Joe Biden wants more people to start living in empty offices

Agreed. This is a good idea overall, but the implementation smells like a bailout of commercial real estate developers to me.

if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?

The Biden administration is doing that also, it just doesn't make as good a headline.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/16/white-house-announces-new-actions-on-homeownership/

Refitting office space to make it liveable is actually super expensive. Commercial spaces don't have the electric, plumbing, or insulation typically required or expected by residents. It can be cheaper to gut or even tear down the building in order to add the necessary MEP and framing, which is why you see developers are still building new rather than converting old commercial spaces. The money will encourage redevelopment which is far less wasteful and combats sprawl.

That said, I agree with you that you could make the money available to buyers instead of developers, but developers are the ones paying the bribesdonating to campaigns.

Developers won't do it though. Otherwise, we'd already have this happening. What they do now is call it a loss and get a break on their taxes.

Developers will do this anyway if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?

Because that doesn't do anything but provide guaranteed cash to existing property owners at the expense of people trying to stop renting. Until the supply side issue is addressed, homeownership will continue to be out of reach for most. The best case here would be to convert these buildings into condos or whatever the local word for apartments you own instead of rent is, but just rentals us a good second choice.

Developers don't want to touch this. The amount of work it would take to turn an office building into an apartment building is more than you likely realise. Building code for the two are very different so fully gutting the building is first on the list. The amount of plumbing that would have to be added and so on. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I think it's a great idea, but to get it done you have to make it profitable or the government will have to step up and hire engineers and contractors and operate the building after, which is of course comunism, and so will never happen. Full aside from the political issues, it just makes more sense to knock down the office building and build a whole new one that is actually designed for residential use. Too little too late no matter what happens with the office buildings. It should never have been allowed, from the start, for corporate entities to buy up housing at all. Not apartment buildings, not single family homes. That has to be fixed first.

We have that already.

They are called usda and fha loans

I lived in a building thay was mixed residential/office space in Buenos Aires. It was really good, during the week you saw movement in and out so it felt alive, ar night and weekends was pretty empty and calm, and you could throw parties without bothering the neighbors.

Just live at work! I can see the LateStageCapitalism posts writing themselves

I think if companies are interested in cutting commute times, they'd normalize work from home. Doesn't seem to be the case sadly

I see no way this could go horribly wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

One floor should reserved for roller skating.

Good reddit humor.

The incentive is already there, it's just prohibited because of zoning and building codes many places. All the government has to do to fix this is stop getting in the way.

uxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don't sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis.

It'll have a domino effect, more apartments in Manhattan means less people in Brooklyn, Queens, etc. meaning prices go down in the latter boroughs. I live in Jersey City across the Hudson from Manhattan and a large part of the residents here are just people who can't afford to live in Manhattan.

are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don't work near there any longer?

Yes, I used to live in a converted office building in Newark NJ (not far from Manhattan) and really loved it. And yes people will always want to live in NYC and especially Manhattan. Many people, myself included simply prefer living in cities. I've also looked for apartments in Manhattan and it's completely different than anywhere else.

Former Commercial Zoning = Inner City

People are going to fight bare knuckle for that kind of residence at a reasonable price. They charge out the wazoo for small apartments in that area.

They use the flatiron building because it's very famous but essentially a nuisance at this point having been vacant for iirc over a decade because of a lawsuit.

Ed: since 2019 but that's quite awhile for the most famous like 2sq miles in America. (Which is also weird but we'll talk about that another time.)

It's not that there might not be plumbing, it's that there is zero plumbing in most office buildings aside from one clustered section for floor where there's 5 to 10 toilets for each gender.

On top of that, you have completely different mechanical systems. An office building for instance may have one single mechanical system for the entire building, whereas an apartment would need separate mechanical systems for each individual apartment.

Then you have the kitchens, bedrooms and interior partition walls that are vastly different than an office building, plus the requirements for exterior windows which precludes larger office buildings with deeper floor plates from being converted at all without demolishing the interior portion of the building. Curtain wall systems that may or may not be compatible between an office and residential building (non-operating windows)... Not to mention the stair and elevator systems are probably not going to work either.

So in the end you're probably looking at gutting the building down to the structure and removing every piece of the building including the outer envelope, roof, all of the electrical plumbing and mechanical systems... In the end it may or may not be cheaper just to build a new building from the ground up.

Source: am architect. And yes, I have done conversions like this in the past.

I wonder if it would be possible to require all future construction to be designed in a way that it could easily be switched between commercial/residential. Like each floor of an office building has to have plumbing roughed it to support x number of toilets/showers on each floor, stuff like that.

Also offices don't require that all the rooms have access to natural light the way residential buildings do. That's why office towers can be thicc blocks while apartment buildings often need to be U-shaped.

it'd be a lot of work resolving all those issues... but definitely doable. just have to find the maniac with money and drive that wants to do that

I worked in a few skyscraper type offices and they are pretty awesome. The view was always crazy and there were always good food options nearby right in the middle of the city. You could make a nice house in there. Just need the bathroom and kitchen to be near the center of the building. You could probably fit 4 nice size units on each floor of my old building. But they would want to make a ton of tiny overpriced ones instead so they will say there isn't enough plumbing lol.

More supply is more supply. It'll probably drive rent down a bit, assuming the plan works. This makes little difference to unemployed homeless people and does nothing to address the fact that many wealthy people see homes as a tool to secure their capital, but it's not nothing. Hopefully it will help some people who are on the brink be a bit more secure in their housing.

Where did you get those numbers from? Where is your source?

Are they were they are needed? Would we need to move people across the county to fill them? Or are they kept mostly empty as a form of storing wealth?

Please don't provide this stat without context. It just promotes cynicism and despair. Reality is complex, and our solutions are going to have to be complex.

Many of these vacant homes are nowhere near major homeless populations. But office buildings often are.

https://ggwash.org/view/73234/vacant-houses-wont-solve-our-housing-crisis

Edit: If you prefer videos, here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xZXdXxYBGU

Greedy real estate hogs and speculators are criminals imo.

And take public transportation!

Send Biden to Gaza and see how quick he stops sending armaments to Israel.

So are you against retrofitting office buildings?

Libertarians: Always finding the rarest of occurrences to continue their dismantling of government and the systems that gave them everything they have. lmao

But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.

Why can't you? I don't believe that there is any law saying you need to have a home in a residential zoned area (anti-homeless laws say that you cannot use public space as a home).

As far as I know, zoning laws just say that you cannot sell or rent out a property in a commercial district as residential. That is a false advertising/minimum allowable quality law, much like you cannot sell the meat of an a diseased animal. Commercial areas likely don't have the infrastructure (schools, utilities, safety) for people to live in.

This is what most Chinese food joints around here do. They are usually family owned, and they live in the back.

As a libertarian

Why are you attracted to children?

Wait why can’t you do this? People definitely live in their gas stations / offices / whatever. It’s just not zoned for that, meaning it wasn’t made for that purpose, it’ll be suboptimal. But like, I don’t think the cops are out to look for your sleeping bag.

Because they don't actually support doing things to help people, they just want to give more money to the rich.

Because both just give money to crappy landlords, but with exta steps. Why not just tax the hell out of anyone who owns a building that's empty for longer than reasonable, maybe with an extension if you can prove you're redeveloping an office into housing.

Because there isn't enough housing that already exists.

Now I don’t know whether to feel owned!

If the average Joe now has more money from the government, wouldn't that drive the property prices up? Polish govt has a program where a mortgage is guaranteed to have 2% interest rate, while in reality the govt pays the difference between the 2% and the actual bank's interest rate, and that just made the prices of housing increase.

The only way not to give money to already rich developers is to have the govt build houses on its own to compete with the developers themselves, which is I assume unthinkable in the US. That would literally be communism

Getting people to live in offices is good because it brings people back to walkable, urban cores.

anyone interpreting it differently is fooling themselves

Anyone saying "We need to build more houses" rather than saying "We need to fill the existing houses" has no interest in solving the problem.

They always were, it's just corporate landlords stood a lot to lose from them losing prominence so kept them artificially in demand. Went so far to lobby that corporations need to have an office by law, even if their structure doesn't necessitate one.

Shut up

Oh, I'm sure they'll charge a minimum of $2k/month even for the shittiest of the shithole office apartments. They'll get their money don't worry.

Easy, developers will only build luxury real estate. It’s what’s been happening in urban centers for a decade or two. Way better margins on luxury real estate.

I hope the entire industry kicks it and every high-ego low talent pedo relator involved in it will have to live on the street (the irony)

Show me on the doll where Biden addressed the housing crisis

love too fund the NLRB after publicly breaking the power of the rail unions and setting worker power back another decade

US politicians only disagree (a little bit) on domestic policy, on foreign policy they're all in lock-step. that used to feel like a truism, but it's been proven very true.

How are downtown luxury apartments solving the housing crisis?

Escalating the war in Ukraine? Please explain how the U.S. has "escalated" the full blown Russian invasion of Ukraine without sounding like a fool.

I don't know who you are personally, and you may not realise it, but you're parroting Russian propaganda. The only one here escalating is Russia when they kept bullying Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. The West have been chastised for letting Putin get away with Crimean annexation, instead of further sanction. Many countries have also thought a charm offensive might satiate Putin, essentially appeasing. But history has shown, appeasement never works because an egomaniac will never be satisfied. Putin thought that he'd get away with it again when he invaded the entirety of Ukraine, but didn't realise it's the red line for the West, and the Ukrainians put up a stiff fight.

he’ll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine

Eh????

Wait, so what do we do with the buildings?

What the actual fuck are you babbling about? Biden went there to tell israel to not do an invasion.

Take care of his own citizens... isnt that exactly what this article is about? Converting office space to residential space?

Take your pills, grandpa.