31–40 of 75 posts
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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.
Studio apartments seem like a better option. Also, from a property manager’s perspective, you generally want to minimize shared spaces because they’re a pain and annoying to deal with.
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Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.
Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats. The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.
You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own.
And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a large commercial building would generate with 24/7 occupancy vs 8/5 occupancy.
The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential isn't because it's not wildly profitable, but because building new purpose-built residential buildings would be cheaper than a conversion for anything other than one or two floors.
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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.
you're basically rebuilding from scratch at that point.
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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.
What will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years?
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Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats. The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.
It's not so much the owner's financial situation, but rather that it'd be cheaper to build new homes than to retrofit a ten floor+ building's plumbing. You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own. And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a lar…
They have been going wild in the UK converting office space to residential.
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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…
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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 oblivio…
and then show me where the jobs are.
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.
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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.
What will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years?
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I'd like to see what kind of house you built for 60k. My assumption is its some small maybe 300 sqft box with no sewer you spent many hours yourself building. Not something something most people would do and while cheap in dollars certainly isn't affordable if you are putting a lot of work into it.
It's basically looks like a glorified rectangular shed but it does have sewage, electric, water, and hvac. Not very impressive but every single person I've had over who's lived in an apartment has expressed interest in learning how to do the same over paying rent out the ass for a similarly sized uninspiring shit-box and ending up with no equity. The only people that have been over that have been unimpressed are peop…