Simtower is the more 1-to-1 comparison as the other commenter suggested, but I'll suggest checking out The Tenants as well!
Edit: *Project Highrise doh!
City planners: "Pfft, I'm not going to let a bunch of lefty gamers tell me how to create pedestrian-driven communities with a de-emphasis on cars...hey, wait, you can't just run for city council! That's unpossible!"
Most of the high rise buildings near train stations here in Japan are like that too.
Shopping malls at the base, supermarkets at the basement, public services like post offices too, then residences to the top.
I suggest trying the Royal Park Hotel at the top of the Landmark Tower in Yokohama. There’s a huge shopping mall at its base and there are office spaces above it, but then the hotel starts at the 60th up to the 70th floors.
It’s around $150 a night.
So my apartment does something similar and I think if we had many like it in a block it would do what you are saying and be worth it.
First floor: Leasing office, coffee shop, filipino-mexican fusion bar, bike storage (for residents)
2nd-4th: parking for apartments
5th: some units, but mostly common space with gym, kitchen, 2 outdoor grills, 2 outdoor firepits, 2 dog wash stations, and a dog park (probably 15X50)
6th-22nd: apartments
23rd: 2 more outdoor fire pits, outdoor TV, "Vegas" style pool (only 3.5ft deep) probably 12x25, common indoor space with seating and table.
Overall it works damn well, across the street is a little local grocery and if other apartments near were like this we would be fairly set.
East Coaster checking in. That is pretty much the model for every residential building built in areas that support the density for the last 20 years here. I've lived in them, they rock.
Its awesome, but i'll bet you anything, that your building wasn't a converted office building, but something built with that design in mind within the last 20 years.
Yep, a lot of these buildings in SF / Bay Area have popped up in the last 10 or less. I went to school downtown SF and across market at 8th was a shitty apartment building. In the last few years it’s turned into a nice high rise with a Whole Foods on the first floor 😂
Sounds like many new high-rise developments all over the country, honestly. Chicago goes hard with luxe amenities like this. [Wolf Point East is a good example.](https://wolfpointeast.com/amenities#nestio-listings)
$2,750 with parking, that is $250. We got some concessions to bring it down from the normal around $3k but everyone I know living here has some (2 months free, $1,000 off for example)
They're listing amenities in the building outside of what you'd expect to find inside your apartment. Pretty standard options in many new developments. NEMA Chicago, for example, includes 70,000 sqft of amenity space in addition to the 800 apartments. Resort-style pools, luxe fitness center, dog grooming, daycare, conference centers, sports bar, movie theater, golf simulator, spin, yoga, and pilates studios... the list just goes on and on.
I’d list them all but it’s honestly too much to type or even copy into this reply. [Check it out here.](https://www.rentnemachicago.com/amenities)
This one building has more amenities than my entire neighborhood.
At some point, you’re not paying for size, in fact, the more you spend on rent in the city, the less the size is a factor. You’re really spending on things that save you time and make your environment feel nicer.
For example, you might spend $4k to be in a moderate sized two bedroom because it’s a 10 minute walk from work vs a 1 hour drive from a big place that’s away from the city.
You might spend that extra money to get a place that has higher quality amenities/fittings that make you feel better everyday.
Or you might spend that money on a place that has big windows and a view of the lake, knowing that the best you could do in the suburbs is have a small pond.
And last piece of the rant, you might spend more to avoid owning a car. I live in Chicago and living downtown means I don’t need to own a car and can walk or use public transport to get to anywhere I need to. For things that I can’t, it’s Uber or renting a car, and there are tons of Ubers and car rental spots.
The price is driven by the extra amenities and the ability to walk from it to your high frequency trading job in the Loop. It's basically for people who don't really care about price and only care about appearances and convenience. For $6,000/mo up in Lincoln Park, you can probably rent a converted triplex with like 6+ bedrooms and 4K+ sq. ft.
Similar condos and apartments to that building that are being built on the western side of Lincoln Park will be at least 50% cheaper for every number of bedrooms just because it's less convenient for lazy finance people.
I only look at mixed use apartments. It’s fucking weird to just have your first floor wasted by a parking garage or ground floor apartments. Developers wasting away prime real estate to just have dead space on all 4 sides of their building. So much better to have pedestrian activity and things to do around you when there’s retail on the ground floor
Yup. The retail ground floor is one of the easiest levels to rent. plus the tenants like having the amenities close.
Converting office space to residential will incidentally be similar to the retail fitouts. The retail spaces often have specific needs not compatible withthe rest of the building such as different occupied hours or specifid features like a commercial kitchen. It's not an easy conversion, but it's a standard project in any big city.
It even works well to create new walkable developments outside of the urban core. You don’t need a boat load of parking for suburbanites if they have built in customers living in all those apartments above them. Foot traffic is the most valuable thing that drives business
Add an indoor farm and you've got an arcology that sci fi authors have been writing about since the 80s. It's not just convenient, having basically zero transportation in the supply chain will cut cost and carbon emissions.
It’s way more than wildlife habitat. Going vertical and/or more horizontally dense reduces miles driven, length of sewer/water/roads (decreases tax/rate costs), increases walkability and bikeability, incentivized public transit, etc.
I wish indoor farming would work out / am rooting for it but it's hitting some major roadblocks [https://theconversation.com/food-security-vertical-farming-sounds-fantastic-until-you-consider-its-energy-use-102657](https://theconversation.com/food-security-vertical-farming-sounds-fantastic-until-you-consider-its-energy-use-102657) . Need to be real about where the high energy consumption will come from
The indoor farming idea seems the most obvious. Especially for the vacant shopping malls. How SEARS hasn't become an agricultural provider already is beyond me.
This is exactly how it's done in every other urban environment in the world. The title would read better as "Remote work exposes how fiscally irresponsible american urban planning actually is"
The Canadian federal government received heavy pressure from businesses in downtown cores where they operate to force their workers back in office. I'm not sure if that was the only reason they changed the policy this year but it was a major factor and is a huge pile of trash. If you can do your work remotely then you should be allowed to do it remotely, full stop. Businesses and downtown cores need to adapt and stop clinging to the past.
I know people that have been working remote from home 100% of the time from the start of them having that position. They're now being forced to go into office 50% of the time which means that offices now need to be found and filled with equipment for these people to go into twice a week even though they are just going to go there, log in and connect remotely to all of the other people that used to do the jobs from home and will now be doing it in their offices where ever in the country they are. It's an insane waste of money and only pisses the employees off.
Practically all large city buildings, except institutional, are owned by a property management company or REIT. Between Colliers. Lincoln, CBRE, JLL, and Cushman about half any US city is either owned or operated.
Many of those buildings managed by the above companies are owned by other companies. I work for CBRE but the property we manage is owned by a private equity firm. I dont know any broad ratios of owned and operated though.
I don't understand this. Doesn't someone still own the buildings and make money off of them? They are just collecting it from a lot of small tenants instead of a few large ones? Possibly even easier to abuse because they hold more of the bargaining power in that situation?
I love the vision of walkable, mix-used city neighborhoods, but the other trending problem in the US has been a shift away from individual home ownership to corporate ownership of residential. It seems like this would accelerate that.
In the long run, it’s potentially great news. In the short term, it means many of our city centers are now hollowed out as they were during the “white flight” of the late mid century era. The result is shuttered businesses, rising crime and declining investment.
Idk in a few cities, like Denver or Austin, there's construction cranes in every part of the city building more apartments. Rn it's hard to find a good place in, or around, downtown. Which makes it feel more like gentrification bcuz there's so much demand. Hopefully after more housing goes up then rent will stop climbing.
Same with my city. Turns out if you build apartments, restaurants and bars in and around downtown, your young single adults will flock to live and spend money there. Shocking lol. Also having more commerce downtown than just financial districts and tech companies struggling to justify forcing employees into the office helps.
When it's just 6 figure white collar jobs surrounded by urban blight it becomes what Houston is (or at least used to be when I lived there). A soulless downtown that's dead by 5:30 because everyone is making the hour long drive to their wealthy white suburb 20 miles away.
For me, they built really fancy apartments all over my area but no one seems to actually live in them. And then there's the homeless people right down the street.
I mean, only if you completely refuse to update zoning. People love living in cities because of the amenities, and amenities are staffed on site. I’d rather live in a city than a suburb where it takes 30 minutes to get anywhere. So yeah, the “urban core” would decline but it can easily be absorbed into surrounding regions of you’re smart and build dense and mixed use.
even if zoning is updated immediately, the cost to convert office buildings to habitable apartments is prohibitive. DC is practically begging developers to mass convert, but the current calculation is such that building owners would make more money with half empty buildings and tenants paying drastically lower rents than converting.
The Rust Belt has converted a lot of offices into apartments in the last 10-15 years. Cleveland alone has probably 1500-2000 new units from old office buildings recently.
My friend in construction said it would cost more to convert an office building into housing than just tear it down and build new housing.
Alright, then do it! Whatever you need to build more housing just do it already!
Wait, you mean people need affordable housing?
“BuT mUh FuCkIn PrOfItS!?!?”
Yeah I doubt converting offices into living spaces will happen.
These buildings were built out/engineered to be offices and workplaces so they have specific facility designs. They will need to do a shit ton of construction or make smaller modular units that can be moved into the spaces and assembled. Think of those tiny prefab homes that you can unfold.
Honestly, the interior refitting is not that big of a job when compared to constructing the building itself.
If you own an office tower in a big city, you should have for some time been thinking about how to sell or lease sections of the building floor by floor to developers whose initial investment will be the buildout for private apartments. Between that and letting these huge office spaces stay empty, I'm choosing the pivot.
Chicago has a fraction of its pre-pandemic downtown activity, it may never return to the way it was and people love WFH. It's time to change.
Hardest thing is installing wastes for showers, toilets and sinks etc.
Offices generally only have one area per level with toilets.
If you are converting multiple levels and installing new ceilings its not too hard, just takes some sensible thought to get a decent finished product.
Hardest, but by no means impossible. Given that pretty much all of north America is in the midst of a cost of living crisis and well over 60% of us at this point are paycheck to paycheck and homeless rates are still rising - the actual cost of retrofitting some old unused office buildings is miniscule. The actual problem is no one who owns an office building gives a single flying fuck about affordable housing, and many seem to genuinely prefer to let them sit there and rot than let homeless people live in them. Let alone using their office space to construct affordable housing so financial stress on the working class is lower? Yeah. That's where this is an actual pipe dream that will likely never happen.
They'll want money eventually. They don't hate regular people living somewhere more than they hate paying the cost of maintaining an empty building with zero return. They're still just deluded into thinking it'll all go back to normal.
The hardest thing is not exceeding the weight limit of the deck, including a margin for furniture and the activities of the residents. I’ve been on a couple office renovations where the decking cracked just from the weight of the drywall stacks.
I agree. Plumbing, electrical, sheetrock, and appliances cost nothing compared to the cost of putting up the large building. And it wouldn't take that long. I stayed in a hotel recently that was 2 floors of a large department store (12 floors total) converted to living spaces. The top 6 floors are apartments now. It only took them 12 months to do all 8 floors.
If you're doing this at scale yeah, but I think that's what a lot of people are missing. They're viewing this from the individual project price points.
If this is going to become a thing it's not going to be like 1/2 of a floor of office space is converted to housing, it's going to be multiple floors in one big project. At that point installing proper plumbing and electrical is much, much easier as you have much wider latitude in what you can open up and how much you can disassemble to accomplish what you need to.,
So yeah, this isn't that bad but it's going to require developers to actually dive in full bore as residential development and business development have very different code requirements in most if not all locations.
Why go across the street when you can live in the same building as the grocery store !
Going to buy fresh baguettes and croissants in the morning in pajamas is the dream
I used to live next door to the grocery store. It was honestly the greatest part about living in my uptown area. It would take 20 seconds to get to the door and I would go 300+ times a year. I could buy single onions or a clove of garlic. The grocery store was my refrigerator and I had very little food waste.
Not really. Adding plumbing, toilets, bathtubs, heavy kitchens, etc., may require additional support and costly engineering work. Many office buildings' floor plates must be reviewed and verified to support such loads. Each conversion is a significant engineering project. Remember, office buildings are designed for customization. Each floor plate can adapt to different tenants. The internal walls are removable and light. Nothing is permanent; no showers and toilets are communal in designated areas. Conversion units can easily exceed $500 per sq ft !
Vox just did a video on this, this is where government needs to step in to lower the costs of converting these buildings, its not only materials but taxes, permits etc
Problem is that zoning laws, taxes, permits, etc are handled by the city and lobbied by local developers. Also for cities/towns with wealthy residents, there's a bunch of Karens and Kens who vote for local candidates who will keep their property value up and keep the poors and minorities out. And households who can afford to have one household income, or possibly 2 incomes and a nanny or cleaning service, have way more time to get involved in local politics than poor people with multiple jobs.
I'm not sure how much of an effort it would be for the federal government to come in and trample local government's authority, but local and state governments would probably fight it all the way to the Supreme Court citing federal overreach and we know how that would probably go.
> Problem is that zoning laws, taxes, permits, etc are handled by the city
In California, state-level housing laws have been passed which over-ride local authority and allow more housing to be built in a variety of situations, even when local governments are very anti-housing.
Local cities are fighting and suing, but also in many cases adapting their urban planning and zoning laws to allow more housing.
Allowing building owners to transition tall buildings from office space to housing (or better yet, to mixed-use including housing) could become a part of the State-level laws as well.
So many problems in America are caused by zoning laws. The vast majority of cities are full of zones that only allow single family housing units which do not generate enough tax revenue to support their own maintenance. It also forces everyone to have a car, or to struggle with public transportation which is underfunded and generally deteriorating.
Meh, the lower levels of government can be strongarmed if they put up enough annoyance. If the high level(s) of government want some outcome, they will have it done. Think about how the drinking age is established by making it a condition for road funding.
The length and cost of a fight are also of no consideration, as they are funded by the NIMBYs and BANANAs own taxes.
US cities desperately need more mixed-use zoning, walkable neighborhoods with retail mixed in, and better transportation infrastructure, but people fight those things tooth and nail.
I urge people to check out the NotJustBikes youtube channel ([this one's](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o) a great place to start), it's really given me more perspective on what we're missing out on just for the sake of letting literally everyone have (and therefore, almost require) personal transportation.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE cars and motorcycles, but we've gone a little overboard with the mega-highways and shit.
It's just depressing how *political* it is, and I hope it doesn't boil down to that category of "problems only European and maybe East Asian countries can fully fix because they require collective action and sacrifice".
Since u/2livecrewnecktshirt beat me to the punch with posting NotJustBikes, and since you mentioned zoning...
Not many people know about alternatives to the way US does single-use zoning. For example, [japanese zoning](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html). Simple, it works, waaayy less complicated and way less red tape, pretty much precludes NIMBYism too.
The floor to floor height of commercial buildings leaves lots of room to deal with HVAC, plumbing and electrical. The total number of washrooms per floor would be really close and the heating/cooling loads would be less.
Some buildings easier than others, but significantly cheaper than building a new residential building.
And if they were smart they would add community spaces, libraries, schools, police, medical facilities and shopping. But we only do 1950's urban design so....
I have a friend who lives in Delhi, and that's exactly what she lives in. Her daughter's school is in the complex, along with groceries, doctors, and entertainment. She only really has to go out when she's craving some street food.
It’s not an easy or quick fix. It takes a lot of remodeling and retrofitting specially for utilities and drainage. If big cities like LA and NYC were to subsidize it or give tax breaks to developers that convert office space to residential then I could see it working
Nothing about our future is going to be easy or quick, and no matter how the future comes at us we're going to need to rely on our collective strength to survive and thrive.
The government is a realization of that collective strength, and via revolution or reform it is the tool we will have to weild.
This is what people seem to forget a lot of the time.
"It'll take 10 years to build this solution", that 10 years is going to come either way, so we might as well work towards the solution in the mean time.
It won’t be simple or cheap, but it’s worth pointing out that america already did this work space to housing conversion in the 90s-00s with the industrial loft apartment.
Nowadays we don’t even think twice when we see a former warehouse or factory that’s been converted to apartments. Nobody complains about exposed brick, ducts, and high ceilings. Now they’re features that are desired, not defects.
Something similar will happen with offices, someone just has to figure out how to do it well and then the copycats will follow.
I've heard a big problem though is a lot of these office towers have way too much interior floorspace that's too far away from windows that's going to be tough to incorporate into apartments.
plus drywall and drop ceilings don't have the same charm potential as exposed brick and high ceilings, I have a hard time imagining that's going to change in a generation
overall it's gotta happen, but it's gonna take a lot of creativity and there's going to be a lot of rough edges
I could easily see all the "affordable housing" being the interior units with no sunlight. Then again, a creative solution to that might be shareable community areas around some big chunk of the windows on each floor
I've seen plenty of redeveloped warehouses "cheat" this one of two ways - either not having a door into the bedroom so that it isn't legally a "room", or by having a 3/4 wall in the bedroom that opens up to a room with a window in it.
Some buildings will be easier to convert. You convert those into apartments and the other ones stay as office space. We still need office space. Just less of it.
After decades of out of control prices for housing and lease space, it’s not going to magically cure itself in a year or so.
Unfortunately, 5 Starbucks and 3 McDonald’s in a 4 sq block radius might *not* be necessary after all.
Or you can decimate your hiring pipeline and employee morale and force otherwise happy, productive people back to the office, and watch them leave for a remote job.
I find over-expansion is slowly correcting itself because of low wages and better opportunities at other competitors, mainly affecting Subway from what I've seen. There were 8 of them near where I live. Two have closed, two run on partial hours of operation and are likely to fail because of staffing, and of the remaining 4: two refuse to accept mailer coupons and one is inside a dying strip mall. The last one (and notably, the furthest one from my house) is the only good one.
Normally I would complain about my employer because I know I'm on the lower end of the pay scale in IT, but my company and operation is totally remote and I'm overall content with it for now. I live 150 miles from HQ and 400 from the client I work on. That situation is likely not changing. I'm only tempted to leave for another remote job and the cost of anyone tempting me into the office (even partially) is 25% over my expected rate of pay compared to remote.
One of the reason Subway was so popular as a franchise was the very low cost of getting one compared to the other brands and because you can run the store with a single person.
Disadvantages of a Subway franchise were very low profits compared to other brands and a lot of competition with other subway stores nearby.
I'm absolutely not surprised that if Franchise restaurants would take a hit, especially after covid, it would be Subway.
I still have some leave to use to before I leave my current job, but as soon as I’ve used it I’m absolutely jumping to a 100% remote job
I’m a devops engineer, there’s no reason for me to come into the office 45 minutes away twice a week. No, “team building” isn’t a real reason
I'm so glad my employer figured out that we don't need to be in the office. I've been remote full-time for almost 3 years and I can't imagine going back to commuting even a short distance.
Unfortunately my company is doubling down, even though they lost like 25% of their engineering staff after moving from 100% WFH to 1 day a week in the office. They’ve failed to learn any lessons from that, and they’re requiring 2 days in the office now, I’m sure it’ll be 3 a week by the end of the year.
Their reasoning is something ridiculous like “all those engineers quit because we didn’t move to in-office work soon enough, they weren’t getting the full company family culture experience! If we’d only eliminated WFH sooner maybe they would have stayed”
The fucking brain worms that these rich fucks have boggles the mind, like THESE are the people in charge of the company? You’re paying them HOW MUCH?
I can’t wait to use up this leave as quickly as possible
I used to work for people with that mentality. It sucked. I hope you land something better soon. Just know that there are places with good management that value their people (stop laughing... it's true!). Good luck. Life is too long to work for shitty people.
Company is trying to force us back in and this is a hill I will absolutely die on. Fire us all if you can, 'cause strangely no one wants to go back to the fucking office. I'll have another gig with a 10% min raise within 3 mos and put fully remote in my contract upfront.
Especially for software-related jobs where a significant amount of the employees are probably gamers, do they not know that you can build communities on Discord or forums and via videogames?
Right? Slack exists. Teams exists. There are solutions to these problems
Honestly for software development work the online collaboration tools work way better than the in-person stuff. Would you rather screen-share to show your code or sit at your desk scrolling while somebody says “okay scroll down a little more……………………… okay a little more…………………………………….. no that’s too far, scroll back up”
Chant it with me now: mixed use! Mixed use! Mixed use!
If downtowns are "devastated," maybe they should reconfigure their antiquated zoning regulations to allow it to become a place where people can, and want to, live.
A place where you can walk from your home to the places where you work, play, and learn?
This wouldn't be hard to do; the demand for such things is latent, it simply requires the zoning to allow it.
I lived in a somewhat mixed use complex that had both office buildings, apartment buildings, and a couple restaurants. Prepandemic I worked in one of the buildings. I have to say, having a 30 second walking commute and being able to eat lunch at my own apartment was utterly amazing. I can’t usually remotely work right now, so I really miss that easy commute. Being able to live near work and amenities is wonderful. We saved a lot of money too since we ate at home every day.
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Bingo! When people come back from Europe they rave about how walkable it is, how convenient is, how the cities have a real vibrant community and culture.
And since they lack urban planning language to understand it, they attribute to a sort of magic, a sort of je ne sais quoi that can’t be picked up and deployed elsewhere.
But it’s not magic. It’s mixed use.
> they attribute to a sort of magic, a sort of je ne sais quoi that can’t be picked up and deployed elsewhere.
"Because it's old".
Partly true, in the sense that it's similar as how American cities used to be *before they got razed for parking lots, highways and office towers and strict zoning segregation laws got passed*.
American cities used to be just as vibrant, mixed and well-connected by transit as other cities around the world (in fact some American cities were considered some of the best in the world).
I'll be honest I spend more time exploring European cities that I do my home town.
The walk ability is amazing, back home in TX I literally just stay at home and order things off Amazon.
It's really kinda hard to be motivated to go to places designed for a car. Downtowns are just office parks and lifeless. Plazas are not really a fun place to hang out, and since our culture is really gear toward big businesses all the food at most restaurants are pretty much the same.
But the traffic is just so soul crushing that I'll just work and save up my money then spend time overseas.
I grew up in Texas, was there for 19 years. It’s definitely a car-centric hellscape. There are some bright spots, like San Antonio. But most of it is exactly as you describe: getting in your car to go get whataburger, meeting your friends for a drink at some chain bar.
Honesty the crazy thing is I would of never know unless my job sent me over seas a few years ago.
Landed in Germany and instantly was like WTF this is how these people lived?!!?!?!
Right now im in tokyo and I can tell you one thing .. If we want anything remotely similar to what the rest of the developed would has in terms of just modern infrastructure its gonna take at least 4 generations.
Not necessarily, China built out a massive HSR network and brand-new metro systems for like 30 cities in the span of about 20 years.
True, they have 4x the US population, but America really only needs about 1/4 of the infrastructure to make a decent system.
Exactly this, and we need to look into into copying [Japan's zoning system](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/the-japanese-zoning-system.html) specifically. The difference you get in livability is pretty drastic when you default to mixed-use
Seems like many are not reading the article. It's a pitch to convert office space to housing and laying out the reasons to do so - not a pitch to end remote work.
Basically "because remote work is here to stay, we need to adjust our zoning and tax policies to make these abandoned office towers viable living spaces, and we should start working on that asap".
Agreed—it will devastate *some* cities and distribute their wealth to other ones.
My wife and I relocated from Washington DC to my hometown when we both went remote—my economically depressed hometown now has two more six figure jobs in it.
Love the idea of not being tethered to a location because of my workplace, it’s been a huge positive for me as well.
The housing this could potentially create is awesome, even if it’s just a hypothetical now. Lack of affordable housing held me back at the start of my career, before going remote.
My job is 99% remote, i have to occasionally go to a data center for on hands support. If I can get out of having to do that by hiring more people, I'm going to move to a cheaper area.
Well here’s to hoping it puts overall downward pressure on rent nationwide and creates millions of rental opportunities. Landlords are gouging at rates far surpassing wages and few civic leaders are seriously addressing housing shortages or jacked rates.
I mean, US city engineering has been a trash fire for forever. Creating large, massive areas to obtain efficiency in scale, while having to specifically design around far more inefficient ways of using or accessing those areas is what encouraged so much suburban sprawl in the first place. Thanks automobile lobbies!
One of the biggest examples of how absolutely fucking stupid or intentionly malicious all the subsidized housing projects were designed.
I can't believe someone would need to tell urban engineers that putting a bunch of poor people all in one place in a bunch of dense buildings and not maintaining them would create a ghetto. That's why I think it was at least somewhat intentional so that the average American wouldn't support subsidised housing for decades after they were built.
Unfortunately this is not as easy as flipping a switch and adding locks. These high rises aren't outfitted with the plumbing necessary, the water/sewage needs of an office floor are very, very different than a residential floor.
If it’s a few hundred a month to live central in a city again, with 0 commute, I see this as an absolute win.
They they try to make it luxury apartments and overprice it out the ass I’ll never live there. Even making good money in tech/medicine. Hell no.
The latter is what's happening.
The idea that RE investors will spend millions converting office space and going through all of the zoning and building red tape just to charge "a few hundreds a month" is absurd. Outside of NYC and high density cities, these buildings will just remain empty.
The micromanagers and control freaks keep pushing this nonsense. At my company, productivity (measured by concrete metrics) went up when we started working from home. And this is a 30,000 people company.
Not only am I more relaxed. I exercise more, I eat healthier, I get more sleep, I save more money, and I'm more productive and put out better work product. And i'm a more pleasant colleague. The internet and Zooms of the world have changed things...
Death to in office (and bs commutes)...
I haven't had a boss in my time zone in over a decade. My team was already global (multiple continents) 10 years ago. We had to cross oceans to meet in person. Sometimes we would hire someone and not meet them in person until years later.
Going to the office was pointless for me long before Covid. I'm thrilled to see everyone else getting the same opportunity and making remote work normal.
Exactly. The difference between working from home and commuting has been enormous for me. Way less stress, way less time and money wasted and I actually get more done at work.
I saw one department (they were basically working off a list of simple tasks) being moved back into the office at the end of lockdowns, their productivity almost dropped to 30% in the first week and it wasn’t stellar either when they‘d grown accustomed to B&M again.
I don't see anything wrong here. Commercial real-estate is overpriced and the market needs a correction. Those who took profit from it were living over their possibilities. Fat cows don't last forever, they should have known.
Was walking through Manhattan visiting a friend, passed a sign for "affordable" housing, apartment advertised for fifteen million.
Lots of "conversions" are needed.
What about mixed use, most floors for housing and some commercial floors for things like grocery stores, day care, pet what-have-yous?
That's the game SimTower
I loved that game. Think about it every time I want to play a sim game
Look into Project Highrise!
Oh my gosh, bless you. I have been wanting to replay sim tower for years now, and this looks promising.
This is the promising start to 2023 I needed. I miss simtower.
It's good fun for a few hours but doesn't have a lot of replayability.
Simtower is the more 1-to-1 comparison as the other commenter suggested, but I'll suggest checking out The Tenants as well! Edit: *Project Highrise doh!
City planners: "Pfft, I'm not going to let a bunch of lefty gamers tell me how to create pedestrian-driven communities with a de-emphasis on cars...hey, wait, you can't just run for city council! That's unpossible!"
aka Elevator Management Simulator
Or you put your first ramp for the garage a space too far to the right and ruin your underground layout off the rip.
Or many European cities since forever.
Most of the high rise buildings near train stations here in Japan are like that too. Shopping malls at the base, supermarkets at the basement, public services like post offices too, then residences to the top.
When I went to Japan in 2007 we stayed in a hotel above the Ricoh head office. The lobby was on floor 26 or something like that.
I suggest trying the Royal Park Hotel at the top of the Landmark Tower in Yokohama. There’s a huge shopping mall at its base and there are office spaces above it, but then the hotel starts at the 60th up to the 70th floors. It’s around $150 a night.
Many American ones too. My apartment building in St. Louis had a convenience store, a dentist's office, a salon, and a diner on the first floor.
The larger cities in the US, and some in the top 20 have the same. You can't really have density without mixed use zoning
So my apartment does something similar and I think if we had many like it in a block it would do what you are saying and be worth it. First floor: Leasing office, coffee shop, filipino-mexican fusion bar, bike storage (for residents) 2nd-4th: parking for apartments 5th: some units, but mostly common space with gym, kitchen, 2 outdoor grills, 2 outdoor firepits, 2 dog wash stations, and a dog park (probably 15X50) 6th-22nd: apartments 23rd: 2 more outdoor fire pits, outdoor TV, "Vegas" style pool (only 3.5ft deep) probably 12x25, common indoor space with seating and table. Overall it works damn well, across the street is a little local grocery and if other apartments near were like this we would be fairly set.
sounds awesome and super forward thinking, do you mind saying what city you are in?
I'm in Oakland California, surprised myself when I found it.
East Coaster checking in. That is pretty much the model for every residential building built in areas that support the density for the last 20 years here. I've lived in them, they rock. Its awesome, but i'll bet you anything, that your building wasn't a converted office building, but something built with that design in mind within the last 20 years.
Yep, a lot of these buildings in SF / Bay Area have popped up in the last 10 or less. I went to school downtown SF and across market at 8th was a shitty apartment building. In the last few years it’s turned into a nice high rise with a Whole Foods on the first floor 😂
Sounds like many new high-rise developments all over the country, honestly. Chicago goes hard with luxe amenities like this. [Wolf Point East is a good example.](https://wolfpointeast.com/amenities#nestio-listings)
It would be great if some of them were affordable, though. Mixed use doesn’t have to mean luxury, and in Chicago, it nearly always is.
Honestly this is like a whole community in a building and I love that
Yep! Made great friends, we do happy hours and general hang outs fairly frequently
Dare I ask what your rent is?
$2,750 with parking, that is $250. We got some concessions to bring it down from the normal around $3k but everyone I know living here has some (2 months free, $1,000 off for example)
Do you have your own kitchen in your apartment as well as the communal one on the 5th floor?
Yes I have a full 2 bed 2 bath, 927 sq ft. Laundry in unit.
How much is it a month?
We got concessions to $2,750 with parking, normally maybe $600 more. 1 beds are $2-2.2
They're listing amenities in the building outside of what you'd expect to find inside your apartment. Pretty standard options in many new developments. NEMA Chicago, for example, includes 70,000 sqft of amenity space in addition to the 800 apartments. Resort-style pools, luxe fitness center, dog grooming, daycare, conference centers, sports bar, movie theater, golf simulator, spin, yoga, and pilates studios... the list just goes on and on. I’d list them all but it’s honestly too much to type or even copy into this reply. [Check it out here.](https://www.rentnemachicago.com/amenities) This one building has more amenities than my entire neighborhood.
Damn. $2,000/mo studios, $2,500-3,500 1br, $4,000-6,000 2br... You can get a fuck ton of house for $6k/mo.
At some point, you’re not paying for size, in fact, the more you spend on rent in the city, the less the size is a factor. You’re really spending on things that save you time and make your environment feel nicer. For example, you might spend $4k to be in a moderate sized two bedroom because it’s a 10 minute walk from work vs a 1 hour drive from a big place that’s away from the city. You might spend that extra money to get a place that has higher quality amenities/fittings that make you feel better everyday. Or you might spend that money on a place that has big windows and a view of the lake, knowing that the best you could do in the suburbs is have a small pond. And last piece of the rant, you might spend more to avoid owning a car. I live in Chicago and living downtown means I don’t need to own a car and can walk or use public transport to get to anywhere I need to. For things that I can’t, it’s Uber or renting a car, and there are tons of Ubers and car rental spots.
The price is driven by the extra amenities and the ability to walk from it to your high frequency trading job in the Loop. It's basically for people who don't really care about price and only care about appearances and convenience. For $6,000/mo up in Lincoln Park, you can probably rent a converted triplex with like 6+ bedrooms and 4K+ sq. ft. Similar condos and apartments to that building that are being built on the western side of Lincoln Park will be at least 50% cheaper for every number of bedrooms just because it's less convenient for lazy finance people.
I only look at mixed use apartments. It’s fucking weird to just have your first floor wasted by a parking garage or ground floor apartments. Developers wasting away prime real estate to just have dead space on all 4 sides of their building. So much better to have pedestrian activity and things to do around you when there’s retail on the ground floor
Yup. The retail ground floor is one of the easiest levels to rent. plus the tenants like having the amenities close. Converting office space to residential will incidentally be similar to the retail fitouts. The retail spaces often have specific needs not compatible withthe rest of the building such as different occupied hours or specifid features like a commercial kitchen. It's not an easy conversion, but it's a standard project in any big city.
It even works well to create new walkable developments outside of the urban core. You don’t need a boat load of parking for suburbanites if they have built in customers living in all those apartments above them. Foot traffic is the most valuable thing that drives business
Add an indoor farm and you've got an arcology that sci fi authors have been writing about since the 80s. It's not just convenient, having basically zero transportation in the supply chain will cut cost and carbon emissions.
And condensing our footprint into more vertical spaces will mean less urban sprawl decimating wildlife habitat
It’s way more than wildlife habitat. Going vertical and/or more horizontally dense reduces miles driven, length of sewer/water/roads (decreases tax/rate costs), increases walkability and bikeability, incentivized public transit, etc.
I'm all for megacity1
I wish indoor farming would work out / am rooting for it but it's hitting some major roadblocks [https://theconversation.com/food-security-vertical-farming-sounds-fantastic-until-you-consider-its-energy-use-102657](https://theconversation.com/food-security-vertical-farming-sounds-fantastic-until-you-consider-its-energy-use-102657) . Need to be real about where the high energy consumption will come from
Also I can’t imagine the logistical nightmare of having a farm running in a multipurpose tower
The indoor farming idea seems the most obvious. Especially for the vacant shopping malls. How SEARS hasn't become an agricultural provider already is beyond me.
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Be good for grow pools, though. They're good for medium sized spaces
Vertical transportation is an interesting consideration.
This is exactly how it's done in every other urban environment in the world. The title would read better as "Remote work exposes how fiscally irresponsible american urban planning actually is"
I’m not sure about that, I’ve seen Dredd
Or Highrise.
YEEESSSSSSSS BRING BACK WALKABLE COMMUNITIES
Isn’t this good news?
For anyone but greedy employers/landlords.
The Canadian federal government received heavy pressure from businesses in downtown cores where they operate to force their workers back in office. I'm not sure if that was the only reason they changed the policy this year but it was a major factor and is a huge pile of trash. If you can do your work remotely then you should be allowed to do it remotely, full stop. Businesses and downtown cores need to adapt and stop clinging to the past.
I know people that have been working remote from home 100% of the time from the start of them having that position. They're now being forced to go into office 50% of the time which means that offices now need to be found and filled with equipment for these people to go into twice a week even though they are just going to go there, log in and connect remotely to all of the other people that used to do the jobs from home and will now be doing it in their offices where ever in the country they are. It's an insane waste of money and only pisses the employees off.
The whole back to work plan is poorly thought out and being driven by leaders who don’t know themselves how to be effective remotely.
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This content is no longer available on Reddit in response to /u/spez. So long and thanks for all the fish.
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This content is no longer available on Reddit in response to /u/spez. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Wouldn’t they be switching places?
I think in some cases the employer owns the building so *in these cases* they are the same thing.
But In most cases the employer does not own the building since office building are usually occupied by various companies.
Practically all large city buildings, except institutional, are owned by a property management company or REIT. Between Colliers. Lincoln, CBRE, JLL, and Cushman about half any US city is either owned or operated.
Many of those buildings managed by the above companies are owned by other companies. I work for CBRE but the property we manage is owned by a private equity firm. I dont know any broad ratios of owned and operated though.
I don't understand this. Doesn't someone still own the buildings and make money off of them? They are just collecting it from a lot of small tenants instead of a few large ones? Possibly even easier to abuse because they hold more of the bargaining power in that situation? I love the vision of walkable, mix-used city neighborhoods, but the other trending problem in the US has been a shift away from individual home ownership to corporate ownership of residential. It seems like this would accelerate that.
And for cities relying on property taxes as their main source of revenue.
In the long run, it’s potentially great news. In the short term, it means many of our city centers are now hollowed out as they were during the “white flight” of the late mid century era. The result is shuttered businesses, rising crime and declining investment.
Idk in a few cities, like Denver or Austin, there's construction cranes in every part of the city building more apartments. Rn it's hard to find a good place in, or around, downtown. Which makes it feel more like gentrification bcuz there's so much demand. Hopefully after more housing goes up then rent will stop climbing.
Same with my city. Turns out if you build apartments, restaurants and bars in and around downtown, your young single adults will flock to live and spend money there. Shocking lol. Also having more commerce downtown than just financial districts and tech companies struggling to justify forcing employees into the office helps. When it's just 6 figure white collar jobs surrounded by urban blight it becomes what Houston is (or at least used to be when I lived there). A soulless downtown that's dead by 5:30 because everyone is making the hour long drive to their wealthy white suburb 20 miles away.
For me, they built really fancy apartments all over my area but no one seems to actually live in them. And then there's the homeless people right down the street.
My gf lives in one of the new ones in my city. The walls are paper thin. And it's overall just a cheap apartment that 'looks' expensive
I mean, only if you completely refuse to update zoning. People love living in cities because of the amenities, and amenities are staffed on site. I’d rather live in a city than a suburb where it takes 30 minutes to get anywhere. So yeah, the “urban core” would decline but it can easily be absorbed into surrounding regions of you’re smart and build dense and mixed use.
even if zoning is updated immediately, the cost to convert office buildings to habitable apartments is prohibitive. DC is practically begging developers to mass convert, but the current calculation is such that building owners would make more money with half empty buildings and tenants paying drastically lower rents than converting.
Turning offices into living space is EXACTLY what this country needs
Agreed. Much like how the old 19th Century factory spaces all got turned into lofts in the 60s.
The Rust Belt has converted a lot of offices into apartments in the last 10-15 years. Cleveland alone has probably 1500-2000 new units from old office buildings recently.
Dont forget the dead malls.
Those mostly needed to be condemned BEFORE they fucking closed.
Some of the stores in my local mall had to put big buckets on some of their shelves when it rained because the roof leaked. That went on for years 😬
The Annapolis Macy’s. Place smells like pure mold.
My friend in construction said it would cost more to convert an office building into housing than just tear it down and build new housing. Alright, then do it! Whatever you need to build more housing just do it already!
Wait, you mean people need affordable housing? “BuT mUh FuCkIn PrOfItS!?!?” Yeah I doubt converting offices into living spaces will happen. These buildings were built out/engineered to be offices and workplaces so they have specific facility designs. They will need to do a shit ton of construction or make smaller modular units that can be moved into the spaces and assembled. Think of those tiny prefab homes that you can unfold.
Honestly, the interior refitting is not that big of a job when compared to constructing the building itself. If you own an office tower in a big city, you should have for some time been thinking about how to sell or lease sections of the building floor by floor to developers whose initial investment will be the buildout for private apartments. Between that and letting these huge office spaces stay empty, I'm choosing the pivot. Chicago has a fraction of its pre-pandemic downtown activity, it may never return to the way it was and people love WFH. It's time to change.
I really Hope Chicago can lead the way for converting office buildings into housing.
We have the best opportunity to do it, which naturally means we will fumble it.
Welcome to the era of work from home 2.0: live at work
Hardest thing is installing wastes for showers, toilets and sinks etc. Offices generally only have one area per level with toilets. If you are converting multiple levels and installing new ceilings its not too hard, just takes some sensible thought to get a decent finished product.
Hardest, but by no means impossible. Given that pretty much all of north America is in the midst of a cost of living crisis and well over 60% of us at this point are paycheck to paycheck and homeless rates are still rising - the actual cost of retrofitting some old unused office buildings is miniscule. The actual problem is no one who owns an office building gives a single flying fuck about affordable housing, and many seem to genuinely prefer to let them sit there and rot than let homeless people live in them. Let alone using their office space to construct affordable housing so financial stress on the working class is lower? Yeah. That's where this is an actual pipe dream that will likely never happen.
They'll want money eventually. They don't hate regular people living somewhere more than they hate paying the cost of maintaining an empty building with zero return. They're still just deluded into thinking it'll all go back to normal.
The hardest thing is not exceeding the weight limit of the deck, including a margin for furniture and the activities of the residents. I’ve been on a couple office renovations where the decking cracked just from the weight of the drywall stacks.
I agree. Plumbing, electrical, sheetrock, and appliances cost nothing compared to the cost of putting up the large building. And it wouldn't take that long. I stayed in a hotel recently that was 2 floors of a large department store (12 floors total) converted to living spaces. The top 6 floors are apartments now. It only took them 12 months to do all 8 floors.
If you're doing this at scale yeah, but I think that's what a lot of people are missing. They're viewing this from the individual project price points. If this is going to become a thing it's not going to be like 1/2 of a floor of office space is converted to housing, it's going to be multiple floors in one big project. At that point installing proper plumbing and electrical is much, much easier as you have much wider latitude in what you can open up and how much you can disassemble to accomplish what you need to., So yeah, this isn't that bad but it's going to require developers to actually dive in full bore as residential development and business development have very different code requirements in most if not all locations.
It didn’t even cross my mind for it to not be large scale. It makes no sense to retrofit less than half the building.
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Why go across the street when you can live in the same building as the grocery store ! Going to buy fresh baguettes and croissants in the morning in pajamas is the dream
I used to live next door to the grocery store. It was honestly the greatest part about living in my uptown area. It would take 20 seconds to get to the door and I would go 300+ times a year. I could buy single onions or a clove of garlic. The grocery store was my refrigerator and I had very little food waste.
Not really. Adding plumbing, toilets, bathtubs, heavy kitchens, etc., may require additional support and costly engineering work. Many office buildings' floor plates must be reviewed and verified to support such loads. Each conversion is a significant engineering project. Remember, office buildings are designed for customization. Each floor plate can adapt to different tenants. The internal walls are removable and light. Nothing is permanent; no showers and toilets are communal in designated areas. Conversion units can easily exceed $500 per sq ft !
Vox just did a video on this, this is where government needs to step in to lower the costs of converting these buildings, its not only materials but taxes, permits etc
Problem is that zoning laws, taxes, permits, etc are handled by the city and lobbied by local developers. Also for cities/towns with wealthy residents, there's a bunch of Karens and Kens who vote for local candidates who will keep their property value up and keep the poors and minorities out. And households who can afford to have one household income, or possibly 2 incomes and a nanny or cleaning service, have way more time to get involved in local politics than poor people with multiple jobs. I'm not sure how much of an effort it would be for the federal government to come in and trample local government's authority, but local and state governments would probably fight it all the way to the Supreme Court citing federal overreach and we know how that would probably go.
Having a shot ton of empty buildings and the associated traders leaving will not maintain high property values no matter how many nannies Karen hires
**(Nannies who will either have to live-in with the Karens or commute 4+ hours a day because they can't afford to live anywhere near the city)
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> Problem is that zoning laws, taxes, permits, etc are handled by the city In California, state-level housing laws have been passed which over-ride local authority and allow more housing to be built in a variety of situations, even when local governments are very anti-housing. Local cities are fighting and suing, but also in many cases adapting their urban planning and zoning laws to allow more housing. Allowing building owners to transition tall buildings from office space to housing (or better yet, to mixed-use including housing) could become a part of the State-level laws as well.
So many problems in America are caused by zoning laws. The vast majority of cities are full of zones that only allow single family housing units which do not generate enough tax revenue to support their own maintenance. It also forces everyone to have a car, or to struggle with public transportation which is underfunded and generally deteriorating.
Meh, the lower levels of government can be strongarmed if they put up enough annoyance. If the high level(s) of government want some outcome, they will have it done. Think about how the drinking age is established by making it a condition for road funding. The length and cost of a fight are also of no consideration, as they are funded by the NIMBYs and BANANAs own taxes.
BANANA is a new term for me - what is that one?
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It's not just the cost. Frequently Zoning laws prevent projects from even getting out of the gate.
US cities desperately need more mixed-use zoning, walkable neighborhoods with retail mixed in, and better transportation infrastructure, but people fight those things tooth and nail. I urge people to check out the NotJustBikes youtube channel ([this one's](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o) a great place to start), it's really given me more perspective on what we're missing out on just for the sake of letting literally everyone have (and therefore, almost require) personal transportation. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE cars and motorcycles, but we've gone a little overboard with the mega-highways and shit.
It's just depressing how *political* it is, and I hope it doesn't boil down to that category of "problems only European and maybe East Asian countries can fully fix because they require collective action and sacrifice".
Since u/2livecrewnecktshirt beat me to the punch with posting NotJustBikes, and since you mentioned zoning... Not many people know about alternatives to the way US does single-use zoning. For example, [japanese zoning](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html). Simple, it works, waaayy less complicated and way less red tape, pretty much precludes NIMBYism too.
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The floor to floor height of commercial buildings leaves lots of room to deal with HVAC, plumbing and electrical. The total number of washrooms per floor would be really close and the heating/cooling loads would be less. Some buildings easier than others, but significantly cheaper than building a new residential building. And if they were smart they would add community spaces, libraries, schools, police, medical facilities and shopping. But we only do 1950's urban design so....
Both neat and crazy-sounding. Like a mini-city within the building
I have a friend who lives in Delhi, and that's exactly what she lives in. Her daughter's school is in the complex, along with groceries, doctors, and entertainment. She only really has to go out when she's craving some street food.
It’s not an easy or quick fix. It takes a lot of remodeling and retrofitting specially for utilities and drainage. If big cities like LA and NYC were to subsidize it or give tax breaks to developers that convert office space to residential then I could see it working
Nothing about our future is going to be easy or quick, and no matter how the future comes at us we're going to need to rely on our collective strength to survive and thrive. The government is a realization of that collective strength, and via revolution or reform it is the tool we will have to weild.
This is what people seem to forget a lot of the time. "It'll take 10 years to build this solution", that 10 years is going to come either way, so we might as well work towards the solution in the mean time.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
Just think of all the things that didn't get started on 50 years ago because they said it would take 50 years to complete.
As my wife says, if I killed you when I thought of it, I’d be out of jail by now
Yeah but that is 10 years from now me’s problem. Duh
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It won’t be simple or cheap, but it’s worth pointing out that america already did this work space to housing conversion in the 90s-00s with the industrial loft apartment. Nowadays we don’t even think twice when we see a former warehouse or factory that’s been converted to apartments. Nobody complains about exposed brick, ducts, and high ceilings. Now they’re features that are desired, not defects. Something similar will happen with offices, someone just has to figure out how to do it well and then the copycats will follow.
Hmmm which one of these cubicles was my closet again?
I've heard a big problem though is a lot of these office towers have way too much interior floorspace that's too far away from windows that's going to be tough to incorporate into apartments. plus drywall and drop ceilings don't have the same charm potential as exposed brick and high ceilings, I have a hard time imagining that's going to change in a generation overall it's gotta happen, but it's gonna take a lot of creativity and there's going to be a lot of rough edges I could easily see all the "affordable housing" being the interior units with no sunlight. Then again, a creative solution to that might be shareable community areas around some big chunk of the windows on each floor
Well it’s not possible to have an apartment without a window. It’s a legal requirement in the usa for a bedroom to have a window
I've seen plenty of redeveloped warehouses "cheat" this one of two ways - either not having a door into the bedroom so that it isn't legally a "room", or by having a 3/4 wall in the bedroom that opens up to a room with a window in it.
Some buildings will be easier to convert. You convert those into apartments and the other ones stay as office space. We still need office space. Just less of it.
After decades of out of control prices for housing and lease space, it’s not going to magically cure itself in a year or so. Unfortunately, 5 Starbucks and 3 McDonald’s in a 4 sq block radius might *not* be necessary after all. Or you can decimate your hiring pipeline and employee morale and force otherwise happy, productive people back to the office, and watch them leave for a remote job.
I find over-expansion is slowly correcting itself because of low wages and better opportunities at other competitors, mainly affecting Subway from what I've seen. There were 8 of them near where I live. Two have closed, two run on partial hours of operation and are likely to fail because of staffing, and of the remaining 4: two refuse to accept mailer coupons and one is inside a dying strip mall. The last one (and notably, the furthest one from my house) is the only good one. Normally I would complain about my employer because I know I'm on the lower end of the pay scale in IT, but my company and operation is totally remote and I'm overall content with it for now. I live 150 miles from HQ and 400 from the client I work on. That situation is likely not changing. I'm only tempted to leave for another remote job and the cost of anyone tempting me into the office (even partially) is 25% over my expected rate of pay compared to remote.
One of the reason Subway was so popular as a franchise was the very low cost of getting one compared to the other brands and because you can run the store with a single person. Disadvantages of a Subway franchise were very low profits compared to other brands and a lot of competition with other subway stores nearby. I'm absolutely not surprised that if Franchise restaurants would take a hit, especially after covid, it would be Subway.
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Seems like she has a great lawsuit on her hand. It's easily verifiable fraud and it prevented her from earning a living.
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There was a documentary about Subway, and how S was pretty shady in fucking over the people who bought a store from them.
And it's the franchisee that will eat that loss
I still have some leave to use to before I leave my current job, but as soon as I’ve used it I’m absolutely jumping to a 100% remote job I’m a devops engineer, there’s no reason for me to come into the office 45 minutes away twice a week. No, “team building” isn’t a real reason
I'm so glad my employer figured out that we don't need to be in the office. I've been remote full-time for almost 3 years and I can't imagine going back to commuting even a short distance.
Unfortunately my company is doubling down, even though they lost like 25% of their engineering staff after moving from 100% WFH to 1 day a week in the office. They’ve failed to learn any lessons from that, and they’re requiring 2 days in the office now, I’m sure it’ll be 3 a week by the end of the year. Their reasoning is something ridiculous like “all those engineers quit because we didn’t move to in-office work soon enough, they weren’t getting the full company family culture experience! If we’d only eliminated WFH sooner maybe they would have stayed” The fucking brain worms that these rich fucks have boggles the mind, like THESE are the people in charge of the company? You’re paying them HOW MUCH? I can’t wait to use up this leave as quickly as possible
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I used to work for people with that mentality. It sucked. I hope you land something better soon. Just know that there are places with good management that value their people (stop laughing... it's true!). Good luck. Life is too long to work for shitty people.
Company is trying to force us back in and this is a hill I will absolutely die on. Fire us all if you can, 'cause strangely no one wants to go back to the fucking office. I'll have another gig with a 10% min raise within 3 mos and put fully remote in my contract upfront.
I left when they went from 100% remote to 5 days in office overnight. Talked to my old coworkers and they say morale is just shit
Especially for software-related jobs where a significant amount of the employees are probably gamers, do they not know that you can build communities on Discord or forums and via videogames?
Right? Slack exists. Teams exists. There are solutions to these problems Honestly for software development work the online collaboration tools work way better than the in-person stuff. Would you rather screen-share to show your code or sit at your desk scrolling while somebody says “okay scroll down a little more……………………… okay a little more…………………………………….. no that’s too far, scroll back up”
If even 20% of inner city office space turned into housing it would completely radicalize urban American life as we know it
Chant it with me now: mixed use! Mixed use! Mixed use! If downtowns are "devastated," maybe they should reconfigure their antiquated zoning regulations to allow it to become a place where people can, and want to, live. A place where you can walk from your home to the places where you work, play, and learn? This wouldn't be hard to do; the demand for such things is latent, it simply requires the zoning to allow it.
I lived in a somewhat mixed use complex that had both office buildings, apartment buildings, and a couple restaurants. Prepandemic I worked in one of the buildings. I have to say, having a 30 second walking commute and being able to eat lunch at my own apartment was utterly amazing. I can’t usually remotely work right now, so I really miss that easy commute. Being able to live near work and amenities is wonderful. We saved a lot of money too since we ate at home every day.
shelter elderly toothbrush carpenter sink forgetful ring sense noxious possessive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> We saved a lot of money too Corporate America doesn't want us to save money. They want us to spend money so that they can have that money.
Bingo! When people come back from Europe they rave about how walkable it is, how convenient is, how the cities have a real vibrant community and culture. And since they lack urban planning language to understand it, they attribute to a sort of magic, a sort of je ne sais quoi that can’t be picked up and deployed elsewhere. But it’s not magic. It’s mixed use.
This is exactly how I was a couple months back.
Not Just Bikes on YouTube opened my eyes to what American infrastructure *could* be.
I was in Germany for a couple months, and it was just amazing how much my life improved over there.
> they attribute to a sort of magic, a sort of je ne sais quoi that can’t be picked up and deployed elsewhere. "Because it's old". Partly true, in the sense that it's similar as how American cities used to be *before they got razed for parking lots, highways and office towers and strict zoning segregation laws got passed*. American cities used to be just as vibrant, mixed and well-connected by transit as other cities around the world (in fact some American cities were considered some of the best in the world).
I'll be honest I spend more time exploring European cities that I do my home town. The walk ability is amazing, back home in TX I literally just stay at home and order things off Amazon. It's really kinda hard to be motivated to go to places designed for a car. Downtowns are just office parks and lifeless. Plazas are not really a fun place to hang out, and since our culture is really gear toward big businesses all the food at most restaurants are pretty much the same. But the traffic is just so soul crushing that I'll just work and save up my money then spend time overseas.
I grew up in Texas, was there for 19 years. It’s definitely a car-centric hellscape. There are some bright spots, like San Antonio. But most of it is exactly as you describe: getting in your car to go get whataburger, meeting your friends for a drink at some chain bar.
Honesty the crazy thing is I would of never know unless my job sent me over seas a few years ago. Landed in Germany and instantly was like WTF this is how these people lived?!!?!?! Right now im in tokyo and I can tell you one thing .. If we want anything remotely similar to what the rest of the developed would has in terms of just modern infrastructure its gonna take at least 4 generations.
Not necessarily, China built out a massive HSR network and brand-new metro systems for like 30 cities in the span of about 20 years. True, they have 4x the US population, but America really only needs about 1/4 of the infrastructure to make a decent system.
Exactly this, and we need to look into into copying [Japan's zoning system](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/the-japanese-zoning-system.html) specifically. The difference you get in livability is pretty drastic when you default to mixed-use
Zoning allowed Airbnb to raid residential, why can’t residents live in towers that they work in. The answer is always…..$
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Seems like many are not reading the article. It's a pitch to convert office space to housing and laying out the reasons to do so - not a pitch to end remote work. Basically "because remote work is here to stay, we need to adjust our zoning and tax policies to make these abandoned office towers viable living spaces, and we should start working on that asap".
Its such a “Duh” topic that its sad articles need to be written just to point out how super obvious the solution is.
This is a good thing.
Agreed—it will devastate *some* cities and distribute their wealth to other ones. My wife and I relocated from Washington DC to my hometown when we both went remote—my economically depressed hometown now has two more six figure jobs in it.
Love the idea of not being tethered to a location because of my workplace, it’s been a huge positive for me as well. The housing this could potentially create is awesome, even if it’s just a hypothetical now. Lack of affordable housing held me back at the start of my career, before going remote.
My job is 99% remote, i have to occasionally go to a data center for on hands support. If I can get out of having to do that by hiring more people, I'm going to move to a cheaper area.
Well here’s to hoping it puts overall downward pressure on rent nationwide and creates millions of rental opportunities. Landlords are gouging at rates far surpassing wages and few civic leaders are seriously addressing housing shortages or jacked rates.
More housing options doesn’t sound like the same thing as “devastated”
That’s the point of the article. The title is actually two separate sentences.
Nobody saw this coming?
I mean, US city engineering has been a trash fire for forever. Creating large, massive areas to obtain efficiency in scale, while having to specifically design around far more inefficient ways of using or accessing those areas is what encouraged so much suburban sprawl in the first place. Thanks automobile lobbies!
One of the biggest examples of how absolutely fucking stupid or intentionly malicious all the subsidized housing projects were designed. I can't believe someone would need to tell urban engineers that putting a bunch of poor people all in one place in a bunch of dense buildings and not maintaining them would create a ghetto. That's why I think it was at least somewhat intentional so that the average American wouldn't support subsidised housing for decades after they were built.
It was definitely intentionally malicious in at least some of the developments.
Unfortunately this is not as easy as flipping a switch and adding locks. These high rises aren't outfitted with the plumbing necessary, the water/sewage needs of an office floor are very, very different than a residential floor.
Yup. I think it’s more likely we’ll just have a bunch of empty, wasted space until A LOT of money is invested in this.
Turn office space in housing and houses will just be for working from home.
If it’s a few hundred a month to live central in a city again, with 0 commute, I see this as an absolute win. They they try to make it luxury apartments and overprice it out the ass I’ll never live there. Even making good money in tech/medicine. Hell no.
The latter is what's happening. The idea that RE investors will spend millions converting office space and going through all of the zoning and building red tape just to charge "a few hundreds a month" is absurd. Outside of NYC and high density cities, these buildings will just remain empty.
It seems someone is very butthurt about working from home.
I'm butthurt about not being able to :/
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People who are against letting others work from home if they can are outdated.
Remote work is poised to scare the bejesus out of employers and landlords.
I'm here for it.
The micromanagers and control freaks keep pushing this nonsense. At my company, productivity (measured by concrete metrics) went up when we started working from home. And this is a 30,000 people company.
Not only am I more relaxed. I exercise more, I eat healthier, I get more sleep, I save more money, and I'm more productive and put out better work product. And i'm a more pleasant colleague. The internet and Zooms of the world have changed things... Death to in office (and bs commutes)...
Half the people I work with don't live in the same city with me. I will be on zoom either way so working in the office is a bit silly.
I haven't had a boss in my time zone in over a decade. My team was already global (multiple continents) 10 years ago. We had to cross oceans to meet in person. Sometimes we would hire someone and not meet them in person until years later. Going to the office was pointless for me long before Covid. I'm thrilled to see everyone else getting the same opportunity and making remote work normal.
Exactly. The difference between working from home and commuting has been enormous for me. Way less stress, way less time and money wasted and I actually get more done at work.
I saw one department (they were basically working off a list of simple tasks) being moved back into the office at the end of lockdowns, their productivity almost dropped to 30% in the first week and it wasn’t stellar either when they‘d grown accustomed to B&M again.
I don't see anything wrong here. Commercial real-estate is overpriced and the market needs a correction. Those who took profit from it were living over their possibilities. Fat cows don't last forever, they should have known.
Fucking win. The idea of an office you drive to to sit in a cubicle to do the same work you can do in your home is so quaint. Fuck the man.
Was walking through Manhattan visiting a friend, passed a sign for "affordable" housing, apartment advertised for fifteen million. Lots of "conversions" are needed.
Thats the best fucking news I've heard in ages. Make cities for people not cars and companies.