171–180 of 413 posts
IMO, they should consider banning cars in downtown areas (and adding large parking garages just outside them) while they're at it.
So I have the option of paying $700 a month to park in town or take a bus that only comes by once every hour and then get jammed on a subway car that might even make it to it's destination.
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more supply = more competition, no?
I have never seen more supply of apartments make existing rents go down. I had a friend's rent go up 25% in one year in an area that has seen a huge amount of apartment buildings go up. That's not rational. The companies that own these apartment buildings care about nothing more than more money and know that they'll be able to find someone to pay the exhorbant prices.
Positive effects can exist even if they don't singlehandedly flip a decades long trend.
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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.
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Because that would convert space really badly. If you're making 10'x10' rooms out of a 100'x100' space, it's 74% dead space. If a floor is more than 10,000 sq feet, maybe 40,000 sq feet, it goes up to to 90%. I mean, numbers are made up, but the point holds.
I’d be interested to see people get really creative with it. Throw a gym in on one floor. Cinema room on another. Storage units in a few more. Probably difficult to structurally support a pool on a floor not already designed for one but sure, let’s throw one in there too. A kids playroom is maybe a little depressing with no natural light but it could work. Hell: keep the middle commercial space and put a grocery stor…
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…
For buildings where they can't cut the whole center of the building... maybe cutting more (but smaller) holes part way between the outside and the center would work. Then do vertical gardens up those shafts.
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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…)
For professions or companies where in-person collaboration is still needed, bigger concentration of business helps focus infrastructure investment into areas where it is most impactful. For instance, it's easier to make a subway line go through an area with lots of offices than it would be to have multiple separate lines passing through satellite hubs.
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…
converting office buildings do not preclude designing humane urban areas
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...
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Most office buildings are not architecturally feasible to convert to residential. In fact, because of zoning laws, many/most can't even be converted. Would you live in an apartment 15 feet wide and 50 feet deep? No. That's why most office buildings dont work You have to redo all the mechanical, plumbing, electric, and then entirely refinish the building. Its literally cheaper to build new than deal with the nightmare…
>Would you live in an apartment 15 feet wide and 50 feet deep? For laughs, I just measured the width of my home's hallways and rooms. I don't see why 15x50 feet apartment isn't doable especially for a bachelor/new couple starting out. Assume an apartment with a 3 foot wide, 50 foot length hallway, subtract another 2 feet width for walls/piping/whatever, and then you can hang 5 rooms that are 10x10 feet from the hallw…
When I read this my immediate reaction is this is part of Boston's effort to blunt the impact of the potential incoming commercial real estate crash, which could damage many Boston business as well as Boston's commercial tax base. I was surprised not to see that mentioned at all in the announcement. Is it unrelated? Is the announcement political spin to encourage those who might otherwise be against bailing out comme…
Yes CRE vacancy is high in Boston, but it's still far from being a CRE crisis. The share of biotech and healthcare space is so high within Boston CRE that vacancy rate aren't nearly as bad as in other cities. And lab conversions are increasingly commonplace, so it's not like a residential conversion program was necessary to save CRE.