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The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#341

Post by gioele »

Shivetya wrote: post #71
pmorici wrote: post #30

I think this article perhaps misses the real story. That being, office parks first built in 25+ years ago are reaching an age where their long term leases are expiring and they need to be renovated for the first time since being constructed to attract new tenants. While it makes sense to renovate an old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details from decades past…

One common occurrence where I live is that county and cities are buying up the old office parks and even strip malls to convert them into government buildings. Most are ideally located as well as being offered up for sale cheaply. Seen even a few charitable organizations buy up parts of a strip mall for the cheap space by square foot. Besides the age a lot of REITs cashed out awhile ago and I am not sure the market i…

> county and cities are buying up the old office parks and even strip malls to convert them into government buildings. Most are ideally located as well as being offered up for sale cheaply.

The point of the grandparent comment is that these buildings are old and in need of expensive maintenance. Why should any government body move in such a building? Can they provide the needed maintenance cheaper that the current owner would do? Or will they move their offices in a decrepit building?

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#342

Post by relet »

pmorici wrote: post #30

I think this article perhaps misses the real story. That being, office parks first built in 25+ years ago are reaching an age where their long term leases are expiring and they need to be renovated for the first time since being constructed to attract new tenants. While it makes sense to renovate an old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details from decades past…

I think it is all about location. East German concrete slab highrisers[0] are being renovated into fashionable lofts, despite their unfashionable image and continuous deterioration - where they are placed in the city centers that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#343

Post by phatfish »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #149
mgolawala wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I think the more realistic outcome would be that the rest of the world would be turned into farmland or pastureland.

Possibly. We're already providing more than enough food in the US with existing farmland (although the problem is it isn't distributed properly to people who need said food). Pastureland could be reduced with meat grown in vats instead of raised on farms (or people simply shifting from a meat-heavy diet). The population trajectory appears to be ballistic, with us hitting the apex in the next 5-15 years (educated wome…

In fact everywhere of any significance except Africa is already at or bellow fertility rates of 2. As you say education and low child mortality creates smaller families.

The problem is not population (or even food production) but energy consumption. But that effects our first world lifestyle so no one in the first world wants to take it seriously.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#344

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ghaff wrote: post #253
mjevans wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone a bit over 30; exactly this. The numbers do NOT add up and haven't at any point in my life. Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job? None of our social structures (including laws and tax incentives/disincentives) or…

>Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? I can't help but feel that you're describing some mythical ideal that never really existed for most people. Yes, for a long time, a lot of manufacturing jobs were pretty stable and people worked for IBM for a long time. But, even in that case, even if the jobs were stable,…

But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs.

Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional.

I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today.

Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing.

So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#345

Post by bane »

pmorici wrote: post #30

I think this article perhaps misses the real story. That being, office parks first built in 25+ years ago are reaching an age where their long term leases are expiring and they need to be renovated for the first time since being constructed to attract new tenants. While it makes sense to renovate an old factory and turn it into trendy office space with exposed brick and vintage architectural details from decades past…

I've noticed that many buildings built during particularly faddish architectural trends tend to very quickly become maintenance nightmares, with repairs costing more than a tear-down and rebuild. It seems lots of these office buildings all over the country were built quickly, to low quality and now nobody wants to move into them. It's not just SV that has this problem.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building the FBI is currently HQ'd out of is 40 years old, and by all accounts should have been razed to the ground 10-15 years ago, only slow government processes keeping the Bureau in it at all.

It's expected to cost $850m-$1.1b to renovate and fix all the problems in the building and bring it up to Class A space (with inflation over time the total number would creep towards $2b). The government has decided that it would be cheaper to move the entire Bureau HQ to another site and build an entirely new building than fix this one.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#346

Post by JosephHatfield »

Those buildings may be practically abandoned, but the new Pike & Rose development only two blocks away appears to be doing quite nicely, and work has already begun on a new development project near what used to be White Flint mall. I live right on the edge of this area, and it seems far from being a ghost town.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#347

Post by mlrtime »

potatolicious wrote: post #137
Tiktaalik wrote: post #63

I'm curious amongst urbanite hackers here: How many would turn down a job at Facebook, Google, Apple or any other company primarily due to their suburban office park nature? Could you see yourself choosing a poorer quality job from an urban company over a better suburban company? Right now I'm a 15 minute bike ride away from my downtown employer. It'd be pretty hard to convince me to give that up. I've done a 30 minu…

Urbanite here (Manhattan), Have turned down offers/interviews at many companies because of non-urban location. FB/GOOG at least have urban offices, Apple does not, as much as I admire their products and would like to work on them. Even when I lived in SF I'd routinely turn down interviews for peninsula/south bay companies because of the location. Fortunately there is no shortage of good quality jobs in my specialty i…

Forget the suburbs, people turn down jobs in Jersey City and Brooklyn to stay in Manhattan (avoiding reverse commute).

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#348

Post by brudgers »

jpatokal wrote: post #338
brudgers wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking your description literally, there is no legal way under any reasonable zoning code that a zoning department could issue a variance to allow a prohibited residential use on a property zoned and currently occupied by an office building. The variance is a mechanism for relieving a hardship that runs with the land by allowing limited non-conformity (e.g. setbacks on a non-conforming lot or the continuation of a pr…

I think you mean "any American zoning code", not "any reasonable code". In Japan, zones are additive: if commercial use is permitted, residential use is also permitted. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/japanese-zoning.h... That said, in Japan the idea of converting a building from one use to another is virtually unknown. Buildings aren't built to last, so it's cheaper and easier to tear them down and rebuil…

Stacked zoning exists in the US and was very common in the wave of local zoning adoptions in the 1920's. Over time, other forms have tended to replace it or be selected for initial ordinances. I suspect Japan's history of zoning like many of it's political institutions arose under rather different circumstances in the 1940's, hence it is national law rather than local.

Anyway, I qualified "residential" with "prohibited".

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#349

Post by octobyte »

bluthru wrote: post #152
astrocyte wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it isn't (several studies have highlighted this). The reason why a lot of cities aren't better for the environment is that the insane cost force many people out to the cities edge who then have to commute in... negating a good deal of the concentration benefits. Further, cities can wreak havoc on health due to the concentration of pollution, noise, etc ... Increase mental health issues due to stress/etc. Hum…

Your data must be from the industrial revolution. We have decades of data from dense European cities that indicate better health and quality of life. Also just look at the health of rural people versus urban people in the US--the obesity crisis ain't happening in cities. >The reason why a lot of cities aren't better for the environment is that the insane cost force many people out to the cities edge who then have to…

> the obesity crisis ain't happening in cities.

It ain't happening in the wealthy areas of the city. Travel to the areas of low economic status and social mobility, and you will indeed find that obesity is a major problem. This really has to do with the fact that in most cases, rural and low income areas of cities are food deserts, so residents are forced to eat fast food and low quality meals from places like corner stores and bodegas. Continue on with the superiority circlejerk, however.

Re: The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town

#350

Post by octobyte »

astrocyte wrote: post #323
agrotera wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of this works in cycles. There once was a time when people were flocking to the suburbs. Now, it is fashionable to live in the city. American suburbs are something of an anomaly. They've existed for a relatively brief period of time, and they seem to be waning now after a few generations. I think you may be conflating "small town" and "suburb" to some degree, when I wouldn't consider those things to be exactly…

> Suburbs are not an anomaly. They even exist in Europe in good numbers if you get outside city centers. The biggest reason why this is not so apparent to tourist is that they never go outside city centers. Many people commute and Europe has a good transportation network as the U.S will soon have to? Then what .... then city centers become less attractive as you can more easily get to where the action is without livi…

> Many people commute and Europe has a good transportation network as the U.S will soon have to? Then what .... then city centers become less attractive as you can more easily get to where the action is without living a stone's throw from it.

This is the crux of the issue. Cities were built around different modes of transportation (walking, biking, driving, trains) whereas suburbs were built up entirely around the automobile. This aversion to driving is something unique to Millenials; owning a car meant freedom and marked success to previous generations. These days, young people are comfortable with streaming services and the new shared economy, so "owning" something isn't important as it once was. Additionally, we face economic concerns (we're making less money and cars are expensive), political concerns (oil, in many cases, directly supports oppressive regimes), and ecological concerns.

In a generation or two, suburbs will have had to adapt to this change in lifestyle and commuter rail/light rail projects are already underway to connect the first ring to the urban cores. Additionally, I think more emphasis will be placed on rebuilding a town center/main street in the areas that can support it. Finally, self-driving electric cars will calm traffic immensely (imagine if all vehicles report to a centralized dispatch AI that can calculate the most efficient routes available, knowing exactly when to turn, stop, accelerate, etc using computer vision, path finding and flocking algorithms.) Cities and suburbs around the country are already adding bike lanes and pedestrian to roads.

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