Where is this not banned?
And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
https://bsky.app/profile/stephenjacobsmith.com/post/3m3xpe3n...
Yes they are, and I say this as someone who lived in a shithole apartment that had a fire scare and needed the Fire Dept to help out. Egress windows and fire trucks with ladders exist for a reason.
Sure, fire safety in homes is a good thing to have. But is it so good that we can't economically build buildings to meet them, and people end up with no home at all?
The problem is you can't easily convert office buildings to housing without these, because the floor plates are too different.
Do we have cases of Japan or China converting industrial or office spaces into residences?
Since 2013, it's been classed as "permitted development" (so, automatically allowed as long as the building isn't listed as architecturally or historically important), and liberalised further in the early 2020s.
House prices have outstripped commercial rents for most of this century, and change of use is cheaper than demolish-and-rebuild, so I'd expect to see the trend continue.
The issue with unsuitable floor plates is real, though, particularly in larger buildings. One solution is to cut chunks out of the curtain wall, turning part of each floor into an open-air terrace which functions as a light well. The reduction in useable floor area means that's only really viable at the premium end of the market, though - a prominent (albeit mixed-use) example is https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2024/07/18/striking-new...
There is a lot of space inside buildings and blocks that must be kept open to permit windows in every bedroom.
When I first moved to New York, I illegally subletted a windowless bedroom. That let me save enough money to (a) enjoy my twenties and (b) launch a start-up. When I got a windowed bedroom, I wound up putting sound-absorbing black-out curtains on them for years.
> The actual problem is high land prices, slow permit approval processes, and restrictive zoning codes
These are bigger problems. But the the blind window requirement is a part of the second two. On its own, it isn't prohibitive. Tied together with a million other petty requirements and your minimum costs balloon.
New York City's fire engines can't reach its skyscrapers' top floors. Not saying you can achieve similar resuls with office-to-residential conversions. But windowless bedrooms aren't a non-starter because of fire safety, they're a non-starter because they make wealthier residents uncomfortable.
Speaking from experience with elevators in various countries: Let's keep the part where, for instance, elevators need a door. (And I'm sure I haven't experienced anywhere close to the long tail of bad elevators.) Some regulations make sense.
But if there are ways to make elevators substantially faster without being unsafe, that'd be lovely. What do US elevators fail to do that they could be doing?
Also, in some/all places the elevator union got basically all manufacturing processes banned so they have to be assembled on site by union workers.
And in the US, nobody in the relevant unions or regulators cares about cities - elevator workers and firefighters are all suburbanite pickup-truck-Americans. So they're rarely personally interested in anything that isn't about driving a big car around really fast. This has a big impact on road layouts and the outside of buildings, because of course everyone listens to firefighters, but all they want to is drive a big red truck everywhere with nothing stopping them.
Americans love saying stuff like this about safety regulations because it makes them sound savvy and civilized, which creates a market for new safety regulations so they can say this about them too, which means there isn't actually any pressure for making them reasonable.
As a result the building code is full of stuff that someone once had a bad dream about and so was instantly banned with no cost-benefit analysis. Among other things, elevators are much stricter and so less frequent than any other country, single-stair buildings are allowed in Seattle (and most of the rest of the world) but nowhere else, and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible.
At no point during this did anyone think about it at all, and if you ever ask if it should be reconsidered they'll look at you like you're crazy.