And my point is that desirable doesn't matter much if the goal is to get people housed. Yeah, you'll get less rent for the inner apartments, but that's how you make affordable housing - you make things cheaply and make sacrifices along the way to do so. Unless you don't want to live with the "poors"...

Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"

The problem is that the rest of the conversion, namely bathrooms and kitchens per unit and the required pipes, are also not cheap, to the point where if you wanted to rent out a lot of cheap units it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew.

> it would be easier to knock the building down and start anew.

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...

My company used to work with a German startup that was based in Lübeck, one of the oldest towns in Germany[0].

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.”

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lübeck

> 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

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.

> 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.

These days buildings are most likely cantilevered from one or more concrete cores rather than steel frame.

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.

I think you are confusing wood frame homes with concrete, steel and glass.

One is far more durable than the other.

We don’t usually demolish them because

* 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

There's an argument there for SRO conversions, but we've shunned those for a generation.

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.

I dunno I think legal regulations on what is safe housing are pretty good, actually.

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!

Windows don't make you safe in a high rise. Especially ones in a donut hole in a structure - no way to escape through those!!

I dunno man, I think people can strawman every which way on housing its kind of tiring.

"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.

But that's a strawman when you can literally cut a hole down a skyscraper and be legal. There's literally no way for FDNY to get a ladder into that hole to rescue someone.

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.

Having fewer or no windows in a modern hi-rise apartment is probably significantly safer than the basement of a 19th century brownstone. Heck, it's probably safer than the brownstone in general.

Not every regulation is about safety. And not every safety regulation achieves additional safety in practice