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.
I once worked in an office where all the windows face a plain interior courtyard. It was terrible as nothing ever moved and you could only see the ground, more windows, and the sky.
Oh, yah, that's cool. You probably have a lot of systems surrounding the building (and ingress/egress) designed for that total volume.
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/bedrooms-withou...
Bedrooms have egress requirements
Apartments have window requirements (eg natural light)
Windows can be unopenable etc.,
It's literally because of hi rises and the issues with it being pointless to jump from 10+ stories (you'll also suffer less, as the smoke will make you pass out long before you're actually being burned).
There's been a whole discussion of the code though as modern mid/high rises have - concrete, "fireproof" (in terms of adjacent unit to unit) construction - sprinkler systems - internal hallway leading to 2 stairways
All of which are lacking in wood frame homes which make up a higher amount of home fire deaths. So there has been an argument that you could build housing much cheaper if you could rely on the concrete & sprinklers, and could lighten the rules around multiple stairs / windows / etc.
An interesting debate, with of course, tradeoffs.
I mean, numbers are made up, but the point holds.
Obviously once you’re talking about true high rises you’re going to run out of possibilities and I know the maths is still very rough. But it’s an interesting thought exercise to think about just how many amenities you could pack into a building.
Dance floor #3? Make it happen!
Is this a thing, in planned conversions? If the pricing varied by day and time, or was dynamic, it could work very well. With secure lockers adjacent. (Would that require mixed-use zoning?)
A teleconference room (/remote classroom) by day could be time-multiplexed into a cinema room off-peak (with some compromise in seating plans), leasing company just needs to handle cleaning deposits and video surveillance at start and end to check users keep it clean.
I get that you get (almost) twice as many apartments (presuming you don't build up higher), but you also get a massive and complicated one time cost. It surprises me that it could ever be worth it.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Chicago,+IL/@41.7332309,-8...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-a...
They talk about converting 180 Water St by adding an internal atrium; it's also one of the conversions illustrated in the recent NYT article about the difficulties of office-to-residential conversions:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
Also, TIL about loss factor:
> As offices, these buildings can also rent 100 percent (or even more) of their total square footage, according to the quirky math of commercial real estate.
https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies...
(The interactive nature doesn't quite get captured by archive correctly)
I don't get why one area can only ever be for one kind of use.
TL;DR: For government officials who are charged with supervising regulations over tens of thousands of areas, it's already more than complicated enough if each of those areas has a single use designation. If you allow all of those to have multiple designations, it becomes too complex for humans to administer and so they don't allow multiple designations.
Where I live, we have short term reuse laws that allow retail spaces to be used for residential, social, or other uses on a fixed basis. Typically a few years. The idea being to review the reassignment when the local needs change.
We get a lot of kindergartens that use these spaces, but also pharmacies, social clubs, and offices. Easy to move in and out.
Anyways, it's been a hot moment since I've paid attention, but years ago the guy that owned the hardware store on 44th Ave tried to convert into a mixed use building. I don't remember a lot of objection, but then the real estate market tanked and he went out of business. The apartments got built at least…
In the case of the USA, though, another 'lens' on the legibility is that overall the people making the laws were neurotically concerned with keeping black people away from white people and enforcing segregation.
'separating uses' was a good way to also 'separate users', and a little barely-that-creative law-writing lets someone keep black people quite removed from the white people.
I found a document from 1922 that is upstream of all american zoning codes - it's what got ratified in Euclid v. Ambler circa 1926.
It's explicit goal was:
"To maintain harmonious relations between the races, care has been given to ensure adequate separation between the two, with room to grow without encroaching on the other"
The race-based zoning designations are gold:
"R1 - white, R2 - colored, R3 - undecided"
Here's a deep link straight to that portion of the document: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan#race-...
Oh, it also says:
"The ordinary two or three story store and dwelling building is not a desirable type of construction from a public stand point. The regulations as applied will tend to reduce the number of flats that would otherwise be located over stores."
So - there it is. The goal of American zoning was, in part, to eliminate 'the ordinary two or three story store and dwelling building'.
I don't understand these comments that act like they live on a different planet.
SF floorplates are usually tiny due to historic biases of our Planning Commission (the dog whistle used to be 'we don't want a skyline of cereal boxes').
In fact, looking at the data [0] most of SF's residential tower floorplates are bigger than SF's office floorplates.
[0]https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Map-of-Tall-Bui...
Don't sleep on San Francisco.
And this isn’t to mention the wildfires or inevitable water issues.
1. September 1, 2017 – 106 degrees T-2. June 14, 2000 – 103 degrees T-2. July 17, 1988 – 103 degrees T-4. September 2, 2017 – 102 degrees T-4. October 5, 1987 – 102 degrees T-6. September 14, 1971 – 101 degrees T-6. May 30, 2001 – 101 degrees T-6. June 14, 1961 – 101 degrees T-6. September 16, 1913 – 101 degrees T-6. September 8, 1904 – 101 degrees T-11. October 4, 1987 – 100 degrees T-11. September 8, 1984 – 100 degrees
9 of the next 10 days in Dallas would be on that list. 3 days from last year in Seattle would be in the top 5 days on that list.
We are comparable to the extremes of a coastal eastern city, with significantly lower temperatures between the peaks. There’s not many places in the US that have never seen 106.
As for water, 80%+ of it in California is used for food that is exported elsewhere.
Strawberries in December in New York are much more at risk than humans in CA.
As for fires, nowhere in the world is safe from that, as this summer is proving.
Out of curiosity, what was the actual reason behind the dog whistle? "Segregate black people by... having smaller floorplates"? That doesn't make much sense to me.
One way SF planners made it hard/less economical to build towers was to force the higher floors to be smaller than lower floors (Transamerica pyramid being the near-satirical example).
That has contributed significantly to SF's inability to build enough housing for the people that live there.
Also a dog-whistle is any statement that sounds palatable to the mainstream, but has an underlying meaning to a politically motivated group. It doesn't only apply to today's American right.
No, the window thing is another housing suppression tactic. In New York, it is common for apartments to be illegally subdivided. It's how a lot of people live because it's affordable. I've done it. It's fine.
Stairwells are necessary. But nobody on the 57th story of a high rise is egressing externally, FDNY's ladders don't even go that high. And if you're only home at night, the window is a needless luxury. As evidenced by, when people are given a choice between more cash and a window, many choose the cash.
I was finding it hard to imagine that there are inner-city office buildings (high rises) that have floors so large that they couldn't be cut into, say 1/4'ths, with four residences on each floor, and each unit having 50% windows along its perimeter.
People build McMansions that are > 10K square feet, so for a building footprint to be too big for this (i.e., so big that buyers would balk at the size), then you'd need a high-rise with ~40K sq ft floors before this became a problem.
A standard city block in Manhattan is apparently 237,000 square feet, so if you had a building that took up a whole block, there'd be a big problem.
Now I'm wondering how many office buildings there are in a typical city block.
My neighbor's house is, IIRC, 11,000 sq-ft all on a single floor. Just a lot of very big rooms.
So you'd probably end up with close to 5k square foot condos - which isn't too ridiculous.
You'd probably do 4 corner units and 4 non-corner units for a total of eight, and end up with each being between 2000 and 2500.
The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a number of reasons. And when you're paying that much money, you probably don't want to live in a building that wasn't even designed to be lived in...
<owners of $5 million Tribeca lofts have entered the chat>
It feels wrong to build luxury housing when regular folk are suffering but if you build luxury housing to the point that the rich stop bidding on regular housing, or even better there’s so much luxury housing that everyone can get a good living space, it’s a net improvement for all of society
Even if the price of expensive apartments does go down a little because more people are able to afford "luxury" you don't necessarily have to let the little guy in on the savings you can as an industry collude to keep the price as high as the market can bear without literally becoming homeless. You don't even have to actually collude in an illegal fashion if your interests are actually sufficiently aligned that you all act in lockstep without overt coordination. Any real savings can be virtually entirely absorbed by the owner class.
There's a natural floor to this though. For example, if Boston built 3 housing units for every human being on the planet, there would hardly be any problem even if every person wanted to live in Boston and own multiple units. This is obviously absurd, but hints at the greater point. There's a point along the supply/demand curve where prices will end up falling, no matter how much external demand or AirBnb rentals come into the area.
The argument I think you're making is that there's no way to build enough housing units in a reasonable amount of time to meaningfully affect non-upper-end housing. There's not much controversy about that in practice (though weirdly enough there is a lot online.) California (and many Californian cities sweeten these deals) specifically offers developers many benefits for varying percentages of affordable housing mixes in their units. Boston also seems to have income-restricted housing as well. Most pro-housing policymakers agree that housing isn't just a build-build-build game but that incentives need to be offered to ensure affordable units are built along with upper end luxury housing.
Rent control changes who gets a home from a decision of whose wealthiest to whose luckiest which isn’t any morally or functionally better. Subsidizing or requiring developers to have “affordable” units in developments either offloads the cost to the other purchasers which will increase the average unit price in the area, which will cause people who used to be able to afford a home to slide down into too poor to afford one. All that’s doing is just moving around who gets to lose when it comes to this scarce resource.
The only answer to a scarce resource with high demand is to produce more of it. Unfortunately Boston, like most US cities, is full of nimbyism. It’s exacerbated by the fact that existing homeowners tend to have more political power just by virtue of the fact that they are more tied to the location and have a vested interest in voting in the area, vs renters who are more likely to up and move instead of invest time in local politics.
I also harp on the luxury housing building quite a bit. Emotionally it hurts to see only luxury housing being built when there is a housing crunch hurting the poor or middle class. The pragmatic bit however is that developers are always going to be incentivized to build luxury housing since it nets them the most profit. These building eventually turn into non luxury housing as the building age and the owners decide to not repair the unit to spec, or standards change and what is considered high end today isn’t in 20 years. We should stop fighting the natural incentives here with developers and lean into them to just build build build, imo.
The policy decisions that I think require actual thought are more along the lines of zoning and standards. Policies that require parking spots for every unit even when they are next to subway stations for instance hurt density a lot. Zoning being in the hands of towns who can act in a parasitic manner is also something that needs to be addressed, with my preference being something more along the lines of Japan’s zoning policies
Everything becomes luxury housing when theres a shortage and it gets bid up by dollars. And the existing government housing has not covered itself in glory such that we should look to that as a solution (paging NYCHA).
This stuck-in-amber Euro-ficiation of US HCOL urban coastal areas is not going to work in the longterm, especially as we continue to have growing population unlike many of the quaint European cities people like to visit.
The poor do not have the willingness to pay a whole category of prices, as they are unable to finance it. Creating luxury accommodation can increase supply, but as the decrease in price does not necessarily put the older accommodation within reach, the owners of captial can choose to retain it.
Housing is not that special, when there is a lot of it, it gets cheap.
Given rental vacancy rates of ~5.8% in the USA in 2022 it is more akin to a hypothetical of building a 12th and 13th house, while an 11th already lies unoccupied.
I am not sure in this more realistic case that building improves matters, unless an unhoused family can gain access to one.
2) Is it easier for unhoused to gain housing when vacancy is 1%/5%/10%/20% ?
For example, Manhattan has 2% vacancy. Even in peak covid dread it never got much above 4%. And you know what - pricing updated very quickly to get those units filled. Lots of tales of people getting crazy deals, including people I know. Of course when the world was no longer ending & everyone moved back.. prices snapped back.
So even a 2% to 4% move can have huge pricing impacts. Imagine building enough in HCOL areas to move the needle.
2) at a certain point squatting sets in. I believe the answer to your question depends on how much capital is held by the rich/poor, and how well property is protected by law enforcement and private security. If you look at the parent comment I was responding to, it mentioned not building so much that it flooded the market.
There's areas of the country with out-migration, lack of jobs, but tons of housing. Post industrial cities in the midwest are like this.
There's areas of the country with high paying jobs, but no housing being built. Areas of NY & CA are like this. It is then no surprise that we have 60k homeless in NYC when even people working for banks or tech can barely afford to live there.
There's also areas of the country with decent paying jobs, but lots of housing.. with lots of in-migration. Sunbelt is like this.
All three of these types of areas have vastly different vacancy rates and homeless rates. Taking national averages confuses the matter.
Quick googling points to vacancy rates of: Manhattan 2%, Boston 3%, SF 7%, Detroit (12% owner vacancy / 7% rental vacancy), Miami (3% owner / 7% rental), Austin (1% owner / 6% rental) etc.
FRED has some good charts you can see state by state the levels and even shapes are totally different in terms of trends and averages. Expensive northeast- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NJRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CTRVAC
Midwest https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ILRVAC
Sunbelt https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GARVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FLRVAC
Northwest https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ORRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WARVAC
Basically everywhere thats expensive has vacancies around 4% or less while areas that have been building its closer to 8%..
> why do you assume a wealthy family will only buy one house, or could be outbid by a poor family? I was responding to this post that seemed to assume all new housing will be bought by the rich as like extra homes..
People underestimate how much "trickle down" kind of is real in RE. In the absence of nice new construction (which seemingly always gets called "luxury"), people with money will move further and further down the market, to buy & renovate. So the option is build more homes to increase supply, or see the dollars chase existing supply & raise its value (and cost).
All newly build luxury housing will by definition be bought be the rich. There is no assumption about that. The discussion was whether they decide to hoard, rent out or sell their old residence. The trend (global) is clear, e.g. NY, CA, SF and further beyond. https://old.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/14zdsia/housing_pr...
The decider onto luxury housing being a benefit is whether the poor can in aggregate afford what the rich want for their old accommodation, increasingly, they cannot.
It's not some sort of conspiracy that nice new construction is called 'luxury', whereas less nice new construction is called 'affordable'.
I don't feel I have anything more to contribute.
The wealthy aren't waiting around to buy/sell houses per se, they're trying to get a maximum return on investment. Adding enough supply so that housing isn't an investment vehicle removes those incentives.
Who will add luxury apartments or affordable apartments except for the already wealthy? Who has the incentive to build enough luxury apartments, to stop housing behaving as an investment vehicle?
There are many many factors that are contributing to high costs like euclidean zoning that took off when the US had less than half of its current population. It's literally illegal to build multifamily housing in vast swaths of the US.
It's very clear that some sort of housing reform is going to be needed, as overly restrictive zoning, suburban sprawl, and it's associated housing costs have become unsustainable.
This isn't some fantasy either, Japan has very reasonable zoning and housing is generally not an investment vehicle there. Sure there's other contributing factors like a declining population, but it all leads back to supply and demand!
how sure are you about the validity of the claim you just made? Note the link below does not include cash buyers.
https://old.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/14zdsia/housing_pr...
The point I've made, is that demand is not just people wanting houses, it's also their ability to pay. There's some magical thinking out there that if investors build 'enough' luxury homes the poor will be able to afford homes. This is a falsehood.
I can't speak to Japan, however I don't think it ever accepted the level of homelessness that the west takes for granted. I would wager that the Japanese government builds more housing projects for the poor than the west.
Most of New York's affordable housing is former luxury townhouses subdivided. You saw similar subdividing in Phoenix post crash. Every time people study this, they find building housing–any housing–eases prices. Yet every time a debate about building housing in high-cost areas comes up, someone comes out with this and throws a wrench in the gears. (The marginal property in a high-cost area will always be luxury. That's what high cost means.)
Anecdote: I've negotiated down my rent in New York based on new luxury developments nearby. I tallied up the cost of their amenities, saw how much I spend, compared the floor plans and showed my work to the landlord. Two units had already left, and I knew one had sized up to the luxury. Based on the math, it made sense–$200 for far more square footage. Landlord delayed but eventually agreed and reduced my rent to keep me.
What size of place are you looking for? My partner and I bought in Boston in 2019 while making a fraction of that income.
the last place they lost a bidding war on was $600K.. for a 3bed/1bath 1000 sq foot.. well outside the city, went for 20% over ask.. crazy stuff
We found some places we could afford but they either made our commute fairly long(>1 hour each way), would stretch our budget to have zero tolerance for emergencies, or both
People also have a lot of received wisdom of how they were brought up in the burbs and just assume you HAVE TO buy.
There's plenty of markets where prices/rent are upside down and you might as well rent indefinitely.
People forget you are either renting housing or renting money to "own" housing. If you are disciplined enough to save the difference, renting can be better in some markets. Mostly its HCOL coastal cities where people are accepting ridiculously low rental yield because they are banking on price appreciation.
If you don't know if you want to be in X location for the next 5.. probably more like 10 years, there's not always a solid reason to buy.
I know of several big, high-rise office buildings that are 75% empty since the pandemic. We’re talking a few years now!
But then again, greed is real. My current office building is getting more and more empty by the day. And they refused to budge on the rent for my company even so.
Of course, more money didn't hurt either ;-)
But if you're talking about buildings from the 19th or the first half of the 20th century, normally there's something good about them, IMO.
"De gustibus non est disputandum", of course.
Now I'm wondering what the better alternative is, though. Naturally good things can be done in many styles (there are also good modern contemporary and minimalist buildings).
I just am not a huge fan of this mixture of balloon framing, sheet rock, and cladding. It's probably better than brick or masonry for earthquakes, but apart from that it just seems flimsy.
Area of Site: 79,288 square feet (7,240m) or about two acres. East to west, 424 feet (129m), north to south, 187 feet (56.9m). Height: The base of building rises five floors above the street. The entrance is four floors high.
Add a few light pipes out to the outside walls and you can even get a bit of outside light inside!
Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"
Idk where this meme started but it’s very far from reality. We as a species have only ever voluntarily demolished like 30 or so building above 35 stories because it’s insanely expensive to do so (most buildings were knocked down to make significantly larger ones in their place).
In no world is it ever cheaper to tear down a high rise and start over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_voluntarily_de...
They were in Old Town, which is on an island.
The building they originally occupied was over a thousand years old. They then modernized to one that was only eight hundred or so years old, then, eventually, they moved to the mainland, into new construction.
Sort of gives new meaning to “reuse.”
The designed lifetime of yer typical neopostmodernist glass box office tower is about 25 years. Many of them are 50 years old at this point. They get torn down and replaced all the time.
I mean, can you provide a list of all these 1973 high rises that are being torn down (and the commentary that they were built to be torn down in 1998)?
I’d be really interested to see that, because any steel building frame should be more durable than that, so I’m curious what these buildings are made out of.
Rebar is a bit trickier than just plain steel.
Also, the thing is that any type of conversion most likely triggers building code updates rather than being grandfathered in, at which point for a building 50+ years old there’s probably either lead or asbestos.
One is far more durable than the other.
* the office market has never imploded like this before and it’s fairly easy to fill buildings like these up
* until recently, most tall buildings that were old enough to demolish were also probably subject to landmark status
The end of SROs is a strong contributor towards increases in homelessness.
SROs aren't great, but its basically the same as my college dorms.
They are definitely better than being homeless or in a communal shelter as well.
For example, in the absence of good legal housing, many poor (mostly immigrant) people in NYC live in illegal basement apartments. Every time there's a flash flood warning with a storm in the city, 5x/year, some of them die in their homes.
Ideally, poor people would also be able to live in legal apartments, provided we could actually build more.. and you know, die less!
"We should build windowless homes so poor people can afford them"
"You can't put poor people in homes you dont want yourself"
"Your desire to not build windowless homes is because you dont want to live next to poor people"
"I think we should build more housing"
"You just want rich people to have more homes"
on and on
FDNY can ladder rescue up to about the 10th floor. They've rope rescued someone as high as the 20th floor recently. https://nypost.com/2022/11/05/fdny-battling-high-rise-blaze-...
So windows are good, actually.
To throw out more strawmen...
"I want marble countertops, everyone should have marble countertops"
"I want a curbless shower, everyone should have curbless showers"
At some point, required amenities and features are preventing people from being housed and causing way more people to literally die because they're not housed vs. the alternative of shitty but safe housing. I'd argue that windows in a high-rise with sprinklers is one of those features.
Not every regulation is about safety. And not every safety regulation achieves additional safety in practice
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...
My house has a basement and a garage, which are not approved as living space, and don't have proper windows or egress. Would it solve the problem to let the interior portions of buildings be designated as storage and utility space?
I'd love to have more space for bikes and musical instruments. ;-)
According to the article, the pre-war buildings are easy to convert.
It's that the open floor model gained popularity; and the building technique evolved. This allowed huge windows to cast light for everyone in one go, since people were not putting opaque wall everywhere which were restricting whatever light that came through "their" part of the building to reach anyone else. "My window" became "our window". Similarly HVAC system evolved to maintain equal temperature in the whole building; there was no longer a need to bring individual heating/cooling system in every single cell since carefully placing some element would let natural convection do the work.
Removing these walls allowed building to be built and heated/cooled with comparatively less material; something that was positive both economically and - dare I say it - ecologically. Converting these shared spaces into private requires to "undo" all these optimisations and will carry a significant cost. Just like converting a bus into several car is not easy because although the seats are there; you are going to need many engines.
This is a great analogy.
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 undesirable or illegal apartments due to lack of windows/egress/etc.
Apparently they've done it a few times. Of course only some buildings can support this, given the layout of the supports, mechanicals, etc.