And while some or even most of this is fixable, major renovations are a ton of cost and effort to convert them to something that will still be expensive and weird, if even possible to meet the legal requirements of residential space.
https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/turning-downtown-...
If they choose not to build sufficient housing... they can at least choose to use what they have.
A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing.
That's a slippery slope. Lots of legal requirements exist to protect someone. Legal requirements for windows are pretty reasonable to ensure people have at least some bare minimum of access to natural light in their home, rather than just living in a box.
Why not let those without homes choose if they are willing to take the risks associated with ignoring those rules over l king on the streets?
Yes, and people voluntarily placed themselves under indentured servitude before it was made illegal.
If there's a housing shortage, the solution isn't to remove bare minimum housing standards for everyone.
It may be something a marginally housed person could afford, though. Maybe that makes room in their budget for healthier food, addiction counseling or after-school tutoring. Or maybe they're already strained and would otherwise be on the street.
I'd rather have a government that enforces a high quality of life.
By and large, I'm a fan of American-style freedom-to-succeed-or-fail, but in the context of NIMBY anti-density housing supply crunches, it feels exceptionally cruel.
'We're going to have policies that limit supply and increase the cost of housing' + 'We're going to prevent you from finding other housing by making it illegal' is a heavy one-two punch.
Specifically, there was house we were looking at, and one of the previous owners covered up the back porch.
However, one of the bedrooms used to overlook that back porch, and had a window on that wall.
They were not allowed to remove that window because "bedrooms have windows", even though the window was an interior window.
Similarly, we considered replacing our bedroom window with a bay window, but the code would not allow it because the windows were too small to allow egress.
That someone is often the homeowners [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/...
These are mostly for fire safety, not quality of life. Turns out not having a window during a fire has killed lots of people.
SF is the poster child for what happens when a bunch of people incapable or unmotivated to engage in planning more than 5min into the future write a law about everyone's pet issue.
Clearly there's a balance to be struck and it's to be struck somewhere on the less regulatory side than it is now.
It's like how sometimes it just doesn't make sense to refactor code because it is fundamentally designed for a different purpose. Sure you can grind it out but will it be any better or cheaper than starting fresh?
Once we start talking easing housing code requirements, especially if it's done in the name of increasing access to housing, the conversation becomes about just how much conversion is really necessary, and how little can be done to break even. And there's a big continuum.
If one end of this continuum is a standard college dorm setup, the other is literally just letting people camp out in an otherwise-unmodified office floor. In between are probably SRO-level accommodations, building four-wall cubicles with open ceilings for sunlight and ventilation (sometimes traditionally covered in chickenwire).
As grim as this sounds, it might actually be preferable to the current practice of allowing tent cities to proliferate downtown. The idea of an office tower slum is incredibly dystopian, but if the alternative is the properties becoming write-offs, it may be the most likely outcome.
It's hard to get more contemporary cyberpunk than an organic community nesting in an ex-Facebook office building.
So it seems this scheme is much less about helping some poor homeless person and much more about some rich investor keeping some money.
Of course the specifics of the building matter a lot, but it's certainly cheaper than ground up net new development.
And even if the conversion leads to abnormal units per modern standards, it will still get occupied at the right price.
Seems a no brainer to rezone most office space to residential. Free market will figure it out. You can bet buying these commercial properties at firesale prices will open up a profitable path to residential
Everyone’s underwater a there isn’t a good solution without massive price decrease (crash) or commercial space demand re-invigorates.
This is what recessions are useful for. Underwater mortgages still need to be serviced. There might be a deal in providing assistance to the lender in exchange for financing conversion.
The mortgages will fail for most new office space, because the underwriting used unrealistic assumptions about rents.
The building codes have evolved over time to protect life/safety of the occupants, so not something you would want to have the City bypass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code [2] https://sfdbi.org/codes
Plenty of people in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, etc live happy lives in much much smaller living areas. This makes them more affordable. But building codes in many places in the USA disallow making places that small.
Other examples of questionable codes are codes that require parking spaces, codes that require front yards, codes that require backyards, etc....
Parking spaces, front yards, back yards, building heights, building types, density etc are all City Planning functions, and you're right, have little to do with life/safety typically, and in many ways are quite destructive by making walkable livable cities very difficult to do now.
The Building codes, on the other hand, have evolved with each disaster over the last century or two - a building collapsing in an earthquake, people dying in fires, etc. So those have real life/safety protection as a primary directive.
Given how little exercise people get and that we are typically glued to a screen (tv, laptop, or phone) during waking hours, I could see an argument for lowering floor space minimums.
You can restrict housing practically as tight as you want by raising permitting requirements, safety assessments, and safety factors and other safety features until it's practically impossible for anyone but the rich to build.
There are people out there that would be safer in a run-down tinder-box shack than an up to code and zoned house. Not because the house is safer, but because it allows them to have an affordable roof over their head and round out their finances for other things that bring them wellbeing. Building and zoning codes fail to account for this.
Japan has a lot of 2.5 tatami sized apartments that you can get for $500/month (even in Tokyo). No heat, but you can plug in a space heater. Shared toilet, and no shower necessarily in building (so you have to use a bath house down the street).
America goes out of its way to avoid such living arrangements, and to avoid things like slums. I think we could do a better job at creating lower end housing, however, by sacrificing some of our livability principles. But it isn't going to fix the guy who wants to cook meth in their state provided housing.
You mean "chronic homeless." There are homeless that you don't notice because they aren't standing out. They are living in cars or maybe crashing on someone's couch. Let's not equate homelessness with mental illness drug abuse.
We are perpetuating a permanent dependent underclass along with a bureaucracy that is incentivized to maintain the class to maintain their power.
How? Getting accurate statistics is impossible, and what we get is self reported. "I'm not on drugs anymore!" (while smoking fent) is not uncommon. Every group will roll out self reported data to support their positions, scientific studies are frowned on, if they are even possible anyways.
When we got rid of them, many of their former inhabitants ended up on the street.
[1] For an incredibly broad definition of 'not functional'.
You mean: the people who run the cities did that, who all happen to be incredibly Democratic. They also did it in San Diego, where I bet a Republican mayor was in power at the time (since you know, that was mostly true in the 80s, 90s, and 00s), but economics rather than political ideology was the main driver of the gentrification.
> You have mental health institutions closed down a decade earlier as well.
Mostly by that famous Democrat named Ronald Reagan?
https://igeek.com/Reagan_emptied_mental_institutions_and_cau...
So you don't assign any responsibility to the people who passed it? How quaint. Why even bother to vote? BTW, one of them is governor right now.
If a Republican did it, vote them out of office too.
In the SF case that I was referring to, it really was all Democrats. I was talking just about SF. Brown opened it up. Newsom continued it.
Having trouble with basic reading comprehension, facts, and culpability? Or just biased?
Now twenty years later, you have Newsom as governor and angling for the Presidency. Not one peep about how his policies helped cause those problems.
Why was it so easy to build all those tech campuses and tech dorms yet so hard to build anywhere else in the city? People complain about NIMBY SF but where was the NIMBY there and then?
You make this legal and tomorrow every RE developer stops putting in windows.
In the real world, you have millions of agents try to game every law and bend it into their advantage in some way.
This sounds like new housing supply. I'm failing to see the problem. Developers still have to sell the apartment, after all.
The problem is the new housing supply was always imminent - only now, it's windowless, all because developers can increase margins by 1.07% and shorten build times by a day.
Last November, HN briefly discussed [1] Munger Hall at the University of California Santa Barbara, which will be just such a building. Housing 4,500 students, only 32 of 512 single rooms on each floor will have physical windows. The remaining 95% will have virtual windows that simulate sunlight.
The HN linked article [2] includes a floor plan and a rendering of an 8-room cluster with shared kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms. UC Santa Barbara has more information on the project [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29096773
[2] https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu...
[3] https://sam.ucsb.edu/campus-planning-design/current-projects...
People do live there (some pretty happily) but this does not seem like a good idea for UCSB freshmen.
It also likely doesn't meet Fire code, which is there for a pretty good reason.
If someone can figure out how to make it look cool, office conversions could be the 2020s version of the warehouse loft.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/08/17/adam-neum...
"When Adam Neumann revealed his new venture to WeWork-ify the residential real estate sector Monday, backed by a $350 million≥."
The layout doesn't seem so terrible, minus the plumbing and heating concerns.
All of these buildings have a hub, bathrooms, and open ceilings for laying more pipes/wiring next to all the fiber cables.
similar gluts caused a really vibrant music scene in Berlin
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/why-empty-offic...
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/07/28/should-dcs-empty-of...
The argument in the Washingtonian hints at a policy solution. It cites a "lack windows on at least two sides" with cavernous floors making "direct natural light" rare. The "complexity of adding hundreds of bathrooms and kitchens (not to mention the accompanying venting and plumbing)" is real. "Turning rooftops into amenity spaces" is not.
So yes, these aren't going to become luxury apartments. Will they have less direct sunlight and no rooftop garden? Yes. Are those remotely necessary? Of course not. Fewer windows doesn't mean no windows; this isn't a safety issue. We will probably need code amendments. But that would require political will to legalize affordable housing.
We live in a democracy. The underlying problem of government is voters.
Most home owners (especially in The Bay) refuse to allow anyone to build anything because they see that as a threat to their home value.
Building with x% percentage affordable units in it? Not enough affordable units and the units are not affordable enough. This will not offset the gentrification caused by the market rate units.
Building with high percentage of deeply affordable units in it? You can't just solve societal problems by throwing housing at it. The residents who will live in these deeply affordable units need social services to get their lives back on track.
Building with 100% deeply affordable units with on site social services? You can't put a homeless shelter in our neighborhood! The honest working class residents of this neighborhood have suffered enough from gentrification without having the homeless problem dumped on them too!
It sounds like Bay area residents are working against their own interests (home values) by reducing housing supply, thereby making their city so unlivable that home values will collapse anyway. Getting people to see the problem and vote accordingly may be difficult, but it doesn't seem completely impossible.
Pretty sure dictatorships have the same problem with improper zoning.
I can't find it now, but there was a study measuring the straightness of the road between capitals and their airports. The straighter the road, the more authoritarian the regime that built it.
Are you proposing that the city rent out licenses to live in the streets, parks and sidewalks, or are you just pooh-poohing the entire idea of housing standards? How do you feel about food standards?
This post is not about food.
I did a renovation once where the idea was to preserve a few of the old wood windows that would be lost due to the nature of the renovation. The original idea was to reuse them and move them into the new renovated space and install them. Turned out it was going to cost more to carefully remove them, fit them, etc than just buying the highest end Marvin windows. So new windows were purchased and the old ones are used for parts now.
Just to pick one example out of a hat, the discussion of elevators was one that made an impression on me. They said the allocation of elevators for residential vs office space is very different, and in some SF examples they had to put in entirely new elevators and staircases.
Seems there's lots of these things you wouldn't think about unless you're in that industry...
For most large modern office buildings it is cheaper to take them down and build new than to try to retrofit them for residential use.
I spent 4 years as a commercial superintendent on various projects in the Caribbean, Dubai, and the DFW.
None of those projects would have any difficulty adding plumbing wherever they wish.
Then again, I don't have any real experience, so I'm very much being optimistic here without actual hands-on knowledge. I could be very wrong, and would love to hear why!
So yes, some walls have plumbing running through them, but not all. Any architect and contractor will try to optimize cost by having as few walls as possible with plumbing. Which is why in some apartments, neighboring bathrooms in units will be close or share some wall space.
It could be state or local building codes based. Here is a mention of it from a city in Illinois. But it definitely isn't just a California thing.
https://elmhurst.org/DocumentCenter/View/1826/Plumbing-Requi...
https://www.reference.com/world-view/standard-wall-thickness...
My California home is all 2x4s everywhere and there's plenty of plumbing in most walls.
In every wall and under every floor? How many sinks did you have?
Maybe you could build the bathrooms and kitchens along partition walls that have space behind them, so pipes could run above the floor, between walls, to the building core where all the main plumbing was designed to be.
It isn’t, it’s called core drilling and it’s extensively used in commercial buildings with concrete decks for electrical conduits, electrical poke-thru devices, plumbing pipes, hot water/chilled water piping for HVAC, data cable sleeves, fire sprinkler piping, etc.
A typical commercial building floor is concrete in a metal pan that has tensioned cables in the concrete to reinforce it. A few holes aren’t going to ruin the structural integrity. A ground penetrating radar scan should be performed prior to drilling to avoid cutting the cables, if you cut one of those, then the structural integrity is affected and repairs get expensive.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/planning-measures-will-ma...
Think of the loss of figurative identity a minority of landlords might incur!
1: I use this term deliberately and with intention plus restraint, having suffered through these for years now. I hope you never experience the misery that is an HOA.
Prevent new housing and complain about prices is the dominant position. And elected officials comply. Democracy is functioning.
Or about a collapsing tax base when stuff like a commercial real estate collapse occur.
I often see new buildings criticized because they will raise the average rent in the area. And people accept that argument. Think about that for a moment.
New construction was expensive, so they geared the apartments towards the upper end of the market. Rents at existing places didn't go down; if anything, it gave them an incentive to go up since they wouldn't be the most expensive place anymore if they did.
Loans and what not put a price floor on the rents of new units; given how hard it is to evict bad tenants (especially with the current backlog), and how hard it is to bring prices back up in rent controlled cities, they're just as well off leaving units empty at full price as they are renting below cost just to stop the bleed.
It's not. But it's wasteful in an urban core, where that lack of density forgoes real economic opportunity. It also creates an easily-identified cause for the lack of housing supply.
Which is why SF is so poor and underdeveloped.
> It also creates an easily-identified cause for the lack of housing supply.
An easily identified excuse. Now do suburban Tennessee.
No, it's one reason why some US cities are becoming increasingly unlivable for anyone outside the upper-middle class - those who sell your groceries, make your lunch or deliver your packages (to name only a handful of occupations).
> An easily identified excuse. Now do suburban Tennessee.
Is suburban Tennessee an urban core?