181–190 of 413 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many cities (I'd say it's the majority in the world), with mixed use zoning which work wonderfully. Lower floors are offices or businesses and upper floors are apartments. Why is this so difficult?
part of the reason this is so bad in the USA is indeed what OP named, the concept of 'legibility', as explained in 'seeing like a state'. In the case of the USA, though, another 'lens' on the legibility is that overall the people making the laws were neurotically concerned with keeping black people away from white people and enforcing segregation. 'separating uses' was a good way to also 'separate users', and a littl…
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…
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 perimeter.
People build McMansions that are > 10K square feet, so for a building footprint to be too big for this (i.e., so big that buyers would balk at the size), then you'd need a high-rise with ~40K sq ft floors before this became a problem.
A standard city block in Manhattan is apparently 237,000 square feet, so if you had a building that took up a whole block, there'd be a big problem.
Now I'm wondering how many office buildings there are in a typical city block.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Property tax represents 72% of Boston's municipal revenue[0], and this initiative provides a property tax reduction of up to 75% for up to 29 years, so unfortunately this initiative will not help with T funding. [0] https://data.boston.gov/dataset/revenue-budget
https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2023-06/FY24%20Item...
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.
I will probably get sniped by someone who actually knows what they're talking about (please correct me if I'm wrong :D), but my impression of the T issues is less a funding issue, and more a competency/corruption issue. We're building above-ground rail at underground rail prices for one example problem.
Looked up the property records. Either a HIGHLY coincidental name clash, or there's a recently retired T exec who has been using MBTA land as an extended back yard and off-street parking area.
That's the moment I gave up on Boston and the T, tbh. It's a small thing that doesn't really matter, but so ridiculously brazen and public and personal. If that sort of thing is what happens out in the open, can you imagine how many tens/hundreds of millions of taxpayer money is being funneled between friends and cousins via MBTA?
For example if you're on the first few floors and you don't have an outside-facing window, your only source of light might be a 20 story light well. At best it always looks like dusk in your apartment, but most often it's pitch black without having your lights always on.
Some of those repurposed building are quite livable, others not as much.