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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

#331

Post by steveBK123 »

aperson_hello wrote: post #320
steveBK123 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno I think legal regulations on what is safe housing are pretty good, actually. For example, in the absence of good legal housing, many poor (mostly immigrant) people in NYC live in illegal basement apartments. Every time there's a flash flood warning with a storm in the city, 5x/year, some of them die in their homes. Ideally, poor people would also be able to live in legal apartments, provided we could actually…

Windows don't make you safe in a high rise. Especially ones in a donut hole in a structure - no way to escape through those!!

I dunno man, I think people can strawman every which way on housing its kind of tiring.

"We should build windowless homes so poor people can afford them"

"You can't put poor people in homes you dont want yourself"

"Your desire to not build windowless homes is because you dont want to live next to poor people"

"I think we should build more housing"

"You just want rich people to have more homes"

on and on

FDNY can ladder rescue up to about the 10th floor. They've rope rescued someone as high as the 20th floor recently. https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/fdny-battling-high-rise-blaze-...

So windows are good, actually.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#332

Post by steveBK123 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #267
aperson_hello wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my point is that desirable doesn't matter much if the goal is to get people housed. Yeah, you'll get less rent for the inner apartments, but that's how you make affordable housing - you make things cheaply and make sacrifices along the way to do so. Unless you don't want to live with the "poors"... Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"

The problem is that the rest of the conversion, namely bathrooms and kitchens per unit and the required pipes, are also not cheap, to the point where if you wanted to rent out a lot of cheap units it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew.

There's an argument there for SRO conversions, but we've shunned those for a generation.

The end of SROs is a strong contributor towards increases in homelessness.

SROs aren't great, but its basically the same as my college dorms.

They are definitely better than being homeless or in a communal shelter as well.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#333

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

xg15 wrote: post #279
RC_ITR wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's against narrative, but this is one of the ways SF's downtown is actually extremely well positioned, assuming the trend of office conversions actually takes off. SF floorplates are usually tiny due to historic biases of our Planning Commission (the dog whistle used to be 'we don't want a skyline of cereal boxes'). In fact, looking at the data [0] most of SF's residential tower floorplates are bigger than SF's off…

> (the dog whistle used to be 'we don't want a skyline of cereal boxes') Out of curiosity, what was the actual reason behind the dog whistle? "Segregate black people by... having smaller floorplates"? That doesn't make much sense to me.

Yeah, I'm not getting it either. The "cereal boxes" in New York and Chicago are full of offices, which are full of -- well, it's not all rich people, but a lot of them are rich.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#334

Post by stewartmcgown »

fader wrote: post #329
rr808 wrote: post #305

Why would you want to live downtown though? Previously downtown living was attractive because of the short walk to the office. If you're WFH you might as well live somewhere nice.

I don't understand the extremely vocal hate for cities that comes up constantly on HN. I love living in the city. I can walk to two different movie theaters, two grocery stores, a huge number of restaurants and stores, and a number of my friends' houses within 15 minutes. I can hop on a bus or the subway and expand that even more. I don't have to waste half a day every weekend mowing a pointless lawn or trimming tree…

Absolutely. I live in Glasgow and it is a perfect environment for walkability, culture, music and great food. Wouldn't live somewhere rural/suburban if you paid me

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#335

Post by eliasmacpherson »

steveBK123 wrote: post #330
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you assume a wealthy family will only buy one house, or could be outbid by a poor family?

Are things made better or worse by building the 11th & 12th houses when there are 12 families in need of houses?

Made better, in that case with those numbers.

Given rental vacancy rates of ~5.8% in the USA in 2022 it is more akin to a hypothetical of building a 12th and 13th house, while an 11th already lies unoccupied.

I am not sure in this more realistic case that building improves matters, unless an unhoused family can gain access to one.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#336

Post by zeroonetwothree »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #326
ecshafer wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are 10 houses available and there are 12 families looking to buy then the they will bid up and the 10 wealthiest families win. If you build 2 luxury homes, it doesn’t matter if poor families 11 and 12 can’t afford them, because 1 and 2 can, which makes them not bid on normal house 1, 2, …, n lowering all housing prices.

why do you assume a wealthy family will only buy one house, or could be outbid by a poor family?

What will the wealthy family do with their 3 houses? If they rent them out that’s still good for the poor family (indeed perhaps they couldn’t afford to buy anyway).

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#337

Post by eliasmacpherson »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #336
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you assume a wealthy family will only buy one house, or could be outbid by a poor family?

What will the wealthy family do with their 3 houses? If they rent them out that’s still good for the poor family (indeed perhaps they couldn’t afford to buy anyway).

on the other hand, if they don't rent them out they can let them appreciate in value, wait for more wealthy families to show up.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#338

Post by HumblyTossed »

ktosobcy wrote: post #124
twelvechairs wrote: post #112

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…

I never understood the need to concentrate all the offices in the single focal point of the city. And currently with WFH it seems to make even more sense to distribute office spaces in local "co-working" spaces and in the end mix residential with work making it intertwined (zoning in the USA, from what I understand, is weird as hack…)

Because at one point, we designed, built and sold stuff and so you would need everything local. Now that most of that is offshored and most jobs are paper pushing, it's really not needed.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#339

Post by nradov »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #328
nradov wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concrete and exposed metal are hardly what most of us think of as "cool materials". The notion of living in an abandoned factory is just dismal. Tear them down and start over.

Haven't you seen all those hip buildings with high ceilings and exposed brick? They used to be factories and warehouses. Many of them are from a time of much sturdier construction. If the alternative is balloon-frame Mc-residential, then you want to renovate the old brick mill.

Those buildings look like crap. Hardly the kind of place where I would want to live or work if I had any choice.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#340

Post by spaced-out »

xyzelement wrote: post #317

I don't totally understand what drives people to project demand for urban residential when urban office is in decline and is being removed. Historically people moved to the cities because that's where the work was. What will drive people to cities when that's no longer true? Granted some people really enjoy "density" but I suspect most people prefer more space / a yard / etc if the lack of commute enables then to spr…

People aren't "projecting" demand, the demand is being driven by the market. Downtown apartments (in good condition) are expensive because they are in high demand while office space is getting harder and harder to fill.

If you own a bunch of downtown commercial real estate, you don't need to be a business guru to see that you could be making a lot more money if you could rent that space out as apartments.

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