The loads you’re designing for in a building intended for commercial use are lower and more uniform than the loads you’re looking at when you wanna slap together something for industrial or residential use.
Office and retail spaces are not designed to bear the heaver load of residential use or the combination of weird flexing, torsion and heavier loads involved in industrial applications.
Those warehouse spaces can be safely converted to lofts by just framing them in. Office buildings need structural changes to become safe living space in addition to all the utility stuff.
Isn’t it really expensive converting officespace to residential though? Given the layout of plumbing, elevators etc. Would assume that alot of the time it would just be cheaper to tear it down ☹️
Its what AB 1532 is trying to achieve in California. Given that the building is already there, there will be less vectors for nimbys to prevent the construction of said building (as its already up and approved)
Only some office buildings can be converted into reasonably shaped apartments, particularly those built before WW2, when architects wanted more natural light. After WW2, office buildings became a lot deeper because of expanded use of electric lights.
But there are ways to make more useful shapes out of those open floor plans.
Per the article, it seems that the main barrier here is that it is currently not economically worthwhile to convert these buildings, as the conversions require massive changes to the buildings themselves. If the value of these properties fall enough, however, it could easily become an attractive proposition for these buildings. A continued push for work from home can hopefully damage these property values enough to make it feasible.
Well after I wrote it I thought, dancing-and-intoxicants clubs are meaningful to me and my friends, but I bet there’s all sorts of other clubs that would benefit from a dedicated, affordable space to flourish. Your chess club DOES deserve a nice building.
YOU get a building! And YOU get a building… and YOU get a building!
I love when cities have the small business + apartment layout.
Especially when the ground level has something useful like a bodega, so people can just go downstairs for food and necessities instead of driving somewhere.
Most of the time it’s more economical to tear them down than to convert them. The plumbing work needed is probably the most expensive part but then you only have windows along the outside walls. I suppose you could have large common areas in the center.
That’s the story they’re selling but I don’t think it really holds water. Sure, they’ll have to remove the fitout and upgrade the plumbing and that costs money but no more than anyone would expect when building apartments. Some office buildings won’t be suitable for residential use due to their shape and they obviously won’t be converted but most are suitable and they’ll be fine.
The business lobby pointing at the ones which are unsuitable and saying “but this whole thing is going to be impossible!” looks disingenuous to me. There are plenty of good options and there’s no reason to expect they won’t be converted.
Economical perhaps, but this is the sort of stupid ass shit that epitomizes how fucked the growth based economy is in this climate changed era. Developer’s think a few years down the road, but have no economic incentive to build it as a cradle-to-cradle build rather than a cradle-to-grave build.
Build the same damn curtain wall floor plans in a dozen cities, so they all look ugly and don’t improve the quality of life, because it’s cheap, makes short term money for people who already have more then they can spend, and leave it to the kids to deal with everything in the future… Grrrr {rant off}
Two people now. You are not going to see ANY of the money that will not be spent on real estate. Do you think it’s going to trickle down? But hey at least it feels good to pretend right? What we need is more snarky comments and less actual solutions.
I work remote and do see that money. Let me explain how:
I save money on car maintenance, gas, and business attire.
I save money on food by eating at home or eating in my neighborhood instead, which adds value to my neighborhood and creates businesses in my neighborhood instead of my bosses
I save roughly 2 hours of getting ready / commute time per day, and time is money.
What’s wild is that my boss ever felt entitled to all of that for their benefit.
I mean WFH was literally impossible for a lot of jobs until broadband internet and personal computers became ubiquitous in the average workers home in the last decade or so. That’s part of why yor boss felt entitled to all that, but I see the rest of your points
they point blank told me they needed me in the office because ‘they owned the building’ (read: they think they are entitled to use their employees time and resources to prop up the value of their commercial real estate)
they also spent the time during the pandemic installing a giant paid cafeteria, so they were hoping to capture some of that lunch revenue I mentioned for themselves, or the company they sub-contracted with
The thing I don’t like is that so much of the cost cutting goes to companies. It’s not just the office space, it’s also furniture, electricity, water and so on.
While the worker save time and costs for transportation they usually don’t get any compensation for the wear and tear of their furniture or the need for extra space for work area.
My work gives me a $100 monthly stipend to cover internet and incidental costs for my home office. It’s not a whole lot but it’s a nice touch on top of my salary + cost savings of working from home.
Sure, but a good desk or chair can be quite expensive to buy. Sitting badly can really mess you up.
But the transportation of the employee isn’t a problem that an employer care about usually. The costs for office space on the other hand is just a saving that companies pocket and pass over to the employers. That’s why I feel that companies should give a stipend for the office space needed by the employee, including computers and screens of course.
I work remote twice a week, which is nice, but I seriously wonder why I even have to go to the office the other three days.
Most of who I communicate with to do my job is not even in my location, so I’m regularly using Microsoft teams and WebEx. Also all the programs are accessible on my work laptop from home.
A lot of the investments by big companies were made in 2018-2019 with low near 0% interest. now a lot of those loans are coming due which will impact their total assets. they want workers in the office to keep Corp real estate in demand so their investments don’t tank. most likely will result in massive layoffs or bail outs as they will try to protect the shareholders for eternal growth.
Yea that’s true. You still can’t design and build an iphone, or near any physical product, remotely. But this is what people want to do. I work for a manufacturing company and there are engineers who want to stay at home and never see the prototypes and never colloborate on them in person. They aren’t going to last much longer. Good riddance. I’m pointing this out because there is a comment below me that says this is “all about control”. There’s a ton of jobs that should not be done remotely. There are a ton of jobs that can be done remotely too. The world is complicated.
I work in engineering, for 3 years we haven’t gone into office. There are in person things when needed, but the majority of design and engineering time is a solitary task.
Programming and fields like it can be done remotely. Manufacturing cannot be done remotely (like you said). I work in a semiconductor fab and my job is most definitely not compatible with remote work. I would like to transition to a job where I can be remote though, at some point.
I seriously wonder why I even have to go to the office the other three days.
You don’t; and you know this already.
I quit my union job when the new hotshot manager started mandating RTO into a newly compressed, hot, bright, loud environment; being able to actually see asses in chairs was his jam, despite the work impact. What a tool.
Found a job with another unionized IT shop, paid for it with a 3% pay cut but got an extra week of vacation (net loss: 3 days pay/yr) and a really great crew and 100% remote written into the contract. Thanks, ya tool.
They are starting the force people back to work at my company. Apparently a location had a fight break out and police called because of an argument over a spot. There isn’t enough room at these places so they were trying to make people go to an office an hour away instead.
If I were to go into the office I wouldn’t have anyone else on my team with me. And if someone were to ask me to do work, I could have easily done it if they sent a message instead of walking by. I also don’t eat lunch, so I would just work with headphones in. So I wouldn’t contribute to the collaboration that is claimed to take place.
The only reason they want people back in the office is for that control. They don’t want people having a good work/life balance. They want you to waste money on gas, time away from your family, and to eat out more often. It would be great if some states would prevent companies from forcing back to office.
This right here! My commute is rather long. I spend about 2 hrs total of my day commuting to and from work. I could save so much time and money on gas if I was full time remote.
I quit a job that was trying to force RTO to a new office that was half an hour away from the old one, had paid parking instead of free and then only had enough office space to house 2/3 of employees at any given moment. They literally told us that for all-hands meetings people were expected to come in and sit on the floor. Then I quit a different job that was trying to force RTO when they owned the nearest parking garage to the office. You might think “Well at least you won’t have to pay to park” but nope, they expected to juice every employee for $12-$18/day in parking.
work with headphones in. So I wouldn’t contribute to the collaboration that is claimed to take place.
In the new cramped environment with low visual privacy and especially no audio privacy, we all just end up with earpods in. We need the noise isolation to f’n THINK!
So the boss oozes his way over and ‘hums’ and ‘haws’ trying to get our attention before waving and doing that “hey pull out your earbuds so I can talk” gesture that resembles yokels trying to pick up someone in an elevator or on the bus and not.getting.it .
Because he doesn’t.
So that is the life of people I left at the old job, and it’s repeated a thousand times over.
Learn to also say on the phone “this environment has no audio privacy. Can you book meeting and a conference room? Thanks”, if you get too many desk calls.
Not just zoning, the average office building needs thorough work for that to happen. Washrooms are centralized and one per floor in an average office building for example, for it to have a bathroom for every apartment, it needs extensive piping.
It can definitely be done though, I live in such a building myself.
I’m sure there are special cases where residents would need bathroom access directly from their apartment, but are there any good reasons for private bathrooms, other than convenience?
To me, one of the most interesting things about converting non-residential building to residential is the potential for different ways of living. A shared bathroom and kitchen with offices converted into living space surrounding a communal area could lead to a more communal lifestyle for residents.
If you want to charge market rents you’d need to provide private bathrooms. Any apartment without a private bathroom is what we’d call a bedsit in the UK and it could be worth half the rent.
We’re talking about converting unused office space into affordable housing, though. Charging half the rent would qualify it as affordable housing and is still better than no income from an unused building.
The piping also needs to be oversized for apartment areas compared to offices.
Local company made this mistake, raised an apartment building on sewage piping designed for offices. At peak hours in the evening and morning the sewage ended up backflowing into the apartments at the lower levels.
LOL I’m sure the depiction of what someone could look like after years of working from home, created/paid for by a work furniture company, is totally accurate.
Noooo, we can’t let companies lose on bad investments, it is a sin in the eyes of The Red Line! Quickly, let’s whip up a bailout for those poor billionares!
Yeah but it would add localised - and extremely high efficiency in terms of water, yield, etc. - food supply that’s more resilient to climate shifts, needs no pesticodes, etc., and for those of us on islands like the UK where we import lots of food it would be good.
Might also help those countries we import from build up more food supply resiliency because thry have more excess. Or massively reduce land use for food ^.^. And a lot of the places food gets imported from or otherwise farmed are also at large risk for climate change, so perhaps using vertical farms or other climate controlled farming techniques would be a good idea for them too nya
Furthermore it makes the supply chain more auditable, so you can reduce the reliance on questionably or very unethically sourced stuff. A controlled environment might also allow for even more automation.
I’m a pretty big fan of vertical farming for lots of reasons though to the point of writing an article on it, so I’m a little biased ;p. The main obstacles are land/building price and energy (and also some techniques for growing staples, though I think that is not a fundamemtal limitation, and I think the other two are solvable)
Edit: also I think it’s desirable to return agricultural land to less managed environments like forests. Moving more human infrastructure into cities would enable more of this sort of “rewilding” (though I think that’s a bit of a misnomer as environments everywhere have all been fundamentally altered by people, and a lot of people’s idea of “nature” is the very sanitised version that avoids the constant slaughter and death, like cityparks and stuff which are actually very human managed - good for mental health, but not really ““nature”” in the same way)
They absolutely can. If Canadian cities can do it with less people and money then certainly some of these massive multi-billion dollar real estate companies can do it too.
Cities, you just said keyword there cities, you can do it in cities because people want to live in cities. They don’t want to live on the outskirts. Most of these offices are not in the city centre because the city centre is a really expensive place to have an office, only massive corporations are based there.
The vast majority of office space is in low rent districts on the periphery of cities. Because no one lives there there’s no shops, no leisure centres, no schools, no parks or other green spaces. You can’t just convert every building into a housing unit without considering the surrounding environment.
It would be infinitely cheaper to just build homes where you actually want them, than to try and convert a building that was never designed for the task.
I know it’s not trendy or hip or exciting to say that, but when you look at the economics it just doesn’t make sense outside of some very limited circumstances.
I think it’s important to note here that it’s not necessarily great for everyone if the companies everybody works for lose a bunch of money. Companies will try as hard as possible not to realize that loss, and after that happens, lots of office buildings aren’t really built in a way where they can be converted to do anything useful, so they’re just gonna sit there. Normal people are probably going to end up paying for this - personnel are some of the easiest things to let go of for a balance sheet.
to who? this video has a pretty good explanation of why so many buildings can’t be converted or just won’t make sense to convert. youtu.be/imyPVFFACTk
That’s a very interesting video. But I still have to ask WHY is it ok for an office to lack the lighting and escape routes when the same is not ok for residential areas (which was the main reason given)? It makes no sense to me. Water and sewage poses no problem because large office buildings have to account for mutiple toilets on each floor. Electricity is also a non issue (I’d argue electricity usage would vastly decrease when coverted). That just leaves shared air circulation and conditioning which also shouldn’t be an issue since it would just be maintained through the landlord (and could even be cheaper for the individual since they don’t have to pay for their own systems but just a flat fee on the rent).
With rent prices in this kind of fantasy land in bigger metroploes like San Fran or NYC , I’d doubt you’d find tenants. Maybe in rural laboratories it might be an issue but not the cities. That’s just my thoughts. Might be wrong.
Here’s the sneaky part: A company that isn’t utterly brain dead can save money with WFH. My startup doesn’t even have an office to go into, we’re all WFH. Know what we’re not spending money on? A commercial lease. There’s opportunity here for companies to go and save a grip of cash by going WFH and either relocating to a smaller campus or dropping it altogether. In this situation, the only party who loses is the asset holder, and I have no problems with that. You win some, you lose some, that’s the free market.
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