who die tragically in a burning building is not zero. Every person trades off some amount of safety for cost, that’s just part of living. It’s possible that this particular tradeoff isn’t worth it, but human life isn’t infinitely sacred. I assume if it were in your power, you also would rather let some people burn to death than ban wooden houses, for example. This, well, inflammatory emotive rhetoric really doesn’t lead to good discussion, or good policy for that matter.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#283

Post by gnulinux »

mcmoor wrote: post #213
mkoubaa wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

converting office buildings do not preclude designing humane urban areas

Given some other comments that say that "it's better than eternal slavery", I'd hope that it truly doesn't end in another brutalism hell.

Just like many other big cities in the US, downtown Boston definitely has brutalist areas, probably due to being built back when brutalism was a common style -- for example, Boston city hall is in brutalist style [1]. However, the most common architectural style in Boston is red-brick. Even some modern high-risers are built to look in this style.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:B...

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#284

Post by golem14 »

aperson_hello wrote: post #191
steveBK123 wrote: post #7

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…

Undesirable apartments sound like code for low income/affordable housing to me... Add a few light pipes out to the outside walls and you can even get a bit of outside light inside!

(charlie Munger has entered the chat)

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#285

Post by mejutoco »

viraptor wrote: post #154
seanthemon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sound like what inevitably happens to my Sims games, just start filling in those gaps Dance floor #3? Make it happen!

Funnily this is kind of possible. Tokyo has at least one dance club located in a residential high-rise, just padded enough that the sound doesn't carry into the apartments around it. It's been a while though and I can't find the name now - please post a link if anyone remembers where it was.

Liquid room?

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#286

Post by acchow »

aperson_hello wrote: post #185
bloppe wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is emergency egress. You need those shafts to be able to support external staircases with many dozens of people rushing down simultaneously in the event of a fire.

Do you? Most newer buildings go without external staircases (typically have two+ internals firewalled apart from each other)

I believe there are two different requirements for residential: 1 is egress (fire regulations), and the other is natural light requirements for each room.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#287

Post by midasuni »

AlbertCory wrote: post #73
xattt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donuted buildings will forever remind me of the Ponte Tower building. (1) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/th...

In Hong Kong, pre-handover, I stayed in a windowless hotel room.

I stayed in one in london last year. It was great until noisy people came back at 2am

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#288

Post by emmelaich »

hedora wrote: post #183
steveBK123 wrote: post #7

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…

The main advantage of living in a converted factory (there are a lot of these in the rust belt) is that you end up with an absolutely enormous space made out of cool materials. I was finding it hard to imagine that there are inner-city office buildings (high rises) that have floors so large that they couldn't be cut into, say 1/4'ths, with four residences on each floor, and each unit having 50% windows along its peri…

High-rises are not good for residential purposes. They are seriously isolating.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#289

Post by michaelmrose »

lovich wrote: post #264
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to fire code, to divide a high-rise into 4 corner units, you need to take up almost ~50% of the space for elevators, stairs and hallways. So you'd probably end up with close to 5k square foot condos - which isn't too ridiculous. You'd probably do 4 corner units and 4 non-corner units for a total of eight, and end up with each being between 2000 and 2500. The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a numb…

Given the Boston market this will still help everyone. My household is making north of 300k and was still having trouble bidding on home where there were dead cockroaches visible during the showing. It feels wrong to build luxury housing when regular folk are suffering but if you build luxury housing to the point that the rich stop bidding on regular housing, or even better there’s so much luxury housing that everyon…

It's not clear that you can meaningfully effect availability of "regular" housing by building any reasonable number of luxury homes. Slightly reducing the cost of luxury apartments may attract more buyers from outside the city, average the rate of vacancy may increase without the price going down much. They can be purchased by the rich to be used as unlicensed hotels aka airbnb. They can be ought up as "investments" and not effectively rented out effectively enough as long as you don't build so much you literally flood the market.

Even if the price of expensive apartments does go down a little because more people are able to afford "luxury" you don't necessarily have to let the little guy in on the savings you can as an industry collude to keep the price as high as the market can bear without literally becoming homeless. You don't even have to actually collude in an illegal fashion if your interests are actually sufficiently aligned that you all act in lockstep without overt coordination. Any real savings can be virtually entirely absorbed by the owner class.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#290

Post by eliasmacpherson »

michaelmrose wrote: post #289
lovich wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the Boston market this will still help everyone. My household is making north of 300k and was still having trouble bidding on home where there were dead cockroaches visible during the showing. It feels wrong to build luxury housing when regular folk are suffering but if you build luxury housing to the point that the rich stop bidding on regular housing, or even better there’s so much luxury housing that everyon…

It's not clear that you can meaningfully effect availability of "regular" housing by building any reasonable number of luxury homes. Slightly reducing the cost of luxury apartments may attract more buyers from outside the city, average the rate of vacancy may increase without the price going down much. They can be purchased by the rich to be used as unlicensed hotels aka airbnb. They can be ought up as "investments"…

Agree - it's the 'Trickle-down Effect' except with property instead of wealth.
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