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Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

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Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#91

Post by vel0city »

vel0city wrote: post #75
usrusr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you really have to cram in as many residents as you could with a purpose-built tenement? There must be ways to keep headcount in the range the infrastructure can support and still provide a lot more housing than just leaving them as empty decaying offices owned by the last one holding the bag. Intersperse flats with windowless storage units (you have a depth problem anyways), low density commercial use like wo…

I mean, sure, you can just sell it as a unit for each floor. You then need to recoup all the costs of rebuilding against fewer people, so all the main area renovations and what not get more expensive and the monthly cost of building maintenance get spread across fewer and fewer tenants. But you've still got a problem of most of the rooms of your very expensive condo have zero natural light, its all practically ancien…

Sorry, I either totally misread your comment or was mentally replying to someone else when I wrote this.

Sure, you could just cram the residences to the edges and try to recoup the cost of the rest of the square footage for places that don't need natural light. But once again you've got issues with original designs and intents for the building. None of the plumbing is designed to be pushed to the edges, so you'll need to make massive changes to the structural integrity by drilling a bunch of new floor cores to do all the new plumbing work. You could rent the interior spaces as storage, but you'll probably quickly flood the market of storage units with the massive amount of square footage you'll be bringing.

Trying to have industrial in there as well is asking for problems. Trying to rent some 15th story small/medium interior unit as some kind of industrial workshop would be quite weird. What kind of industry would want a smaller interior space that probably can't support heavy equipment, has a limit to ceilings of ~10 or so feet, can't require odd ventilation or strange/additional fire suppression/separation requirements, probably has significant power limitations (in terms of industrial capacity, at least), noise limitations, difficulty getting much product in and out, etc? Stuff that the city is going to be OK zoning literally across the hall from people trying to live? And that you're going to find a number of these willing to pay a good bit for such a space to cover the maintenance costs? These buildings weren't built for industrial usages, they were built for office desks and couches. Maybe a few floors have been upgraded to handle additional weight to have datacenter kind of spaces, but definitely not most of the floors.

So then you're trying to spread the maintenance costs of this massive and old building across higher value residences and a lot of very low value storage/weird industrial tenants.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#92

Post by Izikiel43 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #45
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our evidence from a wide range of cities is that those that build more housing have lower rent growth. Actual decreases are unusual though.

Inflationary policy continues to exist, also it is rare to have a true overabundance of housing. But places like Detroit show prices can go down in the right conditions. Commercial leases have their own quirks and long timelines that encourage waiting on a better price. Perhaps a tax on vacant commercial units.

> Detroit show prices can go down in the right conditions.

Those right conditions for rent going down are the wrong conditions for everything else.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#93

Post by mead5432 »

burkaman wrote: post #63
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not the conserve the land outside of cities where people want to live?

Based on what I know about Denver, people there want to live outside the city, not in Denver itself. Everyone I know that moved to "Denver" actually moved somewhere like an hour's drive from downtown, and not because they couldn't afford something in the city. Here's a map of average housing prices in the area: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3e87d9f631dd470ab05ab... . There are some expensive neighborhoods in…

Really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Boulder is surprisingly low. From my experience, it’s on the more expensive side for single family homes. I’m curious what’s driving the info in that dashboard.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#94

Post by collingreen »

binary132 wrote: post #83
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also live in Denver. The biggest problem with downtown isn't zoning (though that may be a part), it's the homeless people. Who's going to want to go hang out on 16th when there's a dude asking you for money on every street corner? I don't know what the solution is, but it seems clear to me that revitalizing downtown starts with removing the "I'm going to have to deal with vagrants" factor.

Last time I went to Denver I actually got chased.

Last time I went to Denver I didn't get chased and everyone I met seemed pretty great.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#95

Post by FloorEgg »

jmward01 wrote: post #39
mattcantstop wrote: post #14

I think Denver (I live here) is an example of our horrible zoning. We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work. This is one of the main principles of BAD design, where you create an entire area around close to a single use (offices). That creates a very fragile city. This "single use" zoning that the US proliferated makes us re…

Everything is part of an ecosystem, even office buildings. Nature shows us that a healthy ecosystem, one that survives shocks, is a diverse ecosystem. Diverse ecosystems find niches faster and niches grow over time to turn into major driving forces. They absorb shocks as new things enter since not all parts react the same or on the same timeline. Diversity is key to long term health. This is why monopolies are bad, t…

I agree with you about ecosystems and many systems for that matter. Diversity in diet leads to diversity in gut microbiome leads to diversity in methods to absorb nutrients leads to longevity and health.

Lots more example I could list.

However I think there are contexts and levels of abstraction where diversity at one level prohibits diversity at another. An example of this would be standards. There is little diversity in shipping container sizes and designs and that standardization enables more shipment of goods.

Standardization in web protocols enables larger diversity in website content.

While I'm not an expert in biology, I'm pretty sure some of our organs have a lot less diversity in cell types than others. E.g. a healthy heart has little cellular diversity compared to a healthy gut.

By standardizing money (limiting diversity in barter) enables a larger economy with greater diversity of products and services.

A highly functional team will all share a core set of values, and if everyone had extremely diverse values the team wouldn't be able to function. For example some businessess thrive on a culture of internal competition, and some thrive on internal cooperation, but mixing these up can create dysfunction. At the same time, some diversity in values leads to better decision making, so again context matters.

So my point is that diversity is a really important property that sometimes needs to be maximized, sometimes needs to be minimized, and sometimes needs to be balanced, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. I also think that in general maximizing global diversity is a good north star value, and I am acknowledging that to achieve it requires minimizing diversity in some narrow contexts.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#96

Post by mothballed »

quickthrowman wrote: post #85
mothballed wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office. History favors the bold, and code inspectors blabbering about "written in blood" don't see all the homeless people they kill via reduced access to housing. I've seen plenty of artist collectives that manage it; on paper they are office/industrial but actually everyone lives there. Every once in awhile one burns down but t…

> There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office. A 20,000 sq ft office tower floor will usually have a single set of restrooms and a couple of kitchen sinks, maybe a dishwasher, plus a couple 6-gallon or instahot water heaters. If you subdivide that floor into a dozen units, that’s 12 showers, 12 washers, 12 dishwashers, 12 toilets, 24 sinks, and 12 water heaters. The…

That's not how the 'black market' ones I've seen operate. And I've seen a lot from when I visited the circuit of underground artist-related events when I lived in chicago. They are shockingly common in areas with extremely high rents and an oversupply of unused commercial space.

They might subdivide it 12 ways, but there is one shared kitchen for a whole floor and maybe 2 toilets, 2 sinks and the residents are going to the laundromats. They tend to put the shared amenities on the ground floor as much as possible because it is easiest to expand them there. It beats being homeless by a long shot.

For reference, when I hauled water, we used about 60 gallons a week for a family, or about 0.05% utilization of a 3" drain pipe for a single family. You do not need much water in order to be way way better off than being homeless; 5/gal a day of non-potable water and you're pretty much in luxury comparatively and a shit-ton of people can be putting that down a 3" or even 2" drain pipe before it causes problems. A 3" pipe is the minimum that would be serving a typical floor of a warehouse, so plenty enough for a constantly used couple of shared bathrooms with a shared kitchen. Honestly even splitting it 12 ways could be overcome with some technical ingenuity (electric lock-outs to prevent more than a few in use at once, and AAVs to prevent needing a bunch of new vents).

These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#97

Post by phatfish »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #90
renewiltord wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did I. But I think the median American acts to not raise their child like that.

Well it’s time to rethink that then. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and at one point it’ll be a necessity to downsize if you want an affordable home.

How much space does a kid staring at an iPad all day really need?

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#98

Post by mothballed »

vel0city wrote: post #91
vel0city wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, you can just sell it as a unit for each floor. You then need to recoup all the costs of rebuilding against fewer people, so all the main area renovations and what not get more expensive and the monthly cost of building maintenance get spread across fewer and fewer tenants. But you've still got a problem of most of the rooms of your very expensive condo have zero natural light, its all practically ancien…

Sorry, I either totally misread your comment or was mentally replying to someone else when I wrote this. Sure, you could just cram the residences to the edges and try to recoup the cost of the rest of the square footage for places that don't need natural light. But once again you've got issues with original designs and intents for the building. None of the plumbing is designed to be pushed to the edges, so you'll nee…

You can run drains out the side of the structure without drilling holes in the floor, same with electric, and even if by some insanity we say "whutabout the holes in the side" then you could even use a damn lift pump/macerator pump to pump it up and out through where a window was. For vents you can also use AAV instead of a traditional vent. If the residences are at the edges they should be able to pop right out and worse case you elevate the floor in the bathroom/kitchen under the plumbing appliances for the slope on the pipe as it exits. A vertical drain pipe isn't going to freeze (and even if it were, could be insulated and heated), and supply lines are such small holes as to not threaten structural integrity.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#99

Post by jmye »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #74
f1shy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked very much Japan or Buenos Aires. Sure. Just pointing out there are downsides also. Traffic is a mess, and that shows in times for ambulances and firefighters. I like things of both. I guess people should vote by choosing to live where they want

Traffic is a mess in Tokyo? Ambulance response times are typically under 10m in japan, so not sure the relevance there. Also the entire point of living in a dense neighborhood is that one is able to address many of your day to day needs without driving. >I guess people should vote by choosing to live where they want I'd have no problem with this if dense, multi-use zoning were common. As it is, very few places in the…

… So live where you want. I do, and it’s a SFH neighborhood. We don’t all need to live in Kowloon City, just because that’s what you like.

So tired of this strident bullshit (“and SFH zoning should not exist”) from people who can’t seem to figure out other people exist and have thoughts and preferences, too.

Re: Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

#100

Post by quickthrowman »

mothballed wrote: post #96
quickthrowman wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office. A 20,000 sq ft office tower floor will usually have a single set of restrooms and a couple of kitchen sinks, maybe a dishwasher, plus a couple 6-gallon or instahot water heaters. If you subdivide that floor into a dozen units, that’s 12 showers, 12 washers, 12 dishwashers, 12 toilets, 24 sinks, and 12 water heaters. The…

That's not how the 'black market' ones I've seen operate. And I've seen a lot from when I visited the circuit of underground artist-related events when I lived in chicago. They are shockingly common in areas with extremely high rents and an oversupply of unused commercial space. They might subdivide it 12 ways, but there is one shared kitchen for a whole floor and maybe 2 toilets, 2 sinks and the residents are going…

> These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).

It didn’t work out so great in Oakland at the Ghost Ship, 36 people died in a similar arrangement.

Building code is written in blood, things are done a certain way for a reason. You may be morally or ethically against them but following code saves lives.

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