Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

bostonplans.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 413 posts

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#51

Post by kibwen »

xattt wrote: post #19
mlyle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either undesirable or illegal apartments due to lack of windows/egress/etc. Couldn't you just wall off the middle? I mean, you do get another set of windows on the inner courtyard, but it seems expensive to perform such major surgery on a building.

Donuted buildings will forever remind me of the Ponte Tower building. (1) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/th...

Well, we're calling them "donut holes", but they're actually rectangles. :P

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#52

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

steveBK123 wrote: post #7

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 wonder if some interior spaces could be preserved for commercial, some reallocated for retail, some set aside for tenant mixed use areas.

I don't get why one area can only ever be for one kind of use.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#53

Post by mlyle »

fasthands9 wrote: post #40
mlyle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes are a big expense, but not as big as the debt on the construction costs. And you end up with massive additional construction costs for fewer square feet to lease. So you only can do this if your bank decides to agree to take a haircut... which only happens if the bank is convinced you have no other options. Reducing the property tax provides a sweetener that you and the bank can share to make it slight…

I could imagine edge scenarios (not sure how common) where office buildings that happen to have residential friendly layouts do this first. Perhaps if that happened it would both raise demand for non-residential space (more people living nearby) and lower supply of commercial prop avail.

> Perhaps if that happened it would both raise demand for non-residential space (more people living nearby) and lower supply of commercial prop avail.

Yup, that's what economics does: the firms with the lowest cost to converting, do so. And it's a nice follow-on effect that more residential hopefully increases commercial demand.

This is mostly a factor where you have a big inventory of older commercial buildings. Advances in HVAC (and before that, lighting) have let you build bigger floors that are less desirable for residential use.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#54

Post by ethanbond »

LightBug1 wrote: post #15
ch4s3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that a single firm or even a stable cartel could effectively control prices in a market as large as Boston is just naive.

De facto cartels ... what do you think is going on now around the world, let alone speculatively in Boston.

Not cartels. Rising productivity means everyone knows they can raise rents. No coordination necessary.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#55

Post by thfuran »

steveBK123 wrote: post #23
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can just run a cartel [1]. I don’t understand why anyone thinks things like housing can have any competition when housing is not a commodity but a necessity and the margins are rather thin with little to no space for efficiency and innovation, and private equity can just buy apartments and houses. > In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, ev…

Property managers owners. RE investment is very hands on, and people hiring property managers to deal with it on their behalf. The idea that the top 10 own 70% of the market is not a shock. You could probably do this "top 10 own 70% of __ market" for literally anything.

I think you skipped the last clause of the sentence you're referencing (and forgot to look at the source). The real point is that one software vendor effectively controls all the pricing.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#56

Post by PartiallyTyped »

steveBK123 wrote: post #23
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can just run a cartel [1]. I don’t understand why anyone thinks things like housing can have any competition when housing is not a commodity but a necessity and the margins are rather thin with little to no space for efficiency and innovation, and private equity can just buy apartments and houses. > In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, ev…

Property managers owners. RE investment is very hands on, and people hiring property managers to deal with it on their behalf. The idea that the top 10 own 70% of the market is not a shock. You could probably do this "top 10 own 70% of __ market" for literally anything.

Notice that you omitted the important part:

> every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.

Which makes this effectively a cartel.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#57

Post by micromacrofoot »

bmitc wrote: post #21
steveBK123 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

because supply has almost never outpaced demand in these cities

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#58

Post by bmitc »

thrill wrote: post #38
bmitc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"know that they'll be able to find someone to pay" So, you're saying the demand remains greater than the supply?

What are you getting at?

That is not necessarily the only conclusion that supports that, but it is one. A lot of urban designers just think that building apartment buildings will help with the demand problem in the same way that people think building highways alleviates congestion, which perhaps surprisingly urban designers know that that doesn't work for highways. And I see no evidence, at least in big metropolitan areas like Boston with a huge amount of attraction, that building supply does anything to ease demand. If anything, it increases it.

I would argue that demand in major cities will never go down. In particular, the greater Boston area has more than 500,000 college students. Many of those graduate and stay and work in the area and many more graduates move into the greater Boston area to work. It's a big area with lots of growing fields with a lot of professional people moving into. Demand is simply not going to go down for apartments, and the demand for housing shows no signs of slowing either.

A bit of my point was that landlords siphon off money from society knowing how important housing is to people and will charge the absolute maximum they can get away with. It's predatory.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#59

Post by jancsika »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #18

It's a fine idea if good candidates for conversion can be found, but shouldn't they fix up their dilapidated public transit system before inviting more density into their urban core? Just today, one of their rail cars caught fire at an elevated station, and their broken fire suppression system did nothing but flood the ground floor when the firefighters tried to use it. Wu's push for more housing density along the ci…

I absolutely agree we need to discuss the topic of their dilapidated public transit system. But shouldn't we first solve the problem of how to deal with Richard Stallman's oversized influence on the FSF?

Until we have a truly well-funded FSF filled with both successful projects and sustainable outreach programs that can reach a more diverse set of participants, I'm afraid that the topic of software freedom will continue to be relegated to the sidelines as some kind of fringe religious zeal.

Until we do that, we'd just be replacing one unethically-proprietary fire suppression system with another unethically-proprietary fire suppression system. And riders will just be commuting back and forth between abodes wired with automation systems which do not respect the wishes of the users within them.

Re: Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings

#60

Post by bonestamp2 »

alephnerd wrote: post #4

> a rate reduction by up to 75% of the standard tax rate for residential for up to 29 years could provide a strong incentive to encourage conversion. This would be implemented through a public-private partnership that will enable the BPDA, the City, and the proponent to enter into a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreement This is actually a pretty nice rebate (similar to the one Ed Lee and Willie Brown proposed fo…

This is a very nice rebate... maybe too nice? It's hard to say, but other cities might learn a lot from this experiment.
Post reply on HN