While the bathrooms can be fixed with effort, windows mean a lot of office spaces would have empty cores as only the square footage near the outer edge of the building would be used.

(This isn't my area of expertise. I'm leaning on there being someone closer to this topic here on HN to opine, but this is at least how I understood it from real estate developers who noted to me why they're avoiding office space conversions)

I feel like the notion "the govt should turn empty offices into housing!!" comes up on places like reddit _all_ the time, it takes very little explanation to show why it's not that simple.

Many buildings are difficult to retrofit because they use a type of compressed concrete floor that cannot be safely drilled. Cheaper to demo.

We just need to reach the tipping point where the demo/rebuild cost is lower than the expected gain.

Just change the code.

Changing code here is unviable.

Also, if you need a window for a bedroom to be safe, why not an office? People spend 8 hours in an office without a window. Mitigating fire risk in tall buildings is a serious issue, but you have sprinkler systems, internal stair exits, etc.

Maybe there’s a creative way to do low-income housing meaning only a window or two in the whole unit, no individual HVAC control (set by building) lots of artificial light, and someone more knowledgeable than me would need to explain the power & plumbing tradeoffs. Maybe you could basically replumb & wire on top of the floorplates, taking a few inches from ceiling height?

As for plumbing, like you I also speculate if they could not just do a raised floor, or possibly inside/along walls, to increase the reach. They already do this in some renovations of very old buildings where they want to create a large central kitchen (resulting in almost horizontal plumbing that clogs like nobody's business).

Step 1 -aquire land and property Step 2 - Build mass transit / metro and invest in the area, proterty price goes up 3x Step 3 - Rent out, or sell

If some one refuses to sell land ar step 1, buld transit where you actually do buy land

Instead of doing this, it would be far more logical to just charge for the services being provided in the form of a yearly fee proportional to the amount of land that is being occupied.

The whole point of a pyramid scheme is they don't create value.

Developing the undeveloped is a productive contibution to the economy. Solving the housing crisis is a productive activity

> this is already done in the form of suburban sprawl

You have to create high-density housing, apartments, and local amenities. Pulling expensive underground rail tlinto a group of suburban homes is a waste

> You generate a bounded one off income

keep them and rent them out

Governments want to help their friends and hurt their enemies. Doing this almost never involves making money - sometimes and only sometimes it involves helping their friends make money.

In your example step 1 and 2 are fine but 3 is awkward. Selling or renting things doesn't make anyone happy. It's better to just give it away - there's no profit to be made but again - the point isn't profit.

If that happens, and it's made reasonable to convert offices into housing, pretty easy to make money from that.

(Edit: by renting/selling the housing - if that wasn't clear yet)

What are we gonna do with the offices anyway? Keep em empty for old times sake?

It's possible the owners wouldn't want to start running a renting to tenants business if they were renting office space, since it's less money per client and more maintenance/running costs. The governement could very well be better at handling this than private companies, and would companies would sell for liquidity instead of future profit, and go into something else.

Esit: I'm no expert on housing, but this would disrupt wildly the value of housing in the city, since the benefit of being close to offices vanishes and housing is all over. Profits from exploiting the buildings could very well be less than interesting for private companies.

It could also be governement policy to sell this housing to individuals instead of renting, creating a lot of capital to be used by individuals (since mortgages are tough to reach for most people today, this could be nice economic leverage for individuals, if they could buy cheap housing and mortgage it.

Not sure what that'd do to the economy but I doubt it would be bad.

I garantee you that keeping em empty isn't lucrative, so we gotta do something with them. Housing makes some sense.

What are you suggesting?

So, slimmer buildings basically.

Strategy requires a goal. Naively your goal might be to house more people.

NYC tried that with lots of projects built in the mid 20th century. True it provided apartments for a number of people during that time. However the projects were a terrible dangerous place to grown-up and many who grew up in them weren't able to enter mainstream society (and thus then subsequent generation requires even more such housing)

Meanwhile the areas near these projects are also dangerous and blighted - doing that at scale would condemn the entire downtown and send the city into a tax death spiral.

(archive: https://archive.ph/gQiQW but it's not as easy to read)

Takeway: old skyscrapers are easier to convert than new ones, because they tended toward home-like small offices.

A modern skyscraper had to have a hole punched in it.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2023%2F0...

Low income housing comes with associated costs to the city and the people who inhabit them pay essentially no taxes so everyone else's taxes need to go up.

And though it scares the living heck out of me. That can be scaled up with AI.

Please be as specific as possible, I'd be surprised if you'd be ignorant enough to make such an accusatory comment if you didn't have an example ready to go.

I wonder, does it have more kills in the air or on the ground?

The f16 is made to stay close to airbases and defend against intrusions. Kinda cheap - relatively.(60 M usd)

The f22 is the peak stealth air superiority fighter. It's made to go anywhere and murder anything. Much, much more expensive. Does not carry that much ordonance.(150M usd)

F18A are made to be do it alls on carriers.(66 M usd)

(I'd love to be corrected if i'm wrong)

There's a saying in systems engineering that comes to mind: "the purpose of a system is what it does".

It's why I've only become more and more convinced that we should leave the rest of the world alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhXFgKEkwbU

I'd be curious for your thoughts.

I'd guess in a few decades people are going to be trying to come up with solutions for all the people who overpaid for their houses, and can't find an adequate buyer.