There is an actual solution, at least for buildings that are large enough:

Make the whole building mixed-use. Ring the outside with apartments, and keep the inside commercial. Make the whole thing a little community in itself.

Just fill the whole center of it with cafés, bodegas, computer repair shops—the kinds of small, locally-owned shops you get in a (healthy) small town or a pre-modern-zoning city area.

Yes, that is an interesting idea and I suspect there are many other creative ways to do some thing like that.

The plumbing remains a major problem, however. Restrooms and other plumbing are very centrally located in an office tower and the newer and more modern that office tower is the more central and consolidated they are.

Anything is possible, of course, but solving the light issue is just one item… The plumbing issue is at least as complicated.

Actually a really interesting idea. Not sure why we don't see this in major cities. Effectively this becomes a minimally with apartments. Do residents/businesses simply dislike this arrangement due to lack of foot traffic and noise?

I personally would love to live somewhere like that, but I don't see it working out in practice. For starters, discoverability for those interior businesses would be poor. Where would they put their names/signs?

I would look to the signage in Tokyo for an example. The buildings have columns of signs listing the floor each one is on. Definitely not what we're used to which might hurt adoption at first, but it works for them.

In the lobby, by the elevators. Offices generally don’t rely on walk-in traffic the way that retail or food/drink do.

The biggest challenge I see is in how to segregate commercial and residential traffic. Residents will not mostly want to live somewhere that they encounter random strangers walking through their hallways all the time. A purpose-built residential tower can limit access per floor fairly easily. In low-rise buildings with living area above retail, you segregate at the door to the upper floors.

Plumbing's been mentioned as an issue but I think ventilation would be an even bigger problem. The need to bring in fresh air and exhaust the cafe fumes from cooking, even with induction stoves, wasn't something that was probably planned for at all.

> Just fill the whole center of it with cafés, bodegas, computer repair shops—the kinds of small, locally-owned shops you get in a (healthy) small town or a pre-modern-zoning city area.

Cyberpunk 2077, here we come!

In Europe a lot of old buildings do this conversion easily, it's really more a problem with modern construction (and hence most American buildings) where the entire design is extremely skewed towards one use case vs the other

In the US, the problem is we have built large offices around the idea of a central elevator shaft then the plumbing and bathrooms are running up and around the shaft. It makes perfect sense for a large multi story office.

You would have to design these weird apartments though that are like a thinly sliced pizza with no central area. Just a long hall of connecting rooms.

Or to retro fit all you have is the foundation and sides, everything else is basically wrong and cost wise you have less than nothing. It is just cheaper to start over and not have to undo all the wrong aspects.

We are mostly in denial in the US that there is going to be a ton of empty, useless buildings along with many regional banks going out of business.

> You would have to design these weird apartments though that are like a thinly sliced pizza with no central area.

Those used to be called "shotgun houses" (or, less euphemistically, "shotgun shacks") though they were rectangular, not pizza-shaped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house

Of course, people did live in them because they were cheap.

In overpriced urban areas, the "pizza slice" configuration might be tolerable to some, if it were cheap enough.

> Office buildings have most of their floor plates not around windows

That’s not the case everywhere. In ‘Europe’ (I don’t know what set of countries this applies to), workers must be able to get sufficient natural daylight.

https://www.kingspan.com/ie/en/knowledge-articles/what-is-en...:

“To comply with the minimum recommendations for indoor spaces lit with windows or curtain walling, over 50% of the space must achieve 300 lux for more than half the daylight hours in the year. In addition, to prevent particularly gloomy areas being created within a room, a backstop value of 100 lux has to be met across the entire space for the same period.

If rooflights are used to provide daylight into the space, then the requirements are more demanding with a value of 300 lux required for the whole of the relevant space for at least half of the daylight hours.”

USA has no natural light requirements. Completely windowless offices can easily meet the standards here with no additional considerations.

Generally when 'USA' doesn't have requirements, it's because those things are handled at the state and local level, not because they don't exist at all. Building codes are generally hyperlocal. This isn't even a concept that would make sense to exist at the federal level with how the US is setup.

I think you're exaggerating how hard the retrofitting is to do. Office buildings tend to have tons of extra space for things like drop ceilings and utility chases that can be easily used to run plumbing and electrics. Natural lighting is a concern but these buildings also tend to have huge windows, that can light passively if the interior spaces that are being retrofitted in are designed correctly.