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A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

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Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#11

Post by cucumber3732842 »

mono442 wrote: post #8

The AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.

Will never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements.

And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#12

Post by evklein »

MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #7
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.

Yeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.

Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms).

It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#13

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

evklein wrote: post #12
MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.

Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared prim…

This is historically incomplete.

American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city.

An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent.

The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws eliminating them. Before the white flight to the suburbs, the attempt was to keep the poor out of cities where the rich lived by eliminating housing of this sort since the poor couldn’t afford single family housing.

This led to a proliferation of laws that required bathrooms and kitchens in every unit, etc.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#14

Post by mbg721 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #11
mono442 wrote: post #8

The AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.

Will never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements. And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.

The lower-friction result is that the offices become huge apartment buildings with reverse-commutes to the suburbs, hoping the "stuff to walk to" survives. There are issues with that too, like plumbing and windows.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#15

Post by milkytron »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

When I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.

For a long time, the US had the money to build things, use them, let them slowly deteriorate, and then abandon them.

It was cheaper to simply let things fall into disrepair, and build shiny new buildings and developments further away from the city center. Rinse and repeat. This is why a lot of inner ring suburbs are filled with strip malls that can't maintain their parking lots, don't have the residential density to support nearby businesses, etc.

It's kind of an interesting development pattern that's been pervasive since the 1950s, and some towns and cities are trying to reverse it with infill.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#16

Post by mono442 »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #13
evklein wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared prim…

This is historically incomplete. American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city. An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent. The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws e…

Isn't it also the fact the almost no one wants to live like that? The expectations has changed and there's probably little demand for such type of housing.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#17

Post by mothballed »

LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #5
hedora wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.

Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.

Having lived in some midwestern cities with a bunch of extra "not easily converted" warehouses, I've seen lots of "illegal" art collective operations where they just put all the extra plumbing on the ground floor where it is easily retrofitted (you can even raise the floor with a false bottom for plumbing if no other option) and then everyone shares a big kitchen, then the upper floors where retro fitting is more difficult are for habitation. Maybe the HVAC unit is undersized or something, or some other safety factors are substandard due to these people not having the money to improve it further, who gives a shit it is better and safer than living on the streets.

Obviously since it's illegal these aren't advertised but they're quite prevalent, and issues are rare enough that now decade past muh Ghost Ship Warehouse is the constant drum being beat by the brain dead building code worshippers who actually bought the line of bullshit that having people homeless and freezing and shitting in the streets was actually a 'written in blood' advantage.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#18

Post by postalrat »

hedora wrote: post #3
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

When I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.

Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.

Widespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#19

Post by triceratops »

mono442 wrote: post #16
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is historically incomplete. American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city. An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent. The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws e…

Isn't it also the fact the almost no one wants to live like that? The expectations has changed and there's probably little demand for such type of housing.

People rent bedrooms in single-family homes all the time. The only difference between that and dorm-style housing is the size of the building.

Re: A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

#20

Post by mothballed »

postalrat wrote: post #18
hedora wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.

Widespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.

I literally just built a house for ~$60k a couple years ago. A burned out trailer even in a rural shithole with no jobs in my state is about $100k+. An actual functional house, $250k+. This is counter-intuitive but it makes sense in context of the recent COVID 0 real interest mania.

Meanwhile all the shithole land with no "dwelling" on it was never eligible for mortgages so people weren't able to bid it up to oblivion on debt that they locked in with 30 year mortgages so you get weird results like the cost of vacant land is way cheaper than the same piece of land with a house that can really only be bulldozed (latter would be cheaper in most times in history). End result is I built an entire house on property cheaper than a burned out uninhabitable trailer. Building on unmortgagable land is a way to bypass the fact houses are all locked up in 30 year loans at negative real interest rates.

End result is it's far cheaper to build a house than buy even a shitty burned out one because to do the latter you have to buy someone out of their money printing machine of a negative real rate loan, which obviously they are only willing to do for a king's ransom.

------ re: location ---------

I won't share my address but if you are looking to do this yourself: look up fishing canneries in Alaska, most of them are close enough to cheap plots you could do this on, often even without permits or property tax. These canneries are also usually desperate for workers and pay a livable wage to those with refrigeration technology certifications.

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