> things like plumbing are

There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.)

I think on average we can do better than literally hell.

> think on average we can do better than literally hell

Sure. But not with the existing CRE stock. My prediction is code won't be compromised. We'll raze the buildings and construct new housing. It will never be as cheap as the alternative could have been, or, more pointedly, than what tens if not hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers endure. (Quite happily, I may add.)

In the US they force people to live in the tents after demolishing the slums and call it progress.

Then they demolish the tents.

> There are apartment buildings in Hell's Kitchen with communal toilets and showers for each floor. There is still running water to each apartment, but I'm not sure that has to be a requirement. (My college dorm didn't have running water.)

You're talking about prewar walk-ups that have been converted to de facto SROs. Also, those are mostly downtown, not in Hell's Kitchen. They're cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price. Some number are also rent-stabilized and occupied by longtime residents, for the same reasons.

There is no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding. There's a reason no new construction uses this model except for dedicated affordable housing (to the extent that's even built anymore). People simply do not want to live like that, and the market reflects that.

> cheap and mostly occupied by young people who can't afford anything else, because they're incredibly undesirable ways to live, limiting their market rental price

Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1].

> no way that you can seriously argue that doing this for newly-constructed skyscrapers would result in units that can be sold at the price that the building owners are demanding

The buildings' owners are screwed. Their leverage constrains them. The question is whether the structures have positive value. Retrofitting to current code leaves most with negative value, i.e. it's cheaper to abandon. The question I was answering is if it's possible to economically convert these to housing for somebody. Under current code, the answer is no.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-populati... 20 to 24

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> Yup, do this. "Young people who can't afford anything else" in New York are a population comparable with that of Atlanta [1].

You can't just link to the age distribution and cite the number of "20-24 year olds in NYC" as evidence that there are half a million people in NYC who can't afford to live in anything other than an SRO.

I’m saying there are half a million New Yorkers aged 20 to 24. Is your argument really that there isn’t a market for a cheap, minimal build in New York?

You're also pulling "can't afford anything else" into that as if the two groups are the same, which is what they're complaining about. (I'm not expressing an opinion myself, I've never been to New York.)

High rises are designed to have reconfigurable floorplans. So, very few internal walls are going to be load bearing. In the absolute worst case (low fixed ceilings that prevent drop ceilings), you can always go for the industrial look + expose upstairs' plumbing to downstairs, and/or add fixed internal walls for vertical plumbing runs.