It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic.
From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*.
There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions.
These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.
> a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc.
That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely:
Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services?
> every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments
Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).
It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem
That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
> NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century.
Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates.
> Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
What makes you say that has changed from the past?
Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
You can look up the answers to some of the questions. Do you have any factual basis for your claims?
> Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.
here you go. Unfortunately city agencies seems very good at not tracking and making this info very public. So you have to go find it from 3rd party nonprofits
The relevant bits:
>>>Only 37 percent rate public safety in their neighborhood as excellent or good, down from 50 % in 2017 [1] (yikes!)
>>> In fact, New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the DAY now as they felt on the subway at NIGHT in 2017 [1]
In fact, this source confirms my entire premise, that while murder has been down vs the horrendous stats of 20 years ago, nonmurder felonies and other crimes have spiked only recently. These 2 now EXCEED the stats of horrendous stats of 20 years ago. [2]
The problem is it’s hard to get anything other than anecdata when discussing things that don’t come into macro statistics. I live in a large Democrat-dominated city, I have very deep connections and roots all around, and casual mentions of petty crime are common. I have observed a lot of shoplifting and I’m only in retail stores so often. There is certainly an attitude that some types of crime just occur and no one will stop it.
> In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”
> Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.
You still don't have any data supporting your claims that crime is high. All you say is that it's not always reported - which is well known and has been for generations, if not forever.
What shows that it's high? It's circular to say that the unknown numbers are higher, not lower, because you think crime is high.
> a large Democrat-dominated city
What does the political party have to do with it, unless this really is about your politics? Republican areas of the country have higher crime rates, last I checked. If you think there's a correlation between party and crime rate, feel free to show us.
> (Pew data)
It's great to have some data, thanks. I don't know that anything has changed, however, though I imagine numbers were different during the pandemic and immediately after.
You have actual data - why kill your argument by exaggerating it?
The stats you posted are about perception, not actual events. If people read other people constantly badgering them about safety, of course they will worry about it.
When you say "shoplifting," do you mean someone has simply walked/run out of the store without paying for something? If so, I don't really understand what that has to do with safety. Same with plenty of other crimes, such as someone jumping a subway turnstile, graffiti, etc. These things surely lead to a lower quality of life and I'd prefer that they didn't happen, but I personally wouldn't say that they make a city dangerous.
This is controversial. Some studies have found that petty crime like this leads to more crime. Or stated differently if you solve these little crimes there is less big crime as well. However this is very controversial and those studies have been criticized - I am not able to figure out the truth here, feel free to do your own research.
A policing tactic back in the 1990s was 'Broken Windows', which did what you said - fix the little stuff and the big issues will improve. It was controversial, as you say, because at least in some places the strategy became 'oppress black and brown males' so the white people can feel safe.
I've read one news story on an analysis of Broken Windows (so not a lot of data) said that outcomes were not correlated with that strategy. Crime went down everywhere, whether or not they used Broken Windows.
Mayors and police chiefs, etc. are called geniuses or fools in strong correlation with national trends, especially the economy. Lots of 1990s mayors, etc. were geniuses as the economy boomed and crime came down nationwide.
Focusing the discussion around "safety" doesn't make sense to me. It's just as reasonable to focus around "order" or "lawfulness" or "cleanliness" or anything else.
I never felt unsafe in LA, but I sure as hell felt disgusted when someone spit on us, and a bunch of other negative emotions when you saw the worst of the homeless population or drug use or anything else.
Was I unsafe ? No, but was it clearly disorderly? Yep.
> What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street?
In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.
Saying NYC being one of the safest places to be in the country is why LLMs will never be accurate. People will just say anything no matter how irrational it is.
Want to back that up with some data? NYC is half the per capita murder rate of the US. What swath of places do you think are safer such that "one of the safest places" for NYC is inaccurate? On >250k population list, NYC is #20/100 safest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.
This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well.
As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.
As less persecutions end up in convictions, and as accusations of bias can mean the end of a police officer career, there's also a more lax attitude from the police force.
Crime becomes less risky and more rewarding, what drives crime force recruitment up, the culture becomes more and more accepting, and petty criminals over time graduate to more serious crimes. Substance abuse, violence, it all just adds to the culture.
Soon you'll start noticing that there areas of the city where police presence is virtually inexistent, and the people who live on those places realize that involving the police could bring unpleasant consequences. Those liberated areas are for all practical purposes, outside the reach of the State.
Soon, murders start going unnoticed, fights against rival gangs lead to deaths, but unless the bodies are found, nobody is going to involve the police. People simply cease to exist and disappear, no records.
Politicians, prosecutors and police chiefs soon realize the political advantage of not digging too much into reality and promoting the lie that the official statistics, utterly corrupted by the incomplete data collection, are trustworthy and represent the reality.
Terminally political people and journalists, that are nowadays basically propaganda officers, start gaslighting everyone that dares to say otherwise. You can't feel safe in the subway, but you are either crazy or a simpleton if you don't believe NYC is one of the safest places in the world, look at the data!
If you want to throw out the data because it doesn’t suit your bias, fine, ultimately it’s your safety on the line based on your decision, so you better hope you’re correctly evaluating.
But I also think it’s odd that you think NYC is underreporting murders and not going after serious crimes, when if you go into rural areas, you’ll find many that are a few Sheriffs stretched thin over hundreds of miles, and infinite more potential for “murders going unnoticed.”
Lol man. I live now in northern Europe. You can show me any stupid number you want, I am not an idiot. I know NYC, it is a fucking hell hole.
Averages, per-capita, even if we could trust the data, and we definitely can't because NY government is a cesspool of corruption means absolutely nothing, because every one who lives in the real world knows that violence is not uniformly distributed. You can lie to yourself as much as you want, it is your choice, but I've seen this movie before, that's how things start, and them there's a moment when even people like you can't deny it anymore, but it will only get there exactly because of folks like you that prefer to live in the bizarre illusion that being a member of your ideological bubble makes you a high status person.
People like you make me remember the old soviet joke when they get astounded with the faith Americans had in their media, because the soviets at least were able to recognize propaganda for what it is.
Poor psychoanalyzing since I’m more often surrounded by the types who would knee jerk agree with you. I’m more likely (and do) to get shit on for dare questioning how truly awful big cities are, so I’d love some of that “high status” you think I’m feeling. Still, I’d rather poke hills in peoples’ poor kneejerk understanding of the world with investigating what the data tells us is actually going on, regardless of whether the opinion is popular. And it’s not, evidenced by the many people here, even on a more urban intellectual environment.
> This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well. As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.
'Everyone knows' is a group of people repeating something to each other enough that they believe it must be true. Those are the things that most need skepticism, an objective factual basis. Look at your comment - there is no factual basis for any of the claims. Some is conspiracy - if they disagree, they are gaslighting, incompetent, etc.
Objective facts are our only salvation from our own delusions - which we're all subject to. There is factual basis to say that NYC is very safe, but it's not conclusive. That doesn't support baseless claims. If you have an alternative claim, there's not reason to believe it without factual support.
Almost everyone you're talking to here lives in the developed world, and it doesn't seem like they 'know' the same thing.
The statement that "NYC is one of the safest places in the country" and the relevance of per capita crime rates are two different discussions. When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.
Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.
There’s a psychological reason (rational or not) people equate cities with violence, and it’s this same “absolute level of safety”. When you could live in a town of 5000 where 1 person gets murdered every year, it’s very different than scaling those numbers up by 1,000. Realistically, 999 of those murders will be of/by people you will barely interact with, whereas in a small town, it’s all but guaranteed that you will know both the murderer and the victim (and they will know each other).
That said, I understand the desire to frame crime in the absolute. Either you’re the 1 guy who gets unlucky and experiences a crime in your small town, or there are 999 people like you in the big city). Crime is a problem of scale, and a bigger scale freaks people out even if the coefficients are the same.
It is not just the scale issue. It is also that for your personal safety, only statistics on killings of random strangers matters.
Majority of murders are among people who know each other. You personal risk is all about who your partner is, who your friends are, how much aggressive your uncle is. A guy you never met that is just about to murder his wife has nothing to do with your personal risk.
Who your partner and friends are can very much be influenced by your location. Your own safety is in some ways influenced by the overall people around you, not just stats on random killings.
I lived in NYC for 20 years, people who live there too long develop stockholm syndrome excusing the shit that goes on on a daily basis. Every new yorker experiences it given enough time.
The common saying is that when a 'transplant' moves and starts questioning the filfth, noise, qol issues and minor crime they are told to go back to Ohio.
I used to be that person , then I realized that living in an environment where you excuse this behavior as normal... is not normal.
So you can spread your message of "statistically safe" as much as you want but everyone knows that new yorkers put up with a different amount of s*t than most.
Why do all the arguments for NY being dangerous, etc. lack an objective basis (except one person's)? I think it's because it's fabricated.
Lots of NYers love living there, obviously - they are willing to pay far more for the privilege (another objective fact). You dismissing their preferences is just one person's baseless speculation.
By that logic, somewhere with no people would be the safest area. Good factoid to know but for most people, it's not useful to live with no others around.
As any person who lives in a city knows, more people means more safety. It's the empty, dark street - especially non-residential - that you want to avoid. Also, the NYPD is always nearby if that suits you (I've never needed them personally).
> When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.
Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.
My argument is clear about how ridiculous absolute values of crime pertain to how safe it is for someone. That you instead want to nitpick the exact # of murders in NYC (when I just winged a 3 per 100k at 8m population) is indicative that you can't refute it and your original assertion is incorrect.
If anything, the real # in 2023 of 386 only further proves my point. That it's ridiculous to assert even that many more murders is less safe than Stockton, CA.
Safety is about "am I more or less likely to have something happen to me" and no one is thinking that means moving to the tiniest country of 2,000 people where only 10 murders happened in the entire country last year.
Apologies, I wasn't aware you were making up numbers. That isn't useful, or helpful in conversation in my opinion, but clearly you feel strongly that's a reasonable thing to do.
I contend it is significantly safer in the majority of cities in the US than New York City.
I didn't realize you need the exact #'s to understand an argument. Now that I've provided NYC's, and Stockton's is 34 in 2019, does it make any difference? No.
Your conclusion is without any evidence and is in fact, wrong, based on the crime metrics we can easily compare.
It's quite uncanny that it's the people who most fear crime, think they're going to something like "stay the hell away from crime infested NYC" and proceed to move somewhere where they're more likely to be affected by crime.
Affected and “victim of” are different. Higher population densities mean more people are affected by a murder (more witnesses, more people disrupted by the crime scene, more people that go ‘I go to that train stop every day, that could have been me’).
Rational or not, proximity of crime freaks some people out much more than probability of being the victim.
Yes there is a good case to be made for density causing crime to be more in your periphery while not targeting you. But I assume we’re talking about actual physical safety, not the perception of safety.
Thats not how statistics work. The average number of crimes per person is going to be the same so the crime per capita is the same as the amount of crime an person should expect to experience on average.
You may be thinking of a median or mode, which can differ based on the shape of the distribution curve.
Sorry but moving the goalpost from “one of the safest places to be in the country” to “one of the safest big cities in the country” is not fair game. The US has over 19,000 cities and you discarded all but 91 of them.
I've not discarded them, it's just the the largest portion of data for where people in the US are, which NYC has an objectively good per capita murder rate compared to where most people live in the US. If we want to get data for the US as a whole, please point me in the direction where we can find the safety level of the median person, besides NYC having a 3.3 murder per capita rate while the US is ~6.5. Idk what % it is, but a large portion of Americans live in those lists of 100k+ cities.
When you have so many people per square mile, it slightly skews the metrics. The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
> you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
People are just reaching for possible straws. Do you have any factual basis to say that? We can make up anything and put the word 'might' or 'maybe' in front of them.
I've spent lots of time in NYC and other dense, major cities, and I think I've seen one crime ($20 stolen). The interstate highway is more threatening, with the aggressive drivers.
Really, go to NYC. Look at the millions of people walking around without a care, going about their days.
I think it's gotten polarized enough around here that it's not going to be helpful to defend my statement, but here goes: I was just saying something that must surely be true... If you measure crime by the person, in a dense place you're more likely to be near a crime when it happens than a place with more crime per person, but much less people per space.
To me, this sounds like the rate of unreported crimes would be lower in dense areas, making them even safer than they appear in the statistics.
You are correct that if the average number of observers per crime is higher, that could indeed make a place feel comparatively more dangerous since the while the liklihood of being a victim is lower, the liklihood of seeing a victim is higher. However, I would posit that a lot more goes into feelings of safety and we haven't seen any data on how large this effect size might be.
> If you measure crime by the person, in a dense place you're more likely to be near a crime when it happens than a place with more crime per person, but much less people per space.
Yes, agreed (of course). I'm not sure what that says about the original statement.
> The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
First, it seems like we are really shifting the goalposts. Being victimized by crime is a lot different than witnessing it, though the latter isn't pleasant, of course.
How much does it matter? In a place that dense, you see a lot more of everything. For people there, it's a feature and not a bug. That's why people pay so much to live there.
Is witnessing a crime so bad? I suppose something traumatizing would be, but I think NYers are used to seeing 'everything, all the time', and they would not be traumatized by most crime. Murder? I think that would leave a mark, depending on what you saw, but that's very rare. Shoplifting? Public intoxication? A carjacking would be alarming, I suppose, speaking for myself.
I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy!
I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?
There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!
You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!
I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.
And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.
I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.
Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).
I suppose it is on one hand based on media, NYC is the big bad city, it's the mafia city, if you have a crime based movie it will be in NY, LA, or maybe Chicago as the most popular places.
Another thing might be that it feels unsafe due to social isolation maybe, for people who are actually there, but that is just a supposition.
I think it's reasonable that they feel it's less safe. I often feel things that I know do not exactly correspond to statistical reality, one should just try to be aware of where the feelings slightly diverge and not go arguing that what one feels is objective reality.
It's kind of a running joke here in NYC how we'll watch some movie depicting the city as a dystopian wasteland, then we walk outside into tree-lined streets, coffee shops, overflowing sidewalk cafes, and people generally living and enjoying their lives.
That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.
This applies equally to the outer boroughs. Poorer neighborhoods (in any borough) are scrappier, of course, than the rich areas. But they're just as full of life and vibrancy.
I really take your point on the media projection. It's relentless. And it really keeps an outdated image alive, especially in the minds of people who don't live here and can't directly contrast with their own eyes.
> That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.
I agree, but I'm not that old and that's the image of New York City I grew up with because it was then true.
It takes more than a generation to overcome that kind of impression. I'm pretty confident that if you asked New Yorkers my parents' age what the South is like you'd get a lot of answers that were unpleasantly accurate in 1965. This is particularly true when a lot of political polarization is based on region and urbanization.
Most crime is marginal even inside cities "infested" with crime. If you are personally affected (statistically improbable), the city/place is already unlivable and it'll go down quickly like some places in South America.
I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.
Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.
> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.
> There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.
The campaign about Western cities is not from China, but from Western conservatives. Look at Trump and the GOP (and now the Democrat governor of NY!) repeatedly calling for the national guard or military to be sent into cities.
The problem with numbers as they are only as good as the source numbers and questions you ask..
If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).
Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.
One solution to this is to collect three different kinds of statistics.
One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.
The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.
The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.
The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.
It is NOW. You missed out when NYC almost went bankrupt in the 1970's and was a hellscape through the 1980's... They did a great job bringing it back from the brink, but it was very very bad.
Of course there is, however murder is the best simple proxy because it's the most severe and least likely to be disputed that it's fudged. So it stands in well for quick internet comments. When you get into a multi-pronged analysis of 5+ crime metrics, and how you factor each into "safety" and what metric and places go more underreported, etc. well, you have yourself a research paper...
You're going to need to elaborate beyond "let's say". What you wrote is basically just a conspiracy theory. In fact crime statistics reporting is an extremely mature field with well-understood methods and comparable data, and nothing one particular administration can do it really going to impact things very much. Basically, if this was such a great trick for Adams to have invented, why didn't it occur to Bloomberg or Giuliani or Koch?
In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.
Your citation for an "understood phenomenon" is a position paper from a lobby group. That's the point: the facts don't match the policy you want, so in our post-reality world the job of lobbyists is to invent arguments to allow people to ignore facts. As folks elsewhere in the thread point out: murder rates don't work with this analysis (you can't "underreport" a body) and murder rates show the same effects.
Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?
Here is another source [1] that draws the conclusion that "approximately half of crimes are not reported to the police".
Here is yet another source from the U.S. Department of Justice [2]: "During the period from 2006 to 2010, 52% of all violent victimizations, or an annual average of 3,382,200 violent victimizations, were not reported to the police.".
Realistically speaking it is hard to measure unreported crimes given that by definition they are - after all - unreported. And yet the fact that some data is not collected or it is hard to collect, doesn't mean that the data doesn't exist.
> Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this?
I could be asking you the same question, based on your stance.
What if there was some place with no crime? No wait, then they would discourage it because there would be no need to fund the police and what the hell does the Mayor do all day.
If it was a large enough city, you could convincingly argue that there being no crime means crime prevention is massively overfunded and/or excessive in nature.
Combine that the culture of not snitching, and you get wildly bad crime data, fueling all sorts of silly internet arguments, bad politics and bad social science.
I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments.
Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice".
The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.
Citation needed on all of that. It's not just retail closing up in NYC -- the rent is ludicrous, and no one wants to start renting at a lowe rate lest their appraisal goes down and their mortgage lender/city coffers start putting the pressure on the landlord
Corporate real estate is a different beast. Residential real estate and corporate real estate do not mirror each other in the market. One can be in high demand while the other has excess supply.
Residential landlords are also much different than dealing with corp real estate owners. The terms, length of lease, laws and many other factors are completely different.
Perhaps we need to encourage (via taxes?) convertible buildings that can either be corporate or residential with relative ease, similar to how in smaller towns you often have dentists and lawyers operating out of obviously converted houses.
This is primarily a building code issue for residential vs commercial construction.
Office generally try to maximize square footage, this tends to result in floor plans that are very awkward to adopt into residential use, primarily because the building code virtually everywhere has some sort of "natural light"/window requirement.
This means that purpose built residential high rises tend to be "skinnier" to have more windows per sq. ft of floor space. Not to mention the very expensive changes (hvac, plumbing, etc.) required to support residential use.
If the building code was changed so that the requirements for office and residential use buildings were closer then it would make future buildings more easily convertible between those use cases. It does not solve the problem of the existing buildings however..
I don't get how any of that is relevant when my claim is that the corporate rental rates is also too high and the financing for rentals shares the same concerns w.r.t rentable price regardless if it's residential or corporate landlords
Fwiw it's almost exclusively international developers running the conversions in Kansas City. I think Greystar might be the one with the largest footprint there.
Takes a few seconds. All major cities (even Fargo ND) have seen increased theft. This is unsurprising due to the economies in western countries (which is all i can speak to).
I believe that some retailer special interest group put out some numbers that did not support any real increase in shoplifting/shrinkage. Initially they made a claim otherwise but they ended up backpedaling. Oddly, the numbers around shrinkage from self-checkout seems to be persistent though.
I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like that crime is happening less on paper?
In the UK crime statistics are collected from a survey of people's experiences of crime that's completely independent from police/arrest records. Does the US not do this?
But the point is that would not tell us anything about the relative frequency of the crime when it's not prosecuted!
You are saying, effectively, that we know that smoke always comes from fire simply because when you light a fire, you see smoke.
You can't argue that policing deters crime simply because when there is policing, crimes are prosecuted. That makes a lot of bad assumptions about the nature of crime itself that I don't think a single criminologist would follow you on.
> You can't argue that policing deters crime simply because when there is policing, crimes are prosecuted.
Why couldn't you? Defund the police = less prosecutions, less policing = more criminals...
Why wouldn't someone argue easily proven points that more police = more safety (Yes, some corruption does exist but it's not like that corruption goes away when the police do.)
"...from that perspective, investing in more police officers to save lives provides a pretty good bang for the buck. Adding more police, they find, also reduces other serious crimes, like robbery, rape, and aggravated assault."
I don't see why this necessarily follows. Unless, e.g., the only reason you are not killing your neighbor is because your pretty sure you will be prosecuted for it.
To view the whole world as just itching to commit crimes as soon as they can get away with it is just already buying into the presuppositions of policing the original gp was interrogating.
Like its fine I guess if you want to have this pseudo-Hobbesian outlook to it all, but you can't pretend its something logical/rational. Because it simply isn't!
I know causation isn't correlation but all you have to do is look around and see that given more opportunities? people take advantage of others.
AKA: more "criminals".
"the only reason you're not killing your neighbor" thats a bit extreme but... yes.
"you can't pretend it's logical rational" Of course I can.
One, it is logical/rational - it's the same reason why people smoke less when you raise taxes on cigs. If it costs more? people will do it less. That cost might be taxes... or possible repercussions. Public shunning. Jailtime. Death penalty. You can pick your topic and if we look at push back against "bad" then the result is less bad.
Two, who says humans are logical/rational? We aren't that far out of the animal stage... we can pretend that we aren't driven by base emotions and the like. Humans are more often than not illogical and irrational. Making stupid decisions. IE: Gambling, drinking, drugs, cheating, etc.
So it's absolute defensible that more police (or, at a baser level, more consequences and more visibility of those consequences for bad decisions) results in less crime (or bad decisions). It's also absolutely defensible that humans are not rational/logical.
Most of the time. Certain crimes (eg public intoxication) often have an arrest followed by letting the person go when they’ve sobered up, so no official prosecution but not no arrest.
Yeah, but protestors are frequently arrested and charged with completely made up charges. It is just a tactic how to discouraged protests. The cops doing arrests know about it, prosecutors know about it, defense layers knows about it and protesters know about it.
It has nothing to do with deterring crimes or crime rates, it is just politics.
The police where I live are transparently useless. Someone tried to steal my car at bart. Even my auto insurance didn't bother asking for a police report while paying out $3k for a repair to the door. Everyone involved understands it's an utter waste of time and not a thing will happen.
Twenty years ago, in a small college town, my car was broken into and the stereo stolen. I called the police out and the cop said, “okay, what do you want me to do about it?”
Well, I don’t know. What should be done about this? I guess I thought my report might be tabulated, that perhaps a pawn shop or two might be called. My wife and I were living financial-aid-reimbursement-check to MGIB check to work-study check at the time. We got the one of the cheapest car stereos we could find, but it still hurt. We had just gotten it installed literally that day, and the next morning it was gone.
I’m sorry to have wasted your time, officer. There’s probably a kid with a one-hitter that you could arrest on your way back to the station.
That's very interesting. It would explain why the "high level" takes such as papers and articles keep saying crime is plummeting but all the anecdotal accounts are "crime is getting worse and worse and nobody does anything about it".
But that's been true for generations. It wouldn't explain some perceived surge now.
What does explain it is what explains many other things that don't match facts, about the economy, vaccines, climate change, election legitimacy, Obama's birthplace, etc. Whatever the conservative message machine focuses on, generally a large portion of the population believes.
Not so easy. A lot of crime in zones with high density of immigration goes unreported because immigrants are illegal. A lot of crime in shit neighborhoods goes unreported because of "code of silence" mentality.
That doesn't answer the parent's point. It doesn't really matter whether it's upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony or not if it doesn't get prosecuted in the first place.
misdemeanors are more likely to be thrown out or never taken to court because of court/jail overcrowding. Felonies are likely to get prosecuted if you have a culprit. Misdemeanors... end up getting asked is this trip really necessary?
> Felonies are likely to get prosecuted if you have a culprit
Maybe, maybe not. From a very brief Google search, in 2022, 8% of felonies were not prosecuted, and of the remaining more than half of felony charges were downgraded by prosecutors to misdemeanors in NYC.
8% not being prosecuted would seem to mean that felonies are likely to get prosecuted, felonies getting downgraded to misdemeanors generally happens in the criminal proceedings process as part of a plea bargain and I would consider that as being "prosecuted" which covers a larger area than just being taken to trial.
It's a combination... DAs wont prosecute misdemeanors - which businesses won't then report... and DAs are also not prosecuting those higher crimes as well - which also means businesses won't report.
Part me of wonders... others are saying "all that theft is employee driven" as a talking point (yeah, I've got my own talking points too. Se'la'vie lol) - how much of it is old data - data from a decade ago before the soft on crime, defund the police crowd took over - and how much of it is employees not reporting crimes that waste everyones time in the current climate.
It'll be interesting to see if we get real data over the years and can look back at this failed experiment on "justice" objectively enough to show what an utter disaster it currently is.
So instead of it being $1000... it's $950... that's like me calling an item $10 when in reality its 9.99. The point still stands.
"Texas" Texas also has stand your ground laws and castle defense... so it's a lot easier to stop criminals. IE: Florida where a sheriff said "We have free gun classes so you can help save tax payers money when defending your property by not missing" (paraphrased).
The point still stands: CA took a $50 limit, bumped it up to $950, elects DAs that don't prosecute misdeamenors - and, as such, store owners don't report crimes that won't lead to prosecutions. Why waste the time? - so when you look at it from a statistical perspective? Oh look... crime numbers are down.
Never mind that more stuff is being stole on a more consistent basis... the lack of higher level crimes (Fewer felonies) and the lack of prosecutions (Why prosecute a misdemeanor as a DA... and why report stuff to police that won't get prosecuted as a business owner...) look better on paper but businesses and people are more unsafe than ever.
A Walgreens or CVS closed near my GF's flat in NYC. She's within 10 blocks of Central Park. The chain said it was due to too much shrinkage. It's been discussed on WNYC as well, tho those experts claimed most shrinkage is employee related.
I live closer to PHL and hear similar claims / rumours.
Self-reporting on these reasons from the business itself is basically useless. No one's fact checking their claims nor do they provide evidence when making these kinds of social-narrative driven claims like "taxes are too high!" or "too much theft!". Businesses, including chains, fail all the time and the owners/managers have an inherent incentive to try and deflect any blame on environmental factors so they are looked at more favourably by corporate.
True. But why not just say, "Rent is too high"? At least then, perhaps, the lease can be renegotiated. Or even, "we plan on opening a larger store" and just never do it.
I certainly agree there might be spin, but then why choose theft?
You can call it a "narrative", but then I get to shrink the "food desert" term into just a part of some narrative too, since I've seen personally how theft drives out grocers in MN here. One after another "underperforming".
The progressive D.A.'s and A.G.'s, who own this project of mass downward departure from normal sentencing, do not expect things to change overnight by taking pressure off (mainly) the poor and the young.
But in 5-10 years if crime is worse and society more stratified, their project can be called a failure.
I'm going to fight tooth and nail when someone calls NYC unsafe, but it's going to be very difficult to argue against the store closings because of theft (as at least one factor).
I've personally witnessed three blatant thefts in the last few years from my local Duane Reade (that closed down in April). Every time the clerks are like "pretty sure that was the same guy from yesterday". It's never violent or scary. It's just like watching a fight between homeless people in a subway station -- you look, think that's odd, and move on.
I suspect it's not all shrinkage though. I imagine continued trends where we buy more and more things via online retailers like Amazon and the growth of online/by mail pharmacies has contributed too. CVS/Duane Reade are still opening new locations too, so it can't be all that bad.
> I'm going to fight tooth and nail when someone calls NYC unsafe
Not the main thing I've been arguing, per-se but the fact that the national guard is being deployed into places like the subway seems to bolster the notion that NY isn't doing well.
"According to the NYPD, there were 570 reports of felony assault on trains or in stations in 2023, that's the highest number in more than 20 years and a 53% jump from pre-pandemic levels."
January crime was up 50% compared to 2023 - and yes, that's a 2 year snapshot. Statistics is the game of picking the two points and saying "SEE! I'M RIGHT!"
but the main points is that violent crime is up.
The main point of my comments is more general crime - its hard to say crime is down when recent decisions to raise the bar to charge people has literally made fewer things crimes so "crime is down" can be true from a "statistically reported" perspective while actual numbers are up.
Look at California that raised the level of misdemeanor to $950... so felonies are down? Gee... I wonder why? Even though objectively more crime is happening, less is getting reported because people won't waste their time on "misdemeanors" that won't get charged by soft on crime DA. Crimes down? True... but also a lie.
Crime is running rampant as criminality is now, for all intents, legal if you're under a threshold. (or, if you're of the right demographics to "atone for past injustice")
"stop and frisk" 1990 called and wants its talking point back.
S&F has been "unconstitutional" for over a decade - and that's not counting Defund The Police shenannery, open border policies and stuff like "bail reform".
IE: Illegal immigrants attacking police and getting released without bail.
True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was more or less static downtown through all of that. Though, nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more) remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year history or so of that city, one could say office space was largely unused.
Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".
Think of an old brick building with several stories and a window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with windows spanning multiple floors.
The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge cost.
The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building not purposed for this is challenging (where does the "contaminated" air go out?).
It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.
i think the best way to describe it is to consider what an office in these types of buildings looks like.
consider a detective office in a movie from like the '50s. the office is small, primary illumination is from large, openable windows, maybe there's a front section for a secretary. that happens to be pretty more or less around the ideal size for an apartment as well, though for more bedrooms you probably need to merge adjacent offices.
now consider the office block from Office Space. it's extremely large and dark in the middle. it is so large that there is no way you could possibly get natural light into the middle easily. in Office Space that's kind of the point, the darkness and required artificial lighting makes it super depressing and a dystopian commentary on the modern economy. who would want to live in an interior like that?
Well.. yeah when you put that way I see what you mean. No those types of buildings wouldn't be very amenable, I suppose I had assumed we would already exclude those from consideration.
Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.
the problem now is that in 2024, these Office-Space style buildings are getting into their 40s and 50s, and with the glut of new class A office space being made available in more contemporary bright, airy open styles, that's the kind of building that is going to be a struggle to fill with new office tenants or convert to residential.
Nobody wants to work there, yet lots of people work there since they need money.
And it's the employer who chooses the location.
Of course top talent does not need to work in a crappy company, but that's the theory.
Also empty space = less trafic.
And you can get food delivered. If you can afford it.
People are foreced to work in crappy open plan offices all the time.
Not easier, maybe slightly more economical. One could easily turn the less-desirable inner spaces into common areas or something else economically-sustainable, like public storage, co-working spaces, etc.
This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say as a European how crazy it is to keep finding out the US is so large that even some third-tier city I ± never heard of is big enough to have a downtown full of outright skyscrapers[0]! It reminds me of reading about some minor Indian city and then looking it up in Wikipedia and seeing it has a population in the millions.
A city doesn't need to be big to have skyscrapers. It's just a policy choice, like how wide roads are or public transportation. Many Americans are surprised that small European towns are big enough to justify a train station.
Small American towns used to have train stations, even in the middle of nowhere. They enabled factories and other industrial work. Then the trains would go away, and the factories would die, or it would happen the other way around. Then teenagers would go out to abandoned tressels to have bonfires and drink near the scenic decay every weekend, until the cops showed up to scatter them running into the woods.
California and Indiana both had a population of about 2.7 million in 1916. Indiana had a dense rail network and California didn't. Indiana is only ~5x smaller than California.
This is what the rail network looked like in 1916:
Thinking of "too small for a station", whenever I passed through Dovey Junction I was only able to see one building, on the other side of a river, and it appears that there is literally no road or path to that building.
"junction" is pulling the heavy weight here. The station is right before the tracks branch, so the purpose of the station is probably to let riders transfer from service on the one branch to service on the other.
Well Europe and the EU both have larger populations than the US and quite a bit higher population densities (even though the continent of Europe is slightly larger) so wouldn't you expect Europe to have more skyscrapers than the US?
A fairly common US city plan seems to be: small ultra-high-density core with a bunch of skyscrapers, fading almost immediately to rather low-density, and then shortly afterwards to virtually no-density. European cities tend to be generally higher-density (no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris), but with fewer skyscrapers.
> no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris
This seems off. If you consult this map and chart [0] Paris seems to do something very similar to NYC with regard to density. There's the city of Paris proper (75 on the map) which has a slightly higher population than Manhattan but a much lower density (52k/sq mi in Paris vs 74k). Then as soon as you get out of that 40 sq mi (about the size of the Bronx) into the the petite couronne density drops to well below that of any one of the five boroughs besides Staten Island.
So, yeah, if you take an area the size of a single NYC borough in the Paris region that's drawn specifically around the densest population zone then it has a higher density than NYC taken as a whole. But if you compare most-dense-zone to most-dense-zone then NYC is denser by a fairly wide margin, and if you compare areas that are of a similar size rather than only including the City of Paris proper then NYC wins again.
It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.
> It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.
I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC, so comparisons between NYC boroughs (which are each almost as big as the city of Paris) and Paris' surrounding departments are clearly favorable for NYC.
If you compare cities of similar size, i.e. Paris with Los Angeles (which is still bigger, both city and metro area), then the european capital is significantly ahead in density (and I did not cherry pick Los Angeles specifically, it's the same for Chicago, Houston, etc.), and the difference is very significant: Even the core of those US cities (excepting NYC) is less dense than the 3 inner Parisian suburb departments (!!).
> I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC
Isn't that just another way of saying that they drew the city boundaries differently than they did in NYC? If you extend the boundaries out to the 814 km^2 of Greater Paris, that gives it a fairly similar population to NYC (7m compared to 8.8m) with a very similar area (814 km^2 to 778 km^2).
My point is that the conditions at those boundaries are not comparable: Greater Paris is pretty much a whole metropolitan area, which is "non-urban"-ish at the boundaries. If you take a slice out of NYC with the same population/area, then that is still only a part of a (bigger than Greater Paris) metro area of like 20M people...
Europe just seems to go for much more mid-rise high-density neighborhoods compared to the US with skyscrapers in the city center and then sprawling suburbs that are so low-density you can barely get out of them without a car.
They are also dangerous and that’s also a big reason why nobody hangs out there after a certain time. European downtowns are family friendly and actually nice and safe, unlike the US.
I think the comment about Kansas City shows that the big reason nobody hangs out there is that nobody actually lives there. And so since after 18:00 everybody these huge, built-up areas are suddenly available, you create excellent conditions for things that'll keep people from going there.
The 'secret' of European downtowns is that they are not uninhabited.
This is why you hear about a housing affordability problem in Washington DC despite a quick search showing dozens of recent sales for 2-3 bedroom apartments for under $100,000.
There never was a housing shortage, there’s just a shortage of people willing to live in vibrant urban neighborhoods.
is that a euphemism? DC used to lead the nation in murder rate for decades -- the DC basketball team used to be the Washington Bullets, which stopped being ironic and funny after a couple years. There are still DC neighborhoods where the police won't send cops without 3+ cars of backup.
DC has gotten much better but is still like #12 or #13 in the US, and it's bad areas are still very bad. The rest of the Fed-Gov areas in the city are locked down hard, but no one lives there, and nearby areas Georgetown or Tenleytown are expensive. Source: from the area, went to AU, had to do background investigations on dudes in SE DC.
Third place is a specific term for those who have not been familiarized:
"In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place")."
If all that existed in those now dead downtown neighbourhoods were offices then of course they’d be dead with a significant disruption to work. What’s missing are still third places, and probably first places too.
East of the Mississippi river has similar population densities to Europe (still less, but not by much). However US population density is skewed downward by the large amount nearly uninhabited land in "the west" and Alaska.
Many of those cities are compromised of enormously large areas though. Chongqing is larger than the country of Austria and has a population density of 390 people per square km. London has a population density of 15000 people per square km.
There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.
It sounds like you may be comparing the population density of a large, diluted area and not the downtown areas alone.
It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings.
Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.
Europe seems to do a better job at constructing buildings that can be used in various use cases, though. So when the office use case goes away, making the building into apartments is fairly simple.
This is unlike the office towers mentioned in the article, which don’t really lend themselves naturally to being apartments.
The history of Kansas City is very interesting - it was well poised to be the size of Chicago until rail travel became less popular. So during the 20's & 30's it was a major landmark for Art Deco architecture.
Yeah, the US is big. Movies and TV shows usually only show like 2 or 3 cities which makes everything seem like it's close together. For instance I live on the east coast, and I've never been to LA California, which might seem weird but it's over 2500 miles away. Different regions have basically different sub-cultures that emerge because we're so spread out.
I was under the impression that Kansas City was still in a bit of a dire situation as far as crime is concerned[1], so I appreciate you highlighting some positive developments.
In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular traffic.
I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run. People generally devalue thing that are free in my experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it must be for poor people, not me).
Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it.
Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes.
I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad.
I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.
Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a small one. It will be interesting to continue following their experiment.
If that were the case, the theory is that the issues would not have increased after they went fare free. The increase may have been due to something else, though. Experimentation is probably the only way we will truly find out.
The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new developments (a good thing). This was the first public transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent sized event it became the smartest way to park and not overpay.
They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.
Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.
KC was smartin choosing lines that had actual demand, so the lines remained popular: Go to the other side of the state, and see what happened in the streetcar in St Louis. It's only running because running it seasonally at a loss is cheaper than paying back the federal government for their share of the project. No amount of pretty colors fix the fact that nobody needs to travel that route, and nowhere near enough people live near the stops
Effective commercialization of station space is indeed a positive development, but you don't really need to privatize railways to get that (even without going into the whole "privatizing in Japan is not the same as here", since large private companies and local authorities coordinate strongly in ways that we wouldn't consider acceptable in the West). Very dense European cities, like London and Paris, are getting more and more of that type of development too; and even in Tokyo, not all stations have a commercial development on top. It's mostly a function of density levels, which are sky-high in Japan.
One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West, where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and in their remuneration levels.
I agree with your general points and I don't know what worked in Japan would work in the USA. I'm pretty confident what works in Europe will probably not work in the USA either though :(
> That means facilities are spotless
I can assure you no stations are remotely spotless. In fact I'm surprised some of them aren't considered fire hazards. Ueno, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Akihabara, all have extremely messy areas. Newer stations appear clean but that's only because they're new AFAICT. Just commenting because I don't want people to ge the wrong impression. They might be cleaner than SF, NYC, Paris on average but they're not as clean as Stockholm or Singapore
Of the stations that you mention, I find Akihabara to be actually quite nice and reasonably well organized (for Japanese standards).
But I agree with you that the others are a mess. Shibuya and Ueno look like half the stations are falling apart, and Shinjuku is some kind of non-euclidean labyrinth, every time I go there, I get lost. If there is even a fire there, the death toll is going to be immense.
Akihabara, there are new and old parts of the station. The new part (lower level) are relatively clean. The old parts (upper level, Sobu-sen) are less clean (unless they've been renewed - I haven't been up in a 2-3 years)
I think that you and the OP have different notions of spotless.
In Japan, at major train stations I find the bathrooms reasonably clean and good to use. In New York, it smells of poop and pee because the odds are that someone probably publicly urinated, or some pipe somewhere in the subway tunnel is leaking sewage.
That's generally true of all bathrooms in the USA vs Japan. I think I've seen 1 disgusting bathroom in Japan a restaurant/mall/store in the more 15+ years I've spent there where as in the USA it's like 1 of 5 that's disgusting. In other words, it's not unique to train stations.
That said, the bathrooms between JR Shinjuku and Marunouchi-line used to smell pretty rancid. I haven't used them recently though.
Oh, I agree it's not unique of train stations. The Japanese overstaff pretty much anything - it's likely part of the reason for their massive public debt, but it helps maintaining infrastructure to good standards. It's the opposite attitude we see in most of the Western world, where public resources are cut to the bone until (and often even after) things rot and fall apart.
JR East covers not only metropolitan train services in Tokyo but also a wider real estate/retail portfolio and all of eastern Honshu, with about 46k total employees.
My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13 years I've been going.
Honestly the places that did it successfully didn’t try to make transit cheap, they didn’t subsidize cars. Requiring amenities like parking by law seems to be working at cross purposes to spending money on transit. For desirable real estate it seems the only way to make affordable housing it to take away expensive upgrades. I think we can agree that safety is not a luxury, but parking spots, private laundry, private kitchens, even private bathrooms, these are things that many people live without every day. I remember some of those times in my life fondly even. Making it illegal by force of law to live like that seems… counterproductive to me, if our stated goal is affordable housing.
> transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA
That’s the objective reality, in most of the USA.
The only way they’ll attract people that aren’t forced to use it, for financial reasons, is to remove the piss and puke from the floor, the stains of the same composition from the seats (although rock hard plastic is getting popular to compensate), and prevent, not remove, the guy with obvious drug and mental health issues, and now has his dick out, from boarding.
If you want something to be attractive for the general population, it has to, literally, be attractive, or at least not repulsive. Otherwise, the shorter commutes and clean interior that personal transport gives is the obvious choice, as it currently, measurably, is.
But, that can’t happen, because anything nice will be destroyed/vandalized, because anyone can board. The goal of not discriminating against anything or anyone is a choice that society has made (probably the correct one) that makes public transport literal shit.
I don’t miss the few times I used it, then noped back into my car.
I suspect charging a nominal but non zero fee e.g $2 on peak $1 off peak per trip probably ends up with the best of both worlds. Free ends up with some negative side effects
A couple dollars pre day is nothing to most people but multiply by thousands of riders every day and it is a lot of money. There is no transit system in the world that couldn't be better with more funding so take that money.
You of course need a plan for the poor but that should be a minority.
I can't find the sources anymore but where I live, PT was never free, but there was no physical restriction to access it.
So by not paying your ticket/subscription, you only had to hope for not seeing controllers who could fine you.
A few years ago, they said that too many people were not actually paying for usage, so they decided to put physical restrictions (fare gates?).
Journalists decided to investigate and they did the math.
Basically they came up with something like : once you take everything into account (building and maintaining physical machines for buying fares and controlling access, managing everything around billing, enforcing fares with human controllers...), on every euro spent by a user, more than 60% went to the costs related to the fare system itself. Less than 40% was actual money that the company could use to improve the UX.
And obviously, the overall UX decreased because they also raised the fares.
So we're paying more, there's still lots of bad people in the stations/subway, but now we have to go through a metal gate to prove that we have paid the fare and do the same to exit PT.
Which, obviously, creates virtual congestion at peak hours, because the human flow is slowed and the width to pass is much narrower than it used to be.
Meanwhile, in another city, they went the other way : free PT.
I have yet to hear of some regular users seeing it as the decrease in UX.
You're describing issues that all have a core of, "Snooty (upper) middle-class temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who won't let themselves have nice things because The Poors." Here is a short and simple plan for fixing the issue: get over yourselves.
I feel like this might be a double edged sword in the long run.
A lot of public transit where I live (Mumbai) is subsidized, which means its not profitable to run the way it is run.
That was a very popular decision at the time (help mobility of the poor), but it ends up with massive underdevelopment as the needs expand. There’s no money for private companies to invest in the infra and it waits on election cycles to push investment.
I feel that if it was actually profitable to build new trains / metros / etc it would have happened much quicker.
Yeah crime post-pandemic there is still a major problem, although typically concentrated in poor neighborhoods as opposed to downtown. When I first moved there, the inner city was considered really dangerous and I saw such rapid gentrification that you'd see people walking their dogs in the middle night without incident just within 8 months or so. So it just sorta.. moved.
I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.
I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite a while, many apartments were once factories or something else 100 years ago.
I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.
Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.
Yes I'm thinking of buildings probably 1980/90s onwards. We are tearing them down and rebuilding apartments in some cases I'm aware of. That seems like a real shame to be honest.
I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.
To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda pleasant place.
Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.
The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.
Redevelopment of derelict downtowns has been outsourced to massive real estate corporations who have created a successful formula that they can pretty much copycat over and over.
Kansas City's Power & Light district, which you mention, was built by the Cordish Companies, which cut and paste in Louisville and Baltimore, among others.
Certainly there are benefits of revitalizing urban spaces but the fact that it is entirely engineered, has little room for local entrepreneurs, and most financial benefits flow to a small cadre of real estate giants, is also somewhat concerning.
It feels hard to avoid. You need scale to make the project viable: a single small redevelopment in a run down area is unappealing, but if you do the whole block, that's a different story.
There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.
In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time.
Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space.
It is a policy problem. There was an OddLots podcast on the topic of NYC CRE to Resi conversions a while ago.
One issue is theres longstanding zoning laws on conversions that limit what can be converted based on year of construction. The year doesn't automatically move forward annually so a new law has to be passed to adjust it otherwise it remains stuck at 1965 or something like that.
One problem with doing this - as seen in Manchester in the UK, is that the new residents will demand that their neighbouring bars and clubs be closed to cut down on noise and disturbance. It has the effect of gutting a city centre of it's culture and nightlife.
Same thing is happening in London's Soho. New 'luxury flats' blocks are being built and life gets sucked out of the place through gentrification, but I guess Soho Estates is happy. Another victim of this short-term developer greed is London's Denmark Street where Jimmy, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the rest of the world's rock and pop royalty used to hang out, record, and shop for gear. That area could have been turned into London's mini Nashville with recording studios and clubs, but instead we got the Outernet monstrosity. Most of the old shops are gone, the only ones surviving are maybe three guitar shops. There are a couple of new ones, Roland and Korg, but the staff are so incompetent that I don't see them lasting.
Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.
There's a massive demographic increase in single person households.
If you're single you have to meet people you can't just retreat into your suburbia castle with your family.
Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.
I know people who live nearish the KC downtown area, and live in an old elementary school that was converted into an apartment complex. A bit weird architecturally, but they seem to like it.
Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing. The depth and shape of the building matters quite a bit. A lot of office buildings are very deep and would result in a lot of rooms/space without windows or access to natural light.
The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit.
But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?
> Conventional wisdom is that only certain office buildings can be converted to housing.
If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.
I once toured a building that had been converted from an old warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned the space directly across the hallway. They were very large, and people had transformed them into offices, arcades, workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have been.
You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.
>If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.
Maybe, but you can't throw out the building codes. A warehouse, certainly, can be retrofit. But office towers? Almost certainly not.
Elevators are not sized for residential; electrical service not sized for residential loads (dishwasher/dryer/microwaves/ovens); HVAC not sized for residential heat loads (same as above); metering requirements means the existing electrical rooms are not large enough (they are never large enough); plumbing and sewer are not sized for residential.
It goes on and on. Even if you got the building for free, you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again. It's not entirely clear whether it is or is not.
It can be done if you make huge, expansive apartments, which has to be read as "really expensive". There aren't that many really rich people who can drop 5 figures per month for an apartment.
I've never seen a high-rise office elevator bank smaller than a residential one.
Dishwashers are negligible; microwaves are a souped-up gaming PC and run a lot less; ovens and dryers are more of a concern, but as with HVAC, I'd like proof that an office's draw (with all its attendant equipment) is more than the what you'd have with a dozen (tops) condos. Plumbing and sewer are the only legitimate concerns I've seen yet. And yet: will, way.
>you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again
These numbers never include externalities like the carbon and refuse footprint of demolishing and rebuilding. How many million metric tons of steel and concrete do we need to dispose of if this becomes a de-facto national policy?
Most non-mechanical equipment electric loads in standard office buildings are receptacles. This is small. Per NEC, I think it's counted as 180VA/receptacle. So the 208/120V panels are sized for that.
Also, the lighting is probably 277V in an office. This precludes any owner-installed fixtures, the super has to do all of that. Moving it to 120V means more transformers, for which there isn't room without sacrificing rentable space.
HVAC, assuming CW/HW to VAV boxes, has the pumps sized for the number. Which may be less or more in residential, depending. It also precludes (or at least makes very difficult) the ability to meter HVAC usage per apartment.
The point isn't that is is impossible. It's just expensive. That expense has to be borne by somebody.
I vote for the construction companies to be held liable. That way any future office buildings they construct will be more easily converted to housing.
Tearing down good buildings and building new is wasteful and causes more pollution then repurposing. These for profit corporations externalized these costs upon us repressing.
Planning for those who plan to use planned obsolescence to generate a profit.
Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.
In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.
What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.
Interestingly, he's not all that far off in a sense. Many commercial buildings used to be built to be multi-functional. The old school classic 3-story brick, with a shop on the bottom, maybe a workshop above, maybe residential (plus rentable space) on the third.
But once you choose high-density, you don't get much in the way of do-overs. For much the same reason that once you choose thinness as a positive metric for laptops, you lose a lot of flexibility.
Yes it's all about tradeoffs, but I think it's useful to accept (e.g.) in the laptop case that having thin and portable devices isn't necessarily a bad thing and it's likely that a good chunk of consumers will want that even if we create economic incentives and policies to encourage recycling and reuse.
I personally don't think it'd be bad to have a larger chunk of buildings be more versatile but you'd lose some of the economic efficiencies (agglomeration effects and positive spillovers) from the concentration of firms in business districts etc.
In every scenario you win some and lose some, and it's not always clear to me we should go all in on any of the bets.
HVAC has to account for the BTUs produced by all equipment. An office might have one or two refrigerators per floor, maybe a dishwasher. Apartments will have one in every apartment. Ditto for ovens, dryers. Even computers and TVs.
Offices have a lot more people per m² all of them using computer equipment continuously for 7hrs/day so in my experience they tend to have considerably higher cooling loads. I know from experience that a typical high rise office building in London, UK will have no heating requirement for most of the year; it is in cooling mode most of the time.
You have to account for peak usage, not median. At 7AM and 6PM, everybody has their stove or ovens going to make dinner, plus the washing machines and dryers.
Building codes and practices are different for commercial and residential for good reasons.
They also contain lot less people. Average person generates 70-100W at rest. Add that to what ever screens, computers, extra lighting. And it is not that big difference in load.
In any modern building there should be raceways where new electric can be run vertically and then through hallow drywall walls. Very easy. The big problem will be plumbing. While you can get wall mounted toilets, I don’t think you can avoid having to trench each shower drain into the existing, likely concrete, floor.
it's also possible for offices to be doing poorly but also still make more money than as a residential property. while vacancy rates are high, those vacancies are spread around, so some people are still renting in these office buildings. if you want to redevelop them you have to get the existing tenants out.
That sounds great! The thing I love most about living in a house is the prospect of “engineering space” - places to do carpentry, electronics, home maintenance etc.
Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.
Would a space in the center of an office tower really have enough air ventilation for ordinary hobby-maker work like sanding, soldering, painting, resin molding, grinding, etc?
Considering what some people do with basement spaces and almost no ventilation at all, I'm going to hazard a guess that a windowless interior room is not a dealbreaker.
Plus the fact that the commercial space that's being converted was often used for this sort of thing already anyway. Yes, this is mostly office space, but many engineering firms have an electronics lab or small prototyping workshop in their "office" space.
If you read the OP you will see that in one example that’s exactly what they do do - in order to reclaim the space occupied by HVAC and turn into more apartments!
You jest, but if someone makes a decent enough full-spectrum daylight simulator, and then get a stamp of approval from FDA (or whichever the authority is relevant here), they stand to make a lot of money by enabling residential use of windowless spaces.
(Cue arguments on how dystopian this is. But hey, if the daylight simulator was to-spec, it wouldn't be the worst of things.)
The danger is that people will be tempted to use the unlivable space as living space, and then you get some massive fire that kills a bunch, and then reactionary laws that prohibit everything uselessly.
NYC has a few places like this, but typically it is living space above the ground floor, and you can rent "dont-ask-dont-tell" space in the basement. Most people use it for storage, but I've seen a few workshops in them.
I’ve seen similar, except the building had > 10 ft ceilings for some reason (it had been a factory). The owners built a ~ 9ft “building” that was missing a wall (and ceilings) inside the space. That was where the kitchen and bedrooms were. Light came in through the open wall in the kitchen, and from where the drop ceiling in the bedroom would have been. The rest of the factory floor was hobby / office / entertaining space.
Note that things such as arcades may need additional power demands that the area isn't sized for (fire risk). Workshops may need added ventilation and woodsheds would require additional power too. A theater type area could have issues with fire codes and occupancy.
I read your description and thought of a building in Chicago, but there must be a few like this. The one I was thinking of is in River North along the river.
It’s a beautiful building, with roomy communal spaces and vintage timber all over. I probably would have bought there if I weren’t too noise sensitive for timber floors.
Yes west of Chinatown. Cermak I think. Spice warehouse in days of old IIRC. Was used for raves decade+ ago. Place is a trip. I camped on top of it once when I was homeless.
I've forgotten of that place for years. Truly magical. Thank you for the memory. I almost shake recalling it.
It sounds like maybe 165 N canal if my recollection from when I was condo shopping is correct (it was a bit above my price range, but I seriously envied the large storage space). The condo I ended up buying (a converted office building in the east loop) has a similar hall of storage rooms but they are much much smaller and not practical for anything other than storage.
Sorry, it’s been a long time and I don’t remember. I know that we were looking for places that were within a 15-20 minute walk from the Loop offices where we worked.
>If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.
In St Louis, the largest building in the state, which is 1.4M square feet and 44 stories, recently sold for $3.5M. It sat empty for several years despite being offered basically for free. The new owners have not announced plans for it.
It's a pretty pure test of your claim. I guess we'll see what happens.
Old warehouses were built very differently compared to modern office buildings. Specifically, office buildings are made to the load requirements of office spaces, with their symbolic walls and furniture. You may have trouble putting even bathtub into an apartment converted from an office.
Damn, that sounds like an ideal place to live for me. I live in an apartment but also play music. I would love to be able to set up a drum kit (and maybe store an e-bike) and still be in my walkable area for cheap ish rent.
As someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on blackout curtains (and sticking electrical tape on every LED in the house), I'd be happy to buy an apartment where few of the rooms have natural light. I know bedrooms have to have windows so the fire department can pull you out of a burning building while you're asleep or whatever, but personally, I am not a fan of the noise and light most of the time.
I just think there is so much space that you can use in a residential setting without natural light. Your movie room. Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy it at a discount if it were offered to me.
It's less about natural light than ventilation. If whatever ventilation systems the building uses breaks down, interior rooms without opening windows are a liability.
One of the newest and tallest skyscrapers in Seattle, Rainier Square, not only has openable windows throughout but on some high floors has massive sliding windows that open up to a sheer drop (widely recognized as a bit of a potential safety risk).
> While giving a tour of the Toronto-Dominion Centre to a group of articling students, he attempted to demonstrate the strength of the structure's window glass by slamming himself into a window. He had apparently performed this stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced harmlessly off the glass. After one attempt which saw the glass hold up, Hoy tried once more. In this instance, the force of Hoy slamming into the window removed the window from its frame, causing the entire intact window and Hoy to fall from the building.
I saw a video of a daredevil who decided to film himself hanging on to the roof of a skyscraper with his fingertips. He did a couple of pullups, but exhausted himself and could not pull himself up back onto the roof. Finally, he let go.
Pulling oneself up onto something by one's fingertips takes a lot of strength. Should have tried that beforehand. (It looks easy in the movies, but those stunt people are very fit.)
Those stunt people also use special effects to make it look like they are on a building but really a padded floor is just below their feet. If you only can see their upper body it may be they are standing on a stool or someone is pushing them up (though in this case I would expect they are actually pulling themselves up with brute strength). They also do this stunt a dozen times and then in editing choose the cut that looks best.
whoa, this links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths, and there are some crazy deaths. one that stands out is Kurt Gödel: "The Austrian-American logician and mathematician developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned and refused to eat food prepared by anyone but his wife. When she became ill and was hospitalized, he starved to death."
I would think that the people density that an office space is built for is higher than residential density. Even a studio apt is more individual space than many shared office layouts.
Most high rise office buildings use steam (older bldgs) or heat strip for heating. If there's an electrical problem, all fans blowing the treated air stop. They use chilled water flowing through air handling units for A/C. (in winter, these same units supply the heated air, the flow of chill water is usually halted.)
In a system like this, if the AHU stops for any reason, the whole floor is effected. Since chillers and associated equipment are very expensive, I would imagine the maintenance fees would be uncomfortable. (get it? Sorry.)
I think maybe spread out across all owners it might be palatable. You have to figure, if your heating/AC conks out, you're into that for 20k. So that's a pretty decent number when/if you're talking about multiple flats on one floor, right?
Every big building I ever lived in in Chicago had this system but for residential use. I am sure it is expensive when it breaks, but it is also amortized across hundreds of units. I'd go so far as to say it's "industry standard" so isn't going to be much of an obstacle for converting office buildings to residential spaces.
(In NYC, we all agreed to believe that there is no such thing as residential air conditioning that is not in the form of a window unit, however.)
When it works, sure. You don't generally sleep for extended periods in an office though, so would probably notice it getting stuffy. Sleeping or bedridden people might not notice or be able to easily do something about it though if oxygen levels drop.
Sleeping produces less co2 than working. Therefore, if you don't feel it getting stuffy (without opening windows) at work time, then sleep time should be no issue. Besides, offices have to deal with more people than residential buildings. And air quality depends on the number of people (and what they do).
The difference when sleeping compared to resting or low activity work is that sleeping is about 60%-65% of resting from what I've found.[1] I'm not sure why we should assume that shouldn't be a problem. We could be close to a low oxygen situation prior to sleep, and then start sleeping and have hours for it to get worse.
We don't generally design safety regulations around "should" and averages, but instead when edge cases happen, as the magnitude of the outcome is very important to take into consideration. I'm not sure what you're trying to express with your comment.
It's simple: if working for 8 hours with many people is not a problem for the ventilation system, then sleeping with less (residential) people should be no issue at all.
This seems wrong... are people opening windows on the 60th floor? What about those buildings whose design precludes easy retrofitting to openable windows? I'm not being rhetorical, I'd like answers.
I figured looking up tall residential building and seeing what they do would be a good indicator of norms. The tallest Residential building in New York is Central Park Tower at 98 above ground floors:
The residential stories have casement windows, within the curtain wall, that can swing up to 4 inches (100 mm) outward. In addition, some condominium units have motorized windows at least seven feet (2.1 m) above the floor.[1]
The condominiums start on the 32nd floor, according to the same article.
If building can't easily be retrofitted to allow openable windows, then I would assume they either can't be used for residential or they could try to get some sort of exemption if they can prove it's safe. I'm mostly going off what I know about building codes and what I've read previously on the topic when it's posted and it's delved into what the actual problems are in converting to residential.
Opening windows on high floors is great -- you don't need screens cause most urban insects stay much closer to ground level. (Although admittedly I haven't opened any windows higher than 20)
My understanding is you have to fix this when changing to residential. There are building codes requires to be met for residential housing, and normally that includes openable window space for both ventilation and egress in an emergency. Maybe they'll make an exception for egress, but I doubt they will for ventilation.
Exactly why I would expect them to make an exception for it. Unless the local laws have been changed specifically to allow for that situation, I doubt the laws started out that way though. I don't imagine the people designing building codes for residential living put a lot of thought to extremely tall buildings initially.
This very much depends on where you are. I had an apartment in a high-rise building in Austin TX a few years ago that did not have openable windows of any kind (I also did not realise this until after signing the lease, which was unfortunate). I assume the building met code.
I don’t understand building codes. It’s not safe for people to sleep there, but it’s safe to work there for eight to twelve hours a day? Something is off.
I mean… yes? I don't see what's so confusing. In an office building, if anything goes wrong, an alarm goes off and everyone leaves, and insurance pays for damages. In a residential building, you have people sleeping, sick, possessions they might not be willing to leave behind, babies, pets… It makes sense for the safety requirements to be different.
I'm not sure if you're being lax in your terminology or whether you are misinterpreting my point.
The problem is not that every window needs to open, it's that some windows need to open. In the building codes I've seen in the past for residential homes, that was expressed as a percentage of square feet of the room or entire building.
So, are you saying there are plenty of tall condos where no windows in a specific dwelling open, or that they have some windows that don't open? If they have no windows that don't open, do you mind mentioning where, as I'd be interested in what the solution was to the problem of needing to allow for passive ventilation.
Thanks, that's fairly clear and concise, at least for the locations you noted.
It does appear to be that in New York it might be required though[1], so it's possibly still a problem depending on area. I'm not going to act like I'm an expert on reading building codes or that one in general though, so I could be misinterpreting it. SF had what clearly seemed like a mechanical ventilation exception in it when I just looked, but SF and Manhattan are the only things I looked up to compare to see if I could find whether it seemed fairly universally allowed or not.
Which is why buildings higher than fire trucks can reach have different fire codes. Stairways are often a separate building within the building with a firewall between them - if the building starts on fire you can get down one of the stairs.
I think the probability of that is lower than my probability of death on my motorcycle. So they're probably going to be fine. Everything is fine until it's not.
The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to be 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.
That's easily remedied - axes and specialized entry tools can be used for exiting.
Yeah, if it doesn't meet the legal definition of a bedroom, it can't be listed as one. That's partially why there are so few interior rooms - lower property value vs if it was a bedroom (but mainly consumer demand for windows).
It really depends on the drywall. If it's 3/4 inch soundproof drywall over sound insulation with services like water, electrical, and sewage you can break it but now you have to navigate the services. And many people aren't going to shove themselves through studs on 16" centers.
Those services are in very limited places in interior walls. You may have an electrical line running to the outlets, but you be extremely unlikely to hit sewer or water. If you do, the gap ti the left or right is extremely unlikely to also have the same services.
If they're worried about not fitting through 16" studs (let alone this entire scenario), then they should select a room with two doors. If you can't fit through studs, I find it hard to believe they're fitting through most windows (generally a more awkward position with limited dimensions too).
Yes. Seattle is earthquake country, and I want to be able to get out if the doors are blocked or jammed from earthquake or fire. It's a fireman's axe, as that job is what they're designed for. I also keep a fire extinguisher in the bedroom.
If you've ever handled a fire axe, you'd realize it makes a lousy weapon. It has a long handle, with a heavy head. The idea is it can build up a lot of momentum to crash through things like doors and walls.
But the long handle makes it difficult to swing in a melee, and slow to swing, and once the swing starts it will be very hard to change its arc. Hence, your target can easily sidestep it. I suppose it would be good against plate armor, but not many villains wear plate armor these days. You also have to be careful with a fire axe to not chop your foot if you miss. I don't think I've ever seen a war axe/hatchet/tomahawk anywhere near that size.
For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.
>For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.
Wielding a baseball bat, you have to constantly worry about the opponent's getting his hands on the bat and wrestling it away from you: a screwdriver is better.
"For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal."
Eh, not really. That's still a lot of unbalanced mass and potentially excessive length. There's a reason batons and other strike weapons aren't made like bats.
A gun is a terrible close quarters weapon. A gun is so good at long range that you can typically ensure you never get into a close quarters fight, but once it becomes close quarters you want something else. (with a gun you do have to keep the muzzle pointed away from you - but one hit with the bat will damage the barrel enough that it isn't safe to fire)
> I know bedrooms have to have windows so the fire department can pull you out of a burning building while you're asleep or whatever
When we were looking for a new house we toured one that had a bit of remodeling done. What was done was the back patio was enclosed to turn it into a room. The detail was that there was an existing bedroom that had a window onto the patio.
The solution, which I have to assume passed code, was simply to retain the bedroom window, even though it did not lead to the outdoors. So this house had an interior window.
I think in most places that bedrooms just need two means of egress plus possibly a specific ventilation requirement, which is most commonly met via a door plus a window, but could be met by two doors to two different legal means of egress (and an HRV/ERV if ventilation is required under locally adopted code).
> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?
Yes, here's an article with great visualizations on how developers are coring out the center of repurposed office buildings in order to create columns of natural light (and how, in certain jurisdictions, this lost square footage can then be reclaimed via new construction stacked on top of the building): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
Well of course one can even have whole floor for single family. It is a small matter of how much one can pay for the space of that size that need to be hashed out.
> But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?
What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings and skylights.
I was thinking instead you could remove a long rectangle from the middle of each floor, so that the two remaining sides could have windows facing each other.
If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the middle block pushed out on each level.
In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so of the potential floorspace.
There's a good "odd lots" podcast about this[1]. There's another of their podcasts about how apartment zoning rules make it hard to make "family" apartments[2]. Basically you need two egress points, windows that can open, windows in kitches and bedrooms. All of these are directly in contradiction to modern office buildings with open floor plans, fixed windows, shared mechanical systems.
So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space.
An un or under-rented building has some potential value based on various hand-wavy factors. Things may get better next year and you've only lost a year's of potential revenue. You may be able to hand the burning bag of dog crap to some star-eyed dreamer.
Taking out a loan, applying for permits, etc, locks in the loss. You get to tell your bank the asset they've got for collateral is worth a lot less, but hey you've got a plan that involves chopping the building apart so there are big holes in it so you can rent it to residents instead of commercial leases.
Hey it's a brand new market and a wonderful opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
In Germany they're called "hofs" and incredibly common. Many apartments only have one view out over the hof, facing someone else's apartment 5m away. You get used to it.
That’s an interesting idea. If there’s enough room between floors already, I wonder if you could squeeze in some horizontal periscope skylights without removing floors. Just need to occasionally send someone out to scrub the exterior window like in that show Silo
Not all of the building needs to be direct residential; for example, I could definitely imagine some light retail, a computer lab, a tool library, an indoor track, a gym, et cetera.
In Tokyo you have buildings with levels of retail, restaurants, bars, karaoke, etc. I'm sure Seoul and probably other dense cities have this too. Korea Town in mid-town Manhattan also does this, but that's just one little block. I'm really surprised there's not more of this in Manhattan actually. I'm sure it exists more than I'm aware of, but it should be more prevalent in a city that dense.
The problem here is zoning laws, in most places in the US you can't build businesses right next to residential. We would have to change our zoning laws and do something similar to a 5 by 1 (bottom floor is retail, top floors are residential)
The same in Europe, zoning laws are a bitch and they're basically existing for bribes. Many local city counsellors get paid off to change the zoning laws and thus raise the price of the briber's property.
At least in Berlin this doesn't seem to be true. While zoning laws are a bitch and exist for bribes, none of them prohibit intermixing offices with residential or retail with residential, and such buildings are very common.
Yeah true here in Spain it's very mixed too. It's better like that I think because this way the neighborhood doesn't become deserted at night and also we can go to a local restaurant for lunch.
The 'zoning' here is more building by building rather than neighborhood based.
But I mean the same kind of administrative issue holds back conversions here. Most Office buildings here would be ideal. They're not that big because here it's illegal to offer office space without plenty of daylight.
Right, these laws absolutely should change. I would hope that any municipality facing a problem like this, with lots of empty office space, would also recognize the fact that their zoning rules are a bad idea.
Sometimes offices are empty because banks that own them dictate the lease rates and building managers can't adjust price to fit the market rate. I sometimes think city councils and codes get too much heat on this issue and the 800lb finance gorilla in the room is politely ignored.
I used to live in 100+ year old warehouse building converted to residential. It has even less windows than a glass paned high rise. They used the interior space exactly like this. One floor had a gym. Some floors converted the space to storage units available to the residents. Other floors had other shared common space. All ideas as you probably took 5s to come up with. It's really not a hard problem to solve that any developer worth their salt would not be able to solve.
I saw a picture of one of those giant suburban developments in Texas... like thousands of cookie cutter homes over a huge area. But I'm sure you could provide the same amount of living space and better amenities in a focused apartment building. There should be schools and restaurants and shops etc spread out over every floor. Or maybe like a 90's shopping mall with a 30 story apartment building on top. It just makes sense to me.
This is how it works in Japan. I thought it was quite nice when I visited. You just enter the elevator at the ground floor, and every button has a store name next to it. You get some pretty nice views when dining on the 15th floor of a building in Akihabara.
If the building's dense enough then you have a built-in set of regular customers. Especially if, say, you're a restaurant in the middle of a building with super-tiny kitchens in the apartments, like the ones described in the link.
Sharing a wall with a neighbor is something I happily to pay a premium to avoid. Hearing a neighbor beat her son or listening to top volume manufactured R&B beats at 2AM when I needed to be at work at 530AM are not fond memories. It was powerful motivation to take my career more seriously.
Why buy a nice suburban home and invest in your future when you could instead live in a windowless former office building with hundreds of other families?
A home is a really silly investment (i know that goes against the prevailing "wisdom"). the economic opportunities of living in an urban area coupled with investing in things that are actually economically productive are more likely to benefit you in the future. does your suburb's tax base cover the infrastructure maintenance costs? is this why suburban folks are so sensitive to their property values, because any little thing could send the development into a tail spin? sounds like a pretty dodgy investment to me.
A home is considered the new hotness, and if you don't own one, you're not financially smart for some reason. At least this is according to the hivemind at /r/personalfinance. Meanwhile, there are very legitimate reasons not to own a property.
Methinks people buying right before COVID at rock bottom interest rates has clouded the judgement of many. This is not a sure fire road to success right now, I can tell you that much.
most investment assets can be financially leveraged. IMO suburb home ownership provides more of an illusion of financial security and leverage than the real thing. being able to buy a house, condo, or apartment in an urban area is a much more significant marker of financial success than doing the same in a heavily subsidized development with limited economic productivity.
I think it's financially smart to attempt to no longer be at the behest of a landlord's whim to raise rent. Home ownership is not even close to being out of reach for young people (like myself), but living in or near a city center absolutely is.
And I agree with you. I've made this point on an earlier thread here on HN... but the prices and interest that goes along with it is absolutely insane in places that are remotely desireable (see Phoenix, AZ) and I'd need to be effectively house poor, when the same place I looked at five years ago I could have afforded with my salary at the time no problem.
Such is the dreaded once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe like COVID and the money printing scam that happened after that that destroyed so much value in money. But others that got in before me at historically low interest and reasonable asset prices just tell me I need to buck up and work harder. I bet you they would be shitting bricks if they were in my shoes. It's like a nightmare I haven't been able to wake up from. :(
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think that people would generally be a lot happier if they can find comfort in living a relatively simple life. I know most people can't just uproot themselves instantly, but in my personal opinion, living somewhere more rural is 100% worth it in every single way. Lower cost of living, closer local communities (you GOTTA give a friendly wave when you drive past a stranger on a backroad, them's the rules!), more sunshine, fresh air, wide open fields...
The job market isn't as competitive as the Bay Area, but if you can remote work and/or get a local non-tech job making a livable wage (there's so many lifted trucks out here, these guys make money), it almost doesn't matter what you do for work, it pays the bills and you can spend time with family after that. You have a house, you have a car, you have a family, maybe you even have a camper like many others around you, and you go camping at the lake every month in the summer! Truly, rural living can actually be an idyllic paradise if you do it right!
Rural is a completely different beast and the limited infrastructure makes for a more sustainable setup, the issue is that the low density makes it unobtainable for most people. I also love the countryside, but it doesn't work as a general rule. It would work better if developments were designed with an urban mindset, but in the US you end up with unsustainable suburban sprawl that never aligns with the tax base.
I really appreciate your perspective. We as a society really are too fixated on keeping up with the Jonses, and it really sucks from a mental health standpoint I think. The city life can exacerbate this feeling considerably too.
I don't own, because I think it's best for my children if they grow up in this city, and the city happens to be one where unless you hit the jackpot (literal or parental) or decide not to save for retirement, you aren't owning.
And yet... I wish we could. I know it's not a great investment monetarily, but there are the fringe benefits, like being able to make the place my own or knowing that I'm not going to have to relocate the kids in a couple of years with a few months' notice because the landlord decides he wants the unit back.
Strong towns is not a good source. They keep stating "facts" that don't check out. Lanes do not need to be replaced every 20 years. On the busy streets they do, but on the not busy streets they can last a lot longer. They make lots of other mistakes like that in other analysis. Pipes last 60-100 years in the ground, but Strong Towns likes to calculate as if they need to be replaced every 20.
One thing I do know is that all these people talk about this "nice place for yourself" instead of "being packed in like sardines" but then the people in the former also will talk about some loneliness epidemic etc etc.
I grew up in various times in a rural place with all sorts of animals where it was just me and my brother for miles and I also grew up later in a city where there were so many kids we would self-organize into all sorts of games and sports.
Personally, the rural place was great and the urban place was great, but the suburban place has neither adventure nor abundance of playmates. Hundreds of nearby families is the absolute dream!
I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but the "with hundreds of other families" is the thing that makes college so fun, cities feel alive, etc. Some people are into that - and suburban life is increasingly feeling the absence of it.
Having a shared space where there are enough families around that there will be 10 kids guaranteed on the playground is nicer in a lot of ways than having 3 kids try to decide whose spacious yard is the gathering spot today.
The problem is never the suburban home - which are indeed often perfectly nice. The problem is the suburb itself, and the kind of people it attracts - those who think that walkability isn't a concern, and are content with driving to eat at a chain restaurant in a strip mall by the highway. Sounds like a properly crappy life to me. I for one will never buy property where I don't have a choice of bars to walk to.
This is conventional wisdom, but it always felt odd to me.
Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces. In the beginning, they were low cost because of some undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not possible?
Lofts evolved from old factory and warehouses. This was in an era before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting. You needed lots of windows to light factories and lots of vertical space for convection cooling to work. Factories were at the edge of town and that town grew into a city. Eventually, the edge was closer to the center than the suburbs. And a new generation wanted to be city dwellers.
Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some of the most in demand housing because of the large space and natural lighting.
Because buildings that were already old 50 years ago were built before elevators and other massive height building techniques. Look at old factory pictures, usually about three or four stories max. That’s much more adaptable than a gigafactory or a World Trade Center.
the buildings built 100 years ago to be converted 50 years ago are very different from the buildings built 50 years ago to be converted today. Improved efficiency and optimization for purpose in building design plays some role in that.
I feel like this is not that terribly different than row homes in the city. They only have windows in the front and back and the back might just be a view of the building backing up on them from the other street. These houses already have a long skinny footprint and it works fine. It doesn't seem that hard to do the same with office buildings. Additionally, amenities like a gym, laundry, community room can all be placed in the center of each floor as desired.
But a row house has a front and back door. In an office building, the entry would be in the middle. You could divide each floor up into four apartments - two long apartments stretching the width of the building, say on the East and West ends. Then two smaller apartments with windows on only one side on the North and South ends of the building.
Four corner apartments work great if the floor plate is small enough to divide the floor by 4 and end up with a sensible square footage. Many office buildings are just so much bigger that this would lead to massive apartments that have few interior walls. Those are not so easy to sell. That's a reason the modern residential skyscraper is typically a narrow needle, instead of being shaped like Sears tower.
It would result in fewer units, but you could introduce "courtyards" that would act as corridors of light. It would depend on the depth of the building. You could potentially do it over two or more stories.
Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work.
Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc
A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try.
Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.
None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building. Those spaces are currently used for elevators and utilities.
Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.
Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction.
So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability.
Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.
Right, so the core of the building is elevators, hallways, and something that doesn't require light. The first use that comes to mind is resident storage. Using space on upper floors for storage isn't how you would design a residential building, but it is a useful purpose for otherwise useless interior space.
Additional leftover interior space can be used for amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the existing space that doesn't require tearing down a building.
As long as we get the building ‘for free’ (don’t have to consider/pay for the original costs to build it), it can definitely be retrofitted for many purposes somewhat economically.
Maybe a bit like the industrial lot to condo process that happened in NYC and other places awhile ago?
It’ll be weird, but folks will adapt.
I’m not sure why folks wouldn’t just build in the ‘burbs (and work remotely) in most cases though?
When it comes to London, the 'burbs' means get into a crowded train (or wait for the next, or the one after that as they are packed in many stations) AND spend 2h per day commuting (+ the very expensive fares). As a young professional in London I would prefer to have a nice 30-40sqm (~300-400 sqf) studio in the center, close to a market/park and be 20mins door-to-door to my work.
If one of the mega-big buildings would be converted to studios, meaning they could 'slice' 20-30 studios per floor, keep one floor for gym/dry cleaners/etc. they would be making a (financial) killing.
>As long as we get the building ‘for free’ (don’t have to consider/pay for the original costs to build it), it can definitely be retrofitted for many purposes somewhat economically.
> Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.
The question is why, and what's wrong with marginal housing (sounds like a great way to reduce homelessness)
The numbers show that Americans order delivery and eat at restaurants more (and cook less) than they have in recent history.
It's intriguing because while flipping and renovating kitchens to have more space - stoves, ovens, and refrigerators is on the rise, fewer families actively use the space over the last decade. (The same can be said for colleges moving from dorms to apartment style housing)
This especially applies to marginal households, but also significantly to upper middle class -> upper class and dense housing.
You’re going to see a shift in the coming years due to inflation - more folks are already eating at home anyway.
But the answer is because sometimes you do need a kitchen, even if it’s to boil some water or whatever or reheat takeout, or because your Mom is visiting and wants to make something. Sharing a kitchen is often a nightmare if you can’t control who else is sharing it - constant fights over dirty dishes being one example. They often get tied up exactly when you want to use them too.
And having your own bathroom (the two are highly correlated as both require ‘wet walls’, and custom plumbing) is great when you want some privacy, are sick, etc. or have some safety concerns.
It can get even more gross and disturbing to share those when you can’t control who you’re sharing with. It’s a common friction point to share a bathroom even with room mates. A lot of people (especially women) flat out avoid public bathrooms due to safety and ‘ick’ concerns.
Imagine if the only toilet you could use if you woke up at 2am and needed to pee was a public toilet.
There is nothing wrong per-se with marginal housing, except they tend to attract ‘marginal people’ that bring with them trouble that others don’t want to deal with if they can avoid it. It does help with homelessness and the like - but it tends to self filter into dangerous territory, because who is going to want to stay at a place where homeless people stay unless they are homeless themselves?
Sharing them is always a step down in experience. It is always cheaper though, as the kitchen and the bathroom are usually the two highest maintenance and ‘most expensive’ rooms.
Most folks stuck in those situations move out ASAP - think dorm rooms and barracks. Or homeless shelters.
Singapore is extremely far along in the ‘eat out at restaurants’ side (it used to be, most Singaporeans ate out at least a couple meals a day), and even they have kitchens and private bathrooms in all the subsidized flats.
Marginal housing was basically outlawed because of abuses, but there are various ways around it if the demand/desire is there (hotels are marginal, for example).
>None of that is possible without massive changes to the structure of the building.
This is addressed in TFA. There was one building the profiled architect designed where they spent the $$ to turn the elevator core into a courtyard. He was able to add back the "lost" square footage as additional floors, which made the project profitable enough to build out.
Addressed in the article! Apartment buildings need less elevators than offices since residents tolerate longer waits. There's still elevators, just less.
Agree. Most office plates have plumbing for the equivalent of four bathrooms, max, all centered near stairs, etc. Figure you would need to 4x the existing number of toilets to make a floor residential and also link to existing central sewage lines. I don't even know what building code even looks like for that in most states.
Commercial is more expensive because it is designed for higher wear, longer tenancy times, dramatically higher utilization, and more customization.
It’s common to run wiring in conduit, use hung ceiling (with space for running lots of extra services), construct the framing out of steel and concrete (instead of wood and stucco), and electrical and HVAC demands are dramatically higher. Networking needs to be more reliable and easier to manage at scale. Electrical needs are often orders of magnitude higher. Everything from locks, to outlets, to flooring needs to be sturdier to handle the increased traffic and wear.
Even a dentists office or hair dresser will need to mount heavy chairs sturdily, pull lots of extra power, and have to worry about weird chemicals or x-rays and the like hurting other tenants.
Additionally, they’re zoned to have access to high volume transit and/or parking.
It’s not a surprise why commercial is more expensive. It’s made for a different use case.
It still is only going to be ‘good enough’ most of the time. And by ‘good enough’, that means tenants pay. Anything else is usually ‘lipstick on a pig’ as it were.
London has several "co-living" [1] housing units at this point, that are basically upscale house-shares for people willing to pay extra to not have to deal with the hassle of house-shares.
Yout get a self-contained flat, but kitchens etc. will be tiny, and then on top there are shared spaces like co-working facilities, lounges, cinemas, gyms, and staff arranging social events etc.
I'd imagine former office buildings could work well for many of the amenities for projects like that.
There are plenty of things that people would be happy to do with cheap urban space in deep/narrow apartment conversions in post-WWII office buildings. I'd enjoy having a workshop and lots of bicycle parking.
The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.
Japan just used fiber optics to run sunlight to inside apartments for natural light in skylights. Obviously the apartments are cheaper typically, and as long as people get exposure to light like this they are generally ok.
I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. I don’t think the problem is whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in place to encourage it.
I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue.
It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to solve these problems end up being against the building codes. Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how clever your technical solution is.
Surely you can solve that by having the occupants sign a waver as part of the rental contract where they wave their rights to be evacuated or rescued in the event of a fire.
My permit says "NO building code or utility inspections will be performed."
I signed that "right" away with the county recorder, it was no problem. Been able to do that for 2 decades in my county. Turns out when people build what they like you get weird shit but little to none of the "but muh codes" fire hysteria came true.
Meanwhile California morons building with regulatory checks out the wazoo get ate up in wildfires. It's like watching actual insane people.
Yes, some places in the US DGAF, and in others there's not even a municipality to issue a permit, let alone enforce one. However, these situations typically are in places where high occupancy buildings don't exist.
The deadliest structure fires in history pretty much have one thing in common: people couldn't get out. There's something to be said for a homeowner who builds their own death trap, but it's a good thing that large commercial properties have to jump through hoops to ensure they don't create a death trap for hundreds of others, just to save a few bucks.
Wildfires are something else entirely -- forests are not man made and their creation is not subject to laws. You wouldn't argue that laws against murder are silly just because you could be attacked by a wild animal, would you? We regulate buildings because people build them.
Most forests today kind of are, in as much that the way a forest is 'designed' is down to a whole collection of active choices made by the forest owners to intervene or not intervene in different ways. There are lots of things that one can do to mitigate the risks of forest fires, and doing or not doing those things is a choice they make.
Yes, I'm aware, but you know what I mean. Trees don't have to file for a permit before they germinate. The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans.
My point is that there is probably almost as much that can be done to mitigate forest fire risks as there is to mitigate house fire risks. We know which forests have a high risk of forest fire and we know various techniques that can be used to lower that risk. If we choose to let forests close to where people live become an unnecessarily high danger for forest fires (or let people live close to 'dangerous' forests), then that is a choice.
The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans
The vast majority of trees close to large number of humans are however owned by someone who responsible for them and gets to decide if they grow up and become big trees or not.
I'm arguing it's a good thing California will let humans choose to man make a house wildfire trap (forest didn't pick you to put a house there) and they should apply their standard of "die in a fire if you like" to everything. I believe, counterintuitively, it will save lives.
Of course the building inspector sees the charred bodies he didn't prevent, but he doesn't see the frozen and exposed ones he created through his policies that handicap supply. The incentives of code and inspection are horribly perverse.
The point of building codes and code inspection is so that people don't put others in danger. And in the places that there is a shortage of housing, it is hardly fire code that is limiting supply. It's not as if we could leave out sprinklers and fire escapes from buildings, and all of a sudden, housing would be cheap. The limiting factors of building housing are not this.
It's not as if we could leave out sprinklers and fire escapes from buildings, and all of a sudden, housing would be cheap.
There's a lot more to fire codes than just sprinklers and fire escapes. If you could ignore all fire codes (and related requirements) then it would definitely be possible to build both more and cheaper apartments than you can now. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, and they almost certainly wouldn't be nice places to live. But a lot of people would take unsafe, uncomfortable and affordable over safe, comfortable and completely unaffordable.
They absolutely are. Building to code costs a lot of extra money, and for good reason, because we don't want people to die. If we didn't have codes one could build a capsule hotel style lodging and easily fix the housing situation.
Have you ever built a house? It would not even be possible for me to build one with inspections, I would lose my day job. And my house was 40k to diy, do you have any idea how burdensome an up to code contractor installed sprinkler system would be against such frugal costs.
Having built my house the price and accessibility absolutely spirals out of control with code inspections. Remove this madness and let the masses do what I've done.
No US codes are going to require sprinklers in your single family home. But if someone is building a new medium-rise apartment building with hundreds of people sleeping in it, sprinklers are not a limiting factor in construction, and it is too much of a risk to build it without.
Our regulations often treat different structures in different places differently because they have different risks. That's okay. Your custom tiny home shouldn't be treated the same as an urban high rise.
In the US windows are also a required means of egress from a bedroom in case of fire. Technically the requirement is two means of egress of any type, but in effect this means the door and the window, where someone can be rescued by a fire truck, escape onto a different path, etc.
I can imagine internal apartments designed with an open concept kitchen/living room and then a row of bedrooms/bathrooms off the open room. Then you could have an hallway off the back that funneled in natural light and the bedrooms/bathrooms could have windows that opened unto that. That gives you an unimpeded escape path.
Indeed, but tradition is not necessarily the only way to have safe policies. We have many more advanced escape systems that work incredibly well these days. I’m sure there are alternative escape technologies that don’t involve windows in a skyscraper in 2024.
If you read the article carefully, you'll see clues to why this developer can make it work in spite of conventional wisdom:
1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates.
2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.
Doesn’t even have to be novel, especially if they can combine floors to make taller spaces in the inner column.
Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on. Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you’d find in a mixed use city with cheap real estate.
Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to simulate outdoors.
> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?
A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each.
One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture, some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even with doors.
Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows.
And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves. Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have windows.
The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use as a buffer for something which becomes unused and inconvenient.
Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for non-living purposes.
Isn't that the norm already in US? I am from Europe and I have 3 living space rooms with windows taking two outer walls and inside there is bathroom and storage area with no windows?
Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?
I can absolutely see the safety argument for distance from a window. Fair! But I will say, as someone who made his windowless basement his bedroom even though I had other options in my home, I love a super dark space to sleep.
And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors.
This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations.
You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside.
I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it.
Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away.
I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep.
At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains.
It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics.
Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.
Most offices already have break rooms. Sinks and dishwashers are fairly common in them. Make them a common area with a shared stove... Odds are the residents will pitch in and buy some cookware and set a policy of clean up after yourself.
I don't think the shape of office buildings is a problem, you can just have stores and storage on the inside and apartments on the outside.
The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to have plumbing ubiquitously.
> Conventional wisdom is thaty only certain office buildings can be converted to housing.
I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall.
I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.
What about common spaces? Put the dwellings on the outer edges, and use the middle of each floor around the elevators as: gyms, libraries, swimming pools, saunas, indoor sports/games (pickleball? table tennis? air hockey? retro arcade machines?), meeting rooms and small-event spaces for residents? maybe a food court with 3rd party vendors? All kinds of creative things can be done!
If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in.
And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper.
These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it?
Here is another idea:
R R R R R R R R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R R R R R R R R
You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.
I love HN so much that we've been able to reduce this serious problem to an easy matrix representation that can be used to both demonstrate the problem and show solutions so easily.
These problems rely on a particularly rigid definition of what housing is. If your house had a back room with no natural light, that would be be far from convenient. But would you accept it if it cost half as much? I bet you would.
There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?
I think a big benefit would be reworking code to make a way to safely allow interior units. They wouldn't be nice without natural light but it's a way to make a lot of units available cheaply.
Separate the internal hallways, convert the outside to residential, keep the inside commercial but redevelop it to support mixed office buildings and retail. Give the bottom floor a mall entrance.
In cities where people are renting out living rooms, closets as sleeping areas I think windowless units would definitely be viable. Hong Kong has cage bunks, SF has adult dorm rooms.
Just a reminder that lofts used to once be the least desirable places to live. It wasn't until people figured out how to live in them that they became cool and desirable.
Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a building for natural light and your office and workshops in the unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these buildings excel at providing.
Water and sewage drainage is also a big deal. Almost impossible to retrofit for 150 bathrooms, around the buildings, when you originally had 20, around the elevator columns.
Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in NYC for 40 years.
We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really important consideration, in almost any human venture.
I don't buy it. Pipes are IMPOSSIBLE to increase the size? Or at some point you hit some city service with no motivation to actually provide service/infrastructure and fix the problem at that end?
I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff.
Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster.
Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space.
Charlie Munger was an advocate of residential buildings that have virtual windows (letting in "artificially created sunlight") instead of actual windows. Before his death he proposed such a residential building for UCSB:
...But I wonder if maybe cities should conduct small-scale tests of Munger's ideas to find out if they help put all that abandoned office space to good use.
I don’t get the point. From what I can see, dorms construction often costs around $70,000. Munger was advocating that we get rid of windows and put students in exceptionally tiny rooms, and the cost will be about $267,000 per student? How is this an advantage?
as i understand it, the theory was that it would discourage the undergraduates from hanging out in their rooms, and force them to hang out around campus and socialize, and this would be good for them.
My experience from a long time ago was that dorm rooms were never really a place to hang out. My undergrad had rooms off a kitchen/suite area and people did hang out there. But rooms were mostly for sleeping (etc.), studying, reading, etc.
Charlie Munger was a weird freak who fancied himself an architect. The only thing that qualified him to design a ridiculous building for UCSB was donating an insane amount of money to UCSB.
A few months ago Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this:
> Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects.
I've seen a conversion done a few years ago, say, 2019, right next to where I live, just south of Prospect Park. A blocky office building has been converted to a residential building, and then has been rented out very quickly. It's not a tower though, a relatively easy conversion. Large windows must be attractive for some though, especially those facing the park.
Admittedly, it's Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and the adjacent blocks are residential.
I've only seen one successful project that was able to convert a business office to residential apartments/condos. If I remember correctly, the building had been vacant for a while (it was built in 1986) and the company who bought it got a really good deal and so the conversion was able to happen without having a massive amount to overcome in order to be profitable. The building just had the perfect layout and structure that made it suitable for a conversion. Ironically, the developer filed bankruptcy during the 2008 housing collapse and several other conversions he was aiming to do also went under.
I may be overlooking a downside but it always seemed obvious to me office and apartment buildings should be intermixed. Separating living, shopping and office into different zones always felt strikingly absurd. I am happy to live in a place where it's not the case so my office building is less than 15 minutes walking from my home, as well as a supermarket, a swimming pool, a forest, a university and everything else one can imagine wanting in their life.
Here in Oslo, the mixed-use Vertikalen[1][2] recently officially opened. Ground floor is a cafeteria and a restaurant, followed by a several floors of offices, and the rest above is all residential apartments.
While the looks can be argued, the mixed-use seems like an interesting idea. Not aware of too many other such buildings here, so will be interesting to see how it fares.
American cities have developments like this now (Baltimore and Philly for example), but it requires acquiring gentrifiable land/buildings, the capital to renovate them, and demand to pull in the middle-class hipsters to live there.
You’re right. What I’ve heard is that this is basically another area with misaligned incentives: for any given project offices are cheaper to build, have fewer permitting concerns, and cheaper to manage (a few big commercial clients versus hundreds of renters), and cities may prefer them if they’re tight on capacity for things like schools – but if everyone does that, your city is unappealing and excessively exposed to the business health of a few companies or industries.
Separation does not happen organically. Rich people and governments are in charge of city planning and they make wrong decisions based on making profits.
In city where I live some rich dude contributed to our city governor’s campaign or something. Now governor has to “return the favor” by relocating thousands of government employees from downtown area which is close to a lot of people’s homes to outskirts of the city where nobody lives and where that rich dude owns office space for rent.
It's doesn't happen organically. It is usually designed by city planners (or equivalent functions depending on the city). It makes most sense to have mixture of residential and commercial buildings in the same area so that there is no foot traffic vacuum depending on the time of the day. Foot traffic vacuum creates space for potential crimes.
(e.g, if you separate commercial and residential, the commercial area will be more likely crime ridden at night and residential area will be more prone to crime during the day).
The huge issue in conversions is the amount of plumbing needed (and associated cost).
It's not uncommon that an entire office floor might only have 1 restroom area & 1 mini-kitchen.
But that same floor, configured as apartments, might have 10+ apartments ... which means 10x the plumbing for bathrooms and kitchens that didn't exist before.
And having feeder plumbing that can support that 10x (or more) increase in water/waste volume.
My office is a former slab-on-grade warehouse that was converted into offices, laboratories, and manufacturing halls.
They installed eight multi-stall bathrooms where once there was a single room in the corner with one toilet through the revolutionary act of running PEX and digging a trench in the slab for sewage.
It is trivial to do the same in a high-rise. If anything it will be easier because instead of digging a trench you can punch holes in the floor and route plumbing and ventilation through the plenum (or whatever is up there).
Water supply and power isn't a problem because here's a secret: commercial spaces almost always use more power than residential, especially in the extremely esoteric and rare cases where workers have computers and copiers. Hell all of these buildings have phat 3-phase service. A dude watching Netflix and using his microwave in a space that once housed a dozen workers, half of which had space heaters under their desks because the HVAC was set to 70 in the summer will be a break for the transformer.
It’s not even just the obvious plumbing providing hot and cold water, and the drain pipes carrying away waste water. You also need vent stacks for all the drains. You also need to put in a whole lot of hot water heaters and the associated electrical work to handle their demands.
Frame additional walls within the room that include additional plumbing lines, branching from existing lines as needed. Granted, you lose space but at least you'll have a fully compliant residence, no?
Can you run plumbing through the ceiling of the floor below? I'd think there's plenty of free space there but it would mean you have access to your neighbor's pipes.
I once had a clogged drain in my apartment. When it was fixed, I was politely asked not to run the water until they could inspect the ceiling in the unit below. They wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to leak on my neighbor below.
General building/fire code but even be a larger issue. I suspect you could probably solve the plumbing side of things but meeting building code might be the larger challenge.
I think they can use/invent something like dirty water towers in NYC. use that for whatever the NYC use it for. Water there really proven dirty so it doesn't matter.
The thesis isn't about "downtowns" across the country but a particular developer in NYC. Older buildings have more usable space because they aren't subject to the same standards as new buildings.
And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.
The target demographic doesn't care about windowlessness:
New York remains a place where many ambitious young people go to start their careers, if not to stay, and this demographic is ideal for the hotel-style conversions for which office towers are most suitable. Moreover, Berman said, “young people are social—they don’t want to sit in the middle of a forest on a Zoom call.”
Renters are now used to the layouts of chain hotels, where there’s one window by the bed, so Berman’s bathrooms and kitchens didn’t need to be sunny, and the kitchens could have a minimal footprint. “Our demographic doesn’t cook,” he said. He referred to the other rooms without windows as “home offices.”
Avinash Malhotra, an architect who has done several conversions with Berman, noted that a single office tower can be carved up into hundreds of little units, as in a hotel. “He is not making housing for the homeless,” Malhotra said. “But I often joke among my employees that what we do is slums for the rich.”
Yes and no. Lots of new residential can save downtowns. Just build new residential however. It's not that much more expensive. The existing office can continue to be used as commercial real estate, especially by the new residents.
Together, this will help create walkable, vibrant downtown with no need for a car to commute to work. The only thing preventing this is zoning, which currently bans most new residential.
Sure, but this is less possible if your downtown is already full of commercial real estate in towers already. Yes, you could argue further zoning changes on the remaining plots could be turned into towers, but it doesn't provide a guarantee the office space will get filled.
No downtown area in North America is full. Every city has vast swaths of underdeveloped land that can be turned into nice, new housing. Zoning should be changed so developers can make the call on what is profitable and not profitable, not NIMBY politicians or internet commentators.
As a side benefit, the new housing will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing.
Depends on what you mean by Full. Here is Los Angeles the downtown core is completely built. You'd need to tear down existing structures and purchase the land to do so.
As stated, you'd need to purchase the expensive land and then turn it into housing. This is done in Los Angeles, but the property that is built isn't cheap affordable housing.
He didn't say it would be cheap affordable housing. He said it "will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing". Which makes sense. Normally new buildings are the luxury housing and over time, as they become outdated, they become the affordable housing. Building new "affordable housing" is a fools errand, since it costs almost as much to build as luxury housing. You just build more housing period and let nature take its course over the decades.
Yep. And don’t we have to wait for the new expensive housing to trickle down and become cheap. If enough new housing is built, the older housing becomes cheaper almost immediately.
There are a lot of cities that don't have much undeveloped land in their downtowns left. Add in things like work from home for your traditional office workers and you've got a lot more office space than you need so there's a push to find some use for these buildings before the bottom completely falls out of the office real estate market.
One of the great NIMBY myths is that there is a lack of developable land in urban areas. Without exception, every North American city has vast swaths of underdeveloped land where shorter, outdated buildings can be torn down and replaced with denser, more modern, energy efficient housing.
WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in person, and relatively few people have the luxury of an at-home office, especially those within urban areas. Perhaps you're happy with your employer pushing office costs onto you, but I prefer an employer that provides me with an office that I can walk/bike to instead.
There are vanishingly few cities in the US where a walkable/bikeable commute is even a real option even if you're willing to move deep into the downtown and move each time you get a new job. The costs of having my own office are far offset by not having to drive at all most days and I'm only ~15-20 minutes by car from my office.
I work in a large multi-site company so I'm either at home on zoom for meetings or in the office on zoom for meetings hearing 60 other people also have zoom meetings. There's vanishingly small benefits for coming to the office for me because the people I could conceivably benefit from in person collaboration with are hours away so no matter what my day lives on video calls and Teams chats.
> WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in person,
I'm increasingly convinced this is simply not true for most jobs and it's being pushed by a) middle management who like in office because they can wander by and check in on everyone easier or b) the real estate arms of companies trying to justify extremely expensive leases they can't get out of. Personally I think b is the ultimate reason because it looks bad to have this cost sitting around with no 'justification'.
Anecdotally our leadership was effusive with praise about how productive we were during the 2 years+ of complete work from home and yet no matter how much feedback they get that people aren't happy with RTO we've been slowly ratcheting up the number of days required in and increasing the level of tracking of adherence to this new policy no one but the C-Suite seem to want.
It's the converse of what you claim. The denser an urban area, the easier it is to switch jobs and still maintain a reasonable commute. Sprawling metros like Boston have already fractured into sub job markets: Someone living in the North Shore area cannot switch to a job in Metro west without enduring a crushing 3-4 hour daily commute. By comparison, someone living in the Back bay can switch companies located in the Seaport to the Financial District without too much disruption to their commute. This becomes more and more true the denser the environment and supporting mass transit increase.
Great for you you love WFH. Go move to the burbs and let the cities build homes for those who don't. No one is forcing you downtown.
Offices are great for in person meetings. A group of people in a room with a whiteboard can discuss things much better than the same people on zoom. If you are just on zoom meetings all day then in person isn't useful at all.
That's the one thing missing from all online right now but it's completely killed because the team I'm on doesn't have any other developers on my team in my city so any whiteboarding has to take place online and we don't have smartboards or something like that that can do whiteboarding well online. The closest we use is Mural but that's not quite as easy or good.
If you don't have everyone in the same room then in person is meaningless. Even one remote person means everyone needs to be remote. The benefits of in office only apply if every person needed for a meeting/decision is in the same room at once. One person missing and you lose all benefits.
I think you're ignoring that fact that once you remove the commerce function of a city, a lot of the factors that create a vibrant culture go away.
If it's not a place where people make money / strive / want to make something of themselves, it's either a retirement community or a vacation town: just in sustaining mode.
What I'm missing: if business scales down, thus population and culture scale down (unless populated by people independent of these things). This means higher vacancies of existing residential, so how much new residential is needed?
I guess what I'm ultimately wondering: what's the "critical mass" of a city? At what point, does the commerce/social engine get small enough that it's no longer sustainable? We already saw many US cities were "weekday-only" cities, devoid of anything interesting, before the pandemic.
That is exactly what I am saying. Lots of new residential not only helps drive demand for the currently underutilized office space, the increased 24/7 foot traffic will drive demand for restaurants and other local businesses.
I was recently in Dublin, and tbh, you are right. There's so much space that could actually be used for large residential buildings, but no, instead people queue and compete for halls in the ground.
Absolutely 100%. There is no reason why office buildings cannot be rezoned and regulations loosened to allow for all office buildings to be changed into affordable housing.
The only problems are a lack of political will with regard to zoning and codes. A common retort is, "well some apartments won't get access to natural light" or "utilities are in one place".
In many countries where housing security is tight, there are people who live inside apartments without windows.
Secondly, share housing where kitchens and bathrooms were used communely (aka a dorm) used to exist for many working class poor. Again, if the choice is the street versus a share house the choice is obvious.
No one said affordable housing needs to provide natural light, private bathrooms, and kitchens. Until the political will exists to return to what used to be normal for America and in many respects the entire world homelessness will continue.
Sometimes a roof over ones head and a place to sleep is all the homeless want. Price it accordingly.
A big issue is what we're building rather than how much we're building or what we're converting.
There is way too much ultra-luxury buildings getting built in NYC. It's simply too profitable and there's little to no incentive to build (or convert) apartments normal people can afford.
Another problem for NYC in particular, a lot of the buildings that exist already would be illegal to build now. I get the desire to avoid streets being in constant shadow from surrounding buildings but large footprint buildings are simply a more efficient use of space once you factor in things like elevators, fire escapes and electrical/mechanical ducting.
The NYC government works at the behest of property developers so this is unlikely to change.
Why do you think the luxury buildings are a "big issue"? People who can move into those buildings will move into them. This frees up the lower priced apartments they previously (or otherwise would have) inhabited.
I wouldn't make the assumption that the people buying luxury units will be moving out of lower-priced units.
In Canada's major cities, for example, we see such luxury and non-luxury units being bought as stores-of-value by wealthy foreigners trying to avoid risk or capital controls, rather than as something to be actively lived in by them or anyone else. Supply is consumed, without any being relinquished.
Even when the owner might reside in such a unit, it ends up being more like a dedicated hotel room for them. They'll simultaneously own luxury residences in other cities and/or countries, and travel between them. Again, supply is consumed (in multiple markets), without any being relinquished.
The luxury market really isn't like the broader housing market.
Because many are used as vacation homes or just money laundering. With wealth inequality at historical world records, the rich can just buy both, and they do. Lol
I lived in Manhattan for 10 years from late 90s into the late 2000s, live in NJ now. A major trend I have seen is NYC skewing more and more towards the rich/ultra rich and ignoring the rich and middle class. We recently visited NYC for the first time in a couple of years, and it seemed like everything was transformed into Gucci and YSL and Bulgari etc etc.
I don’t know how this is sustainable given that Manhattan is an island.
The reason why it's more profitable to do ultra-luxury is that regulations increase fixed costs, which make it less profitable to do projects that would have had lower expected returns, like affordable apartments.
There was a big value drop during the pandemic which is still ongoing because of home office.
Turning them into housing could indeed be a good option for people in big cities, but the real estate market cares about money and housing is not the best option for them.
Are you saying they can't evict the office tenants in order to convert the building? I'm sure any transition from office -> condos will be long, messy, and expensive. Still better than dead, empty cities though.
IIRC (it's been awhile) most office leases are for 5 years, or maybe 3.. I forget. Not sure if they'd have any stipulations to allow evictions in an instance like this.
I would imagine if office buildings offered tenants a get-out-of-your-lease-free card, they'd jump on it. Office leases are not cheap, and go on for years (last one I dealt with was 7!). And if the office is empty...
The most pro-office scenario I can imagine is this:
- There's a massive economic downturn resulting in job losses, power briefly shifts from the employees to the employers, and the incumbent office-heads indeed insists on RTO.
- But they would soon go out of business competing against new employers that are remote-only and have far lower overhead, killing RTO again.
EDIT
One other scenario that just came to mind is an extreme amount of new building and revitalization in cities. If they build enough units, and enough big, nice units, and spruce up the place a bit, living in a city will become cheaper and more practical.
If I can live in a huge nice condo with decent rent, no homeless people on the sidewalk, and close to the office, I wouldn't mind RTO so much.
As it is, city living only makes sense for those in their 20's or those who are truly dedicated to the city lifestyle.
Let's not "save" them, which is just an attempt to bail out the landlords who have been gouging the rents and manipulating building codes and laws, sabotaging rail, and doing everything in their power to keep rents artificially high.
Step 1: Let all the landlords go bankrupt. The buildings will be repossessed and owned by creditors, but still there.
Step 2: New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty lot.
Any other plan is an attempt to transfer wealth from the people to the landlord class to save their skin. Hard pass, let them use their 75 years of ill gotten rents.
“ New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty lot”
If no one truly buys them, you don’t get an empty lot. You get abandoned, dilapidated buildings and all the associated social/environmental problems that comes with that.
Or the city could just invoke eminent domain, buy it at a very low price if the owner can’t demonstrate it having a high market price, restore the building and democratically choose an equitable process to rent it or sell it, hopefully favoring existing citizens.
But of course, we’d have to be a lot more aggressive about invoking eminent domain for this to be effective. To that end, it would make sense to also establish policies ensuring it’s easy to invoke it fairly and transparently - ie, easily allowing other parties to bid against the city for higher prices in cases where eminent domain is to be used this way (stipulating that those parties also take measures to restore the building, etc).
That's working great for St. Louis! Empty husks of building that have sat empty and unmaintained for years being bought for cents on the dollar is definitely a sign of a healthy city
First off, St. Louis isn't empty because of muh car centric infrastructure, it's empty because of deindustrialization. Secondly, parking lots are in fact a better use of space than empty, dilapidated office buildings.
Lots of buildings across the country have actually been torn down to become parking, I'm not an expert on St. Louis urban development but it seems like many buildings were torn down there and replaced with parking lots that make the area worse. Then there's fewer people, and the cycle of dilapidation and abandonment continues.
What you are advocating for is the system that has gotten us to the point where nobody can afford housing.
You let rich interests create a situation where they make more and more money for doing nothing. In this case, sitting on downtown real estate. They use the money to manipulate the system to tilt the economy more and more in their favor. They kill off attempts to introduce rail. They fight against increasing capacity for housing or office space, because when demand goes up and supply stays the same they get higher rent for doing literally nothing but continue to own the same properties. They bribe politicians to force you back into the office downtown for no reason.
This is literally called rent-seekinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Landlords have been doing this for thousands of years to the point it is a fundamental economic principle.
Then, when they get in trouble, and they might lose some money, you have to bail them out or they will ruin your cities. They are going to ruin the cities either way. If you bail them out they will take the money and then do none of the things they were supposed to do in exchange. They are only going to do whatever puts the most money in their pocket, and they play a long game.
Here is a counter proposal:
- Tax any vacant building at a rate high enough that any owner will be forced to put the building into use or sell it to someone who will. This applies both to buildings that are 'abandoned' as well as just sitting empty due to lack of tenants.
- Tie property tax rates directly to the rate of supply. Whenever an action is taken that artificially increases property values, increase the rates to offset that increase. If the planning commission kills a new apartment building that would increase the number of beds in part of the city by 1%, increase tax rates by 1% (1% of the current rate). This will penalize existing landlords (and homeowners) for rent-seeking and NIMBY. This can be done at the state level and the funds can be earmarked for low income housing and job programs, or parks.
- Offer tax incentives for things that lower property values but increase quality of life. These would include housing programs, railroads and stations, high density housing, etc. This would help balance out the rent seeking behavior of landlords and de-align their group interests. For example, if I own a large apartment complex and there is a proposal to build another large complex next door to mine, I am opposed to it. More housing will lower my rents. However, if I get a permanent tax cut when the new complex is built, it will not take much of a difference in tax rate for my profits to increase (since the lowering of marginal rents will very small from one building and spread over a wide area, whereas the tax benefit is concentrated in the area where I benefit). Landlords would then be forced to use their influence to try to steer new development to be near their own properties, rather than using their combined influence to kill all development.
What an utterly hostile and naive view. We need rental buildings and thus we need landlords. There are many many scenarios where one may want to rent instead of buy. You need a place only for a few years, you need a place while you explore to decide where to buy, you don't have the money to buy yet, etc.
If your next suggestion is that all landlords be government run or run as a coop, no freaking thanks to the first and while coops are great I don't think only coops is a good solution. If you want only wealthy homeowners and the rest of the population living in communism style housing, very hard disagree.
You also don't know anything about co-ops. Frankly I think you are completely uneducated on any of this stuff.
Go look up GHI in Greenbelt, Maryland. It's one of the oldest and largest co-ops in the USA. Housing in GHI is a fraction of the cost of the surrounding neighborhood, and the cause is that you cannot rent out GHI units. Only owners can live in their own units, which means speculators and landlords are simply banned from bidding up the costs. As a result, the cost to buy a unit there is a fraction of what it is right next door, maintenance on the units is better, crime is lower, services are better. It's a 100% walk able community that is run democratically. It's really a model for how housing could be built all across the country, but I guess you are the expert, we should keep doing what we do now and just let a couple billionaires complete a monopoly on having a roof, and hope that they only ask for 100% of our income and not more.
I'm not so sure New York City is a valid comparison with other cities (in the US) wrt "downtown" living. NYC has a long, solid history of this kind of living that most other cities just don't have. For example, transportation: NYC is perhaps the only city in the US where you can live a completely full life without a car. Most other cities have developed around cars as the primary transportation method, so if you want to live any sort of normal life, you're probably gonna need a car. If you live on the Upper West side in Manhattan and want to see a friend in Hicksville, Long Island, it's a simple subway/train ride. However, if you live in downtown St. Louis, and you wanna see a friend in Oakville, South County, you're not getting there without a car. And I think most cities in the US are like this - maybe exceptions are San Francisco and Chicago? Maybe?
That isn't quite true, but close. Most cities before about 1950 developed just like NYC. However NYC had subways that were not torn out unlike most cities with streetcars that got ripped out. That difference meant that NYC stayed dense in the core, while other cities were forced to become less dense in the core because the residential options didn't work.
It's more than just a density problem. People need to be locally consistent.
They need a place that caters to their culture(including the town or city itself - micro culture) - they need a place to hang out with people of like mind, they need hobbies and places to go, they need restaurants, events, parks, quiet places, loud and busy places, areas to connect with nature, areas to focus on business or meet fellow enthusiasts. It's not a numbers game .... it's human emotions and reality.
we need hospitals and daycares and public pools, arcades, shops, zoos, heritage sites, pop ups, concerts, etc ...
it's more than just walls + plumbing and electrical codes.....
New growth cities have a supreme advantage here, because they can redistribute prior growth strategies into their current growth models. The faster these newer cities are currently growing the less they will be disrupted by loyalty to prior growth patterns. Older cities are doomed to empty at their cores unless they have something unique and specific that is cause for perseverance. There is no illusion to any of this. Wishful thinking and nostalgia won't fix it.
Its just economics. The answers to over coming economic disruption are always the same: be where you are not expected or do that which others cannot.
Nope, absurd property-speculation driven tax burdens and chaotic zoning inevitably drive out both residential dwellings and business competition.
Cities were traditionally a side-effect of communication hubs, trade collocated with rail/shipping locales, and centralized labor-driven stable factory lines. Communication is now decentralized due to technology changes since the early 90's, trade is now settled with online brokerages/logistics, and factories were either outsourced or moved into more favorable tax districts to maintain competitive posture.
Most modern cities are now running unsustainable theme-park service economies. Note municipal districts are never stripped of jurisdictional tax boundaries, and this still holds true even for areas in economic decline due to mismanagement/arrogance.
Have a wonderfully awesome day, and I thank god it is not my task to try and fix these issues =)
Save from what exactly? This is phrased as if the current state of affairs where nearly all real estate is owned by investors whose only goal is to milk it for maximum value at the expense of the working class and common people. What exactly do we need to save these down towns again?
I don't see how downtowns without offices would thrive. The main attraction of downtowns where people live are that they don't need cars because work and social lives are within walking distance.
The idea quickly falls apart once you need a car to get to either social events or to work.
Remember the reason that offices are empty is because people are working from home. So there is no "commute to work." Social and shopping needs would still be met inside the city.
The main attraction of living downtown is there's lots of life with the people around: plentiful meetups for whatever you like, more neighbors for friends, more people to socialize. There's a large, living, breathing, constantly-changing ecosystem that's self-rearranging of bars for all tastes (including non-alcoholic); chain stores and indie ones; parks for to frolic; restaurants and food trucks of all shapes and flavors; entertainment venues; parades to savor; sports games, stand-up, concerts and shows; city festivals, conventions, expos; all that and more within walkable distance.
If your work is nearby, that's just chef's kiss, then.
Back when I worked out of an office in an industrial park in the suburbs of Boston, a number of the younger/single folks would reverse-commute in from the city. Since it was against the prevailing flow of traffic it was a pretty easy drive for them.
It's funny, I've been writing for years that the CRE market is terminally doomed and we might as well turn the skyscrapers into affordable public housing. Refreshing to see this reality leaking into the public consciousness.
I too have been waiting for the inner city CRE market to crash for a long time now, but conversions of skyscrapers are generally impractical for all the reasons listed in this comment
A simple note: why people should want to live there? If there is no more work in cities except for city services, witch happen to be more and more bound to some bigger/external entities, so no real margins to evolve for any local company, why be there?
Yes, there are many desperate enough to flock anywhere if they see a possible accommodation, but how can they survive locally?
After the '80s logistic revolution and then TLC/IT progress finally making offices useless in cities there is no viable economy anymore. The new right density for the economy of scale are single-family homes and small buildings spread enough to have room to change but not too far, intermixed with homes enough to avoid the US suburbs error. We can't have a new deal in dense cities.
P.v. works best for self-consumption only and we heading toward cheap enough batteries to make almost-autonomous homes the norm in a large slice of the inhabited world (30kWh capacity per home at minimum), we can collect and store and clorate enough water to make semi-autonomous homes and various shops. It start to be cheaper than creating large aqueducts. We start to being able to treat sewers enough to been able to have local treatment instead of a sewerage network, we are not there, but near enough. The world change and we have to change accordingly meaning we can't keep up the immense infra we have made for cities while people move around to escape too frequently flooded areas, too hot areas and so on. We need infra for industries, and many industries need a certain size to be viable, but the trend it's clear we need to produce modern way to live less and less dependent on complex services existing on ground networks. We still need roads, personal air mobility and last-mile air mobility is still far despite certain claims https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but we know where we should go. Smart cities can't work like the old Fordlandia can't. Classic cities already not work anymore, so we do not have other options so far and we need to evolve anyway.
Because cities are awesome: density gives you choice.
In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly have several options for what school to send them to, many probably within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have one, unless they want an hour-long bus ride.
Same goes for restaurants, and social activities -- and people! (i.e., potential friends)
Cities are drastically more efficient. PV does -not- work best for personal consumption, that's actually the hardest way to go because you're not sharing available resources. Same goes for almost everything else you listed.
What's not awesome are cities defined by gridlock and huge highways, something that is itself addressed by increasing the amount of residential space relative to office space.
> In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly have several options for what school to send them to, many probably within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have one, unless they want an hour-long bus ride.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I live in about as suburban of a town as you could imagine and there are 2 public elementary schools, a charter school, and a private Christian school within about a 15 minute walk. Within a 5-10 minute drive there are probably 5 more high quality charter schools, a few more private schools and who knows how many more public schools.
hashtag not-all-suburbs. First of all, your description of a "suburban town" may be different from what I mean when I say "sparse suburb" (which is kind of the opposite of a town). Second, some suburbs immediately next to large cities have great schools because they're the place a lot of upper-middle class folks fled to 50 years ago. But there are also many like I describe. In the Pittsburgh area, if you're wealthy and move to the Fox Chapel suburban area, you'll have what you describe. If you move a bit farther out to Cranberry, you'll have what I described.
(Now, that said, from my spot in the city, there are about 10 different elementary schools within a 2 mile radius.)
Also, don't confuse my comment about choice with quality -- many US suburbs have higher quality schools than some of the cities they're adjacent to for reasons of historical racism and wealth inequality. A very separate issue from the benefits of density!
In my post I'm talking generically about "why cities in 2024" not counting actual cities. Where I live now, is a spread area of single family homes and around here I still have a supermarket (grocery store) a 1' car, elementary school a 5', a golf club and paragliding at 7', a canyoning school at 10' alongside a generic store for wood, steel, cements, painting etc, at 15' a kind of multipurpose center (used as seasonal cinema/theater, cultural center, ...) and a medical clinic, at the same time distance various other commerce, all immersed in the wood.
The point is not what is there now in a specific place of the Earth but what we could do in various places on Earth. The society and the economy I've found here, arranged as described, do works very well. In the region there are a significant variety of human settlements ranging from the ITER nuclear research center, the European Design Center of Toyota, to various sheep farms and tourism. All spread in few hours car range in an economy that's still flourishing and alive even in the current global state of things. There are many different people intermixed, only around my home there is a home an USA-French top manager working mostly in the middle east and aside his home one of a retired chef of a small restaurant in Monaco, in the neighborhood at a walking comfy distance we are no more than 30 people, with 7 different nationalities and a variety of expertise and wealth. Oh, it's a small place, but there are many small places like that and they can thrive as well. From where I'm from I barely know my neighbors in the same building. Oh sure, I've study at the uni just 1km away from my old home, nice, but for what? If I have a child till the high school anything is there, for high school there are still some local options (but I might not like their quality) and I can buy him/her an accommodation elsewhere where he/she can star experiencing an autonomous life because yes, teenagers nowadays need to be autonomous and most of them are totally unable to be due to their glued, iper-surveillant parents. After their studies, after having started a career and a family they can choose whatever they want to live, after parent's death they can choose to go back or sell the old settlements and the society keep turning.
A day we will have flying cars? No issue, there is space for them. We have added p.v.? No issue again, there was already space for it. Geothermal heat pumps? No issues the tallest home is three story on it's own ground. The blacksmith shed 3km from here start to be used by the blacksmith and became something else? No issue is just a shed with a bit of space around, easy rebuilt and converted to something else. In a dense city NOTHING is possible or at least it's terribly costly and complicated. Just try to look why the USA can't build a high speed rail where they need it: it's simply too dense, in France was possible simply because a large slice of population leave spread in the country. A new airport? Good luck in a dense city that growing and growing have surrounded the once upon a time very on the outskirts. Good luck turning useless office towers in apartments. Good luck restoring a new working economy in a dense city. Just to get on-line retails delivery is a nightmare, while here switching from classic mailboxes meant for paper mail to huts-like ones for packages or adding remote opening to the entryphone was pretty simple and cheap.
That's why I'm saying the city do not work. I understand well that some want it, feel the need of it, feel depressed outside, I know personally a handful, personal or family friends, they have all the rights for their preferences but they also should acknowledge that such model can't stand anymore in the present changing world. It's not a matter of preference, it's a practical fact. Like those who love more and more frequently flooded zones, they love them, they have all the rights to love them, but they can't expect insurances pay an year after another big money for after-flood restoration.
Well, choice to consume, but nothing more. I was living in a big dense EU city, after others big&dense, now I'm living in the French Alps, at a short-range from the see, but high enough to have good climate, nature, still having services not like in a big city, but still enough, including good enough FTTH, roads, grocery with drive services and so on. Before?
Well, before I can choose restaurants from all over the world, some fitness centers, some events, always and only services to consume and no real personal activity. Traffic congestion, lack of space and so on complete the game. no, thanks.
In social terms my social life here with FAR LESS people around is IMPROVED because being less we are more social, we meet much more with different people instead of being in bubble if friends, very isolated from all others humans around. Surely mean cultural level is far lower, but due to the general cultural degradation these days to find interesting people for interesting dialogues internet is the sole means, we are too rarefied to meet IRL casually.
Schools? Here every school have large green space and plenty of outdoor activities, yes not at walking distance but who care? Primary schools are normally in 30km radius on good roads, high schools are more rare, but not that far away and if young start to going out of home to study is a good thing for them. Universities became a bit more costly since you must be around them but again it's not that special.
Cities IMO are SOLD to be efficient, and they are definitively not. Starting from the office model where you have a place to live, almost unused during the day, and a place to work almost only used during the day, and we build such mid/high rise buildings to use them only a bit less than half a day, wasting time for commuting, how efficient.... Oh, sure, to farm humans is efficient, to live farmed inside definitively not.
P.a. actually work ONLY for self-consumption because on scale sharing energy is a nightmare for the grid, we do not have superconductive links, sharing means sharing locally, so have a locally very unstable demand for big power plants, the worst scenario for network stability, they can't keep the frequency with significant p.v. on grid. Instead IF we focus on self-consumption p.v. offer options to heat large quantity of water to have them in the night, when needed, to have geothermic heat pumps, heating the ground in summer to balance the heat get in the winter and so on.
BTW cities can't exists without much highways: there anyone eat, and the food came from outside.
The urban-suburban sprawl situation in the US, which is the focus of this article, is far removed from the EU. Metropolitan areas in the US are characterized by having hundreds of kilometers of inefficient low density suburbia. In the US, the highways you mentioned are mostly utilized for inefficiently shuttling of people back and forth across the suburban sprawl. As mentioned in the below linked article, in the US metropolitan areas, urban city areas have 2x to 4x less carbon footprint per capita than the suburbs.
Can you accept that different people have different preferences? Yours are valid of course, why cant the city dwellers prefer what the city offers? You seem to understand the advantages the city has but just reject them as if everyone feels the same way as you do.
Of course, but preference and efficiency are different things: people who like living in cities have all the rights to clearly state that, as a personal preference, as I state mine, but they can't describe their life as efficient or ecological since that's definitively not the case.
We do many inefficient things just because we like them, just think how absurd is smoking tobacco. Smokers have all the right to state "it's a pleasure for me", but a pleasure does not means automatically a good, sustainable and efficient thing. Personally I really like smoked salmon, however I life far from salmons natural environment, I still buy it because I can, but of course I know it's a very inefficient and absurd practice (specially since I know a bit the supply chain).
Preferences are one thing, but you're factually wrong about the efficiency of cities vs suburbs.
"Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than
suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York."
"In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. While households located in more densely populated neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice the average. In metro areas such as New York, GHG emissions in these outlying jurisdictions are readily apparent: Emissions in Manhattan average lower than 38 tons per household annually, but in exurban jurisdictions such as Sussex County, N.J., these emissions exceed 66 tons per household annually."
You're radically under-estimating the efficiency gains of sharing infrastructure. Consider a simple metric like paved road-miles per person, or electricity-line-miles, or distance to school, etc.
It's absolutely fine to have a preference for a rural environment - I grew up in the foothills of the mountains and I miss them terribly - but efficiency is a measurable metric, and cities win, for better or worse.
As answered below that's not what others have observed and more relevant is the capacity to evolve. A NEW mid-rise building and a NEW set of single family homes matching the number of apartment show that the mid-rise new building consume less in operational terms than the single family homes. Though it demand more raw materials to be built, and more infra around it to operate, and typically waterproofs the soil for a large area, killing soil humus, meaning consuming soil, while single family homes do not but the real difference arrive at the end of their useful life: rebuild single family homes it's a common task. Rebuild a mid-rise building it's another story. First of all you have to relocate not a single family for a little time but MANY families for a not so little time, secondly in most part of the world the building owner is not one, they are many and they have to agree rebuilt and how to do so, not counting the issue such large activity create in the surroundings. Long story short: multi story buildings tend to last in degrade for a long time, consuming than much more then newer homes. Homes can easily built in wood, well, it's not pure wood, but it's a self-renewing material in nature if we do not harvest too much. Bigger structures in wood can be made but they tend to be a nightmare. A tall building is not a set of piled containers that packed occupy less soil, it have to sustain it's own weight, have proper foundations, anti-seismic design, fire-safe design etc.
Long story short is like a train: formally is far cheaper than a plane, if you just observe a single fully-loaded trip. But you have to count all you need to build and maintain the train and the relevant infra, and here things start to change much, than you have to count the flexibility over time: a plane can go from any A to B in a certain distance range, a train need rails and build/change rails take an enormous amount of work.
Long story short again: yes FORMALLY under specific windows of observation the city is far more efficient, but in TCO terms is definitively not.
My understanding is that carbon output per capita is far lower in nyc than in american suburbia. American suburbia is a pretty unique place, hard to say how it compares to europe, but at least in the US city livers generally are more ecological at least by some definitions.
I dont think many people value efficiency as highly as you do. Tons of people are fine with being inefficient, they certainly wouldnt call their actions absurd. To me there's nothing wrong with transporting salmon, and Im honestly not really sure why you think there is. Most lox is factory farmed so not like its threatening the species.
Well, what's available in large parts of the world are unsustainable settlements, some due to their place, too prone to floods, wildfires, ... many with subsidence problems, many with aging and irreplaceable infra and so on. So what's available are raw materials, industries and knowledge to start building something new. On the table we have the smart cities, natural evolution of present dense cities and distopic nightmares like the original Fordlandia. You can read about Google Sidewalk labs or Arkadag, Innopolis, Prospera, ... to form an idea of the near future. I prefer something else.
Personally I left the big city for mountains in a not too far area, with enough services and there I see the green new deal working, in kWh terms I consume much less (considering I do not consume gas, diesel, petrol etc anymore), my life quality is improved much, local economy works better than many others so... I propose this as a model.
Hasn't RTO (return-to-office) mandate solved the issue of empty office towers. Other day I read 90% of employers have forced RTO. And for companies with significant downtown real estate they are really aggressive with 100% compliance.
I know many people whose companies have an RTO mandate, and would put themselves in that "90% of employers with forced RTO" group … but where the rubber meets the road, many are not in office and enforcement is more of an unspoken agreement with a manager about being in from time to time.
So, public face / private face stuff.
Commercial real estate is in a much worse place than they care to say.
No. There is a bit of a crisis with commercial real estate. Locally there are several stories of large businesses slashing their footprint, say, in half or selling buildings outright.
Ah good to now. I was thinking about this and come to conclusion that city govt, builders, employers which are all powerful entities and they all looking to fill office buildings. But I do not see a powerful counterbalancing force on this issue. Because employees are typically on receiving end of this my way or highway policy.
In countries where the news media is largely consolidated, there seems to be a campaign of news articles pro-return-to-work. My assumption is that the overlap in interests between rich connected news and media magnates and commercial property ownership is somewhat aligned.
In my opinion we have already crossed the rubicon on this topic and the pandemic caused a paradigm shift that means it’s very hard to put that genie back on the bottle, regardless of how many news articles they write.
Organizations are finding it extremely hard to hire if they have an in-office policy. Few people want to lose two hours a day commuting in cities like London and rammed into busy public transport which used to be the case.
1) smaller office complexes around the perimeter of downtowns make cheap tear downs while businesses concentrate into most desirable office space.
2) older buildings are more viable for residential conversions, if subsidized into positive economics
3) permit + incentivize residential construction - you'd be surprised how much of typical US downtowns are made up of parking lots/structures which can easily be scraped for housing.
Lastly as people do fill into downtowns, that will naturally convert into the ecosystem that serves those people - for all but capital intensive projects which will need to be spearheaded by municipalities and developers alike.
Turning office buildings into apartments or small businesses (or both) could be a good solution. there's a severe lack of housing in a lot of cities in many countries
Don't you mean the opposite? Surely the crime comes from the financial instability. I don't see how you could address the crime without addressing the financial instability.
concentrating/diffusing poverty is a different axis of policy vs. housing/not housing the destitute
the unfortunate circumstances surrounding NYCHA properties was due to concentrating poverty, in singapore public housing is economically integrated so as to avoid the same problem
Causation goes both ways. Intelligent, educated, and well-paid Hacker News posters often don't understand the cloud of chaos, crime, poor decision-making, and deflected blame that hovers over the lives of many poor people. Section 8 landlords understand that while such people may comprise a minority of their tenants (or not), it only takes one to ruin a building and the surrounding neighborhood.
On a certain level this is common knowledge, reflected in the real estate markets of all big American cities. Dirt-cheap housing stock can be found in large swaths of Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, et cetera. It's cheap because even the most desperate families would rather live anywhere else, around anyone else.
Prioritising business just concentrates money in the hands of people who already have money while nothing to address the day to day concerns of actual people.
London seems to manage this petty well. I think it’s quite healthy for a city to commingle folk from different income groups rather than house them in specific areas.
How is the government stealing your income or destroying the value of your property? Seems a bit hyperbolic.
And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
Because there is no free market in housing whatsoever.
Owning land doesn't give you the right to build anything. You need planning permission - which means permission from the local council, local homeowners and consultation, etc. which gives the NIMBY attitude so much power.
There aren't piles of empty houses. There aren't enough houses at all.
> And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free market principles stop applying, since they presume a basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a government perspective is to remove the agency of those who are so drug addled that they cannot make good decisions.
The posts you are responding to said "low income", "poor" and "different income groups". The classism required to go from that to "criminals" is very disturbing.
London has sky high rents for young professionals while also taxing them exorbitant amounts that ends up subsidize social housing for "economically inactive" people. I would not call that efficient.
Rather than this relatively low-effort idea, just think about the other marginalized groups for which appeal could be curried:
- orphans and widowers
- statutorily limited peoples
- losers of the womb lottery
- the soft in spirit
- students of life
- unhoused migrants
- homeless encampment simulator
And failing this:
- displaced urban wildlife
- tear it down and make space for plants
I like this idea. I would even settle for the mixed income housing that a lot of development companies here (DC) were supposed to build when they received subsidies from the government.
The Austin Plaza Saltillo project is a great example. Shops at the bottom make it useful for the whole community. Parking is in garages underneath which promotes walk ability. When you see someone going to their place you don’t know if they are on food stamps or are a tech millionaire. There’s less stigma and more respect for all neighbors.
This is not true. Here in Holland developers of high rises are forced to make 40% of it social housing. This works quite well. The social housing system is broken, but thats mostly because they havent built enough housing in the last 50 years.
How come nobody ever talks about industrializing the suburbs? I live 6 minutes by car from the small scale manufacturing concern where I work. It’s kind of amazing.
Yes certainly, now that people have realized they can work from home, the corporate jig is up. Time to convert those offices into more residential buildings!
How would that fix the broken governments, schools, and rampant crime?
The cities I live near seem to have no problem attracting young singles and couples. Young urbanites I've worked with have all moved out when (a) they have kids and realize how bad the schools are, (b) when one of them gets mugged, (c) they get married to a non-urbanite, (d) they want local governance that is at least slightly sane.
It's insane that so many cities will spare no expense to avoid doing things that actually matter, no amount of resources is spared to ensure serious drug addiction, homelessness and crime runs amok.
I've looked at the cost of converting office space to residential, and every time, it was slightly less costly than a tear down and rebuild - and in one case it was a lot more. And that's before you deal with parking. The other issue was taxes: the city would not get the same tax revenue out of the building and wasn't very interested in the project as a result.
can you explain why parking would be an issue? Typically offices are more people-dense than residential. So converting office to residential should reduce the number of parking spaces needed.
The ocean of concrete around a typical suburban office building is very expensive to remediate. Downtown buildings often have integrated parking garages which create substantial expense when converting to residential. Also, family residences may actually increase parking demands in downtown properties (i.e. walk/train/etc to work means less demand for spaces then when 2 car families move in). If converting to residential was doable outside of extremely low value/tax incentive properties, every REIT would be converting their poor performing commercial holdings... It's just not simple, easy or rewarding right now.
We are not (or should not) be talking about an overnight change. Parking lots and ramps wear out over time and have to be replaced (ramps must be replaced for safety reasons, lots you can fill the holes with gravel and continue using if the market will allow). Likewise buildings reach the point where you can start asking if remodeling is better than tearing down (often to build larger). Cities should be changing over time, so remove one old lot/ramp/building and watch what happens. If parking is needed you will see that as existing lots/ramps fill and raise rates, while if it isn't needed you will see. And of course as you build larger that means more people which in turn gives transit a boost in rider which in turn means you can increase service making cars less needed. Every year every lot/ramp/building owner should observe the city compared to their real estate and decide if maybe it is time to do something different.
There's a reason that most re-development takes a long time. Most of that time is waiting for land values to drop to the point that redevelopment is the best way to restore property tax revenue. That process takes decades. The thought exercise here is what if there was a way to go faster and convert a building from commercial to residential? The article is about a developer who does this in NYC... where a lot of commercial real estate is at 50% occupancy... and is doing conversions very quickly.
Can you explain the "substantial expense" required to convert an office parking garage to a residential parking garage?
Typically, office building parking ratio is currently around 4 spots per 1,000 square feet (1). With two people sharing a 750 sqft 1BR apartment, there should be 50% extra parking spaces.
There's lots of stuff in the article about the feasibility of turning the buildings into apartments. But I don't see anything convincing about it saving the downtown. It seems to me that a lot of people who do leave downtown areas are leaving for non-housing issues - lack of services (police), high taxes, bad schools, etc.
I think you might be conflating two issues. Housing in downtown isn't desirable for a populace of people (probably true for those who need more space and/or want to think about issues like schooling etc.) and downtown isn't being used (even for office use).
The idea to turn office towers into apartments tries to address the second issue without explicitly trying to solve the first (which is make downtown more desirable to live in).
I'm not conflating them at all. They are two interdependent variables in the system. Even TFA says that 20% usage of the empty buildings would be extremely optimistic. So you're not going to be even close to solving it by focusing on just the second.
Are we rapidly brushing past the question “do we want and need to save downtowns in the first place?”?
I have not really thought that through; at first blush it seems obvious that one would want to save these downtowns. But also some of the best innovations arise out of the creation that follows destruction.
I do think the simple fact of offering hyper-dense communities (especially in cities that lack them otherwise, like many midwestern cities, say) makes any downtown attractive as a living option to a certain group of people who want the "15 minute city" experience. Doing so tends to transform downtowns into actual communities as well, as opposed to places with many low quality vendors that cater to duller, less personable 9-to-5 routines.
And then of course there are knock-on effects to placing people like that (typically young professionals and artists) together like that to rub shoulders, talk about ideas, start businesses etc...
> And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.
Large buildings with controlled ventilation offer the prospect of better control over air composition, in particular reduction of CO2 levels. As CO2 rises this could become very important.
If you turn office towers into apartments, where are people gonna work?
May work in some cities that benefit of high tourism or are high status enough (Manhattan, city of London) that you'll always fill them, but it just doesn't scale beyond them.
Ain't nobody dreaming about living in downtown Columbus or Cleveland or Detroit. You live there if you work there.
From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*.
There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions.
These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.
That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely:
Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services?
> every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments
Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).
Did it? Not in NYC. Crime is very low; it's arguably one of the safest places to be in the country.
That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates.
> Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
What makes you say that has changed from the past?
Murder may be low.
Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
> Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.
The relevant bits:
>>>Only 37 percent rate public safety in their neighborhood as excellent or good, down from 50 % in 2017 [1] (yikes!)
>>> In fact, New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the DAY now as they felt on the subway at NIGHT in 2017 [1]
In fact, this source confirms my entire premise, that while murder has been down vs the horrendous stats of 20 years ago, nonmurder felonies and other crimes have spiked only recently. These 2 now EXCEED the stats of horrendous stats of 20 years ago. [2]
[1] https://cbcny.org/research/straight-from-new-yorkers [2] See article, figure 2.
You don't need all caps or exaggeration - you have data!
> In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”
> Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
What shows that it's high? It's circular to say that the unknown numbers are higher, not lower, because you think crime is high.
> a large Democrat-dominated city
What does the political party have to do with it, unless this really is about your politics? Republican areas of the country have higher crime rates, last I checked. If you think there's a correlation between party and crime rate, feel free to show us.
> (Pew data)
It's great to have some data, thanks. I don't know that anything has changed, however, though I imagine numbers were different during the pandemic and immediately after.
Numbers could be better now, for all we know.
You have actual data - why kill your argument by exaggerating it?
The stats you posted are about perception, not actual events. If people read other people constantly badgering them about safety, of course they will worry about it.
I've read one news story on an analysis of Broken Windows (so not a lot of data) said that outcomes were not correlated with that strategy. Crime went down everywhere, whether or not they used Broken Windows.
Mayors and police chiefs, etc. are called geniuses or fools in strong correlation with national trends, especially the economy. Lots of 1990s mayors, etc. were geniuses as the economy boomed and crime came down nationwide.
I never felt unsafe in LA, but I sure as hell felt disgusted when someone spit on us, and a bunch of other negative emotions when you saw the worst of the homeless population or drug use or anything else.
Was I unsafe ? No, but was it clearly disorderly? Yep.
In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.
(Tourists' impressions of safety are a really terrible guide to anything, and can be dramatically incorrect in either direction.)
On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.
As less persecutions end up in convictions, and as accusations of bias can mean the end of a police officer career, there's also a more lax attitude from the police force.
Crime becomes less risky and more rewarding, what drives crime force recruitment up, the culture becomes more and more accepting, and petty criminals over time graduate to more serious crimes. Substance abuse, violence, it all just adds to the culture.
Soon you'll start noticing that there areas of the city where police presence is virtually inexistent, and the people who live on those places realize that involving the police could bring unpleasant consequences. Those liberated areas are for all practical purposes, outside the reach of the State.
Soon, murders start going unnoticed, fights against rival gangs lead to deaths, but unless the bodies are found, nobody is going to involve the police. People simply cease to exist and disappear, no records.
Politicians, prosecutors and police chiefs soon realize the political advantage of not digging too much into reality and promoting the lie that the official statistics, utterly corrupted by the incomplete data collection, are trustworthy and represent the reality.
Terminally political people and journalists, that are nowadays basically propaganda officers, start gaslighting everyone that dares to say otherwise. You can't feel safe in the subway, but you are either crazy or a simpleton if you don't believe NYC is one of the safest places in the world, look at the data!
But I also think it’s odd that you think NYC is underreporting murders and not going after serious crimes, when if you go into rural areas, you’ll find many that are a few Sheriffs stretched thin over hundreds of miles, and infinite more potential for “murders going unnoticed.”
https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...
Paints a picture
Averages, per-capita, even if we could trust the data, and we definitely can't because NY government is a cesspool of corruption means absolutely nothing, because every one who lives in the real world knows that violence is not uniformly distributed. You can lie to yourself as much as you want, it is your choice, but I've seen this movie before, that's how things start, and them there's a moment when even people like you can't deny it anymore, but it will only get there exactly because of folks like you that prefer to live in the bizarre illusion that being a member of your ideological bubble makes you a high status person.
People like you make me remember the old soviet joke when they get astounded with the faith Americans had in their media, because the soviets at least were able to recognize propaganda for what it is.
'Everyone knows' is a group of people repeating something to each other enough that they believe it must be true. Those are the things that most need skepticism, an objective factual basis. Look at your comment - there is no factual basis for any of the claims. Some is conspiracy - if they disagree, they are gaslighting, incompetent, etc.
Objective facts are our only salvation from our own delusions - which we're all subject to. There is factual basis to say that NYC is very safe, but it's not conclusive. That doesn't support baseless claims. If you have an alternative claim, there's not reason to believe it without factual support.
Almost everyone you're talking to here lives in the developed world, and it doesn't seem like they 'know' the same thing.
> You can't feel safe in the subway
You can, and many do. I do.
Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.
That said, I understand the desire to frame crime in the absolute. Either you’re the 1 guy who gets unlucky and experiences a crime in your small town, or there are 999 people like you in the big city). Crime is a problem of scale, and a bigger scale freaks people out even if the coefficients are the same.
Majority of murders are among people who know each other. You personal risk is all about who your partner is, who your friends are, how much aggressive your uncle is. A guy you never met that is just about to murder his wife has nothing to do with your personal risk.
It freaks out people who live elsewhere and all they know of cities is what they see on cable news, especially a certain channel.
> There’s a psychological reason (rational or not) people equate cities with violence
Maybe it's simply that it's repeated at them endlessly - a simple, effective tactic used by conservatives for decades.
I lived in NYC for 20 years, people who live there too long develop stockholm syndrome excusing the shit that goes on on a daily basis. Every new yorker experiences it given enough time.
The common saying is that when a 'transplant' moves and starts questioning the filfth, noise, qol issues and minor crime they are told to go back to Ohio.
I used to be that person , then I realized that living in an environment where you excuse this behavior as normal... is not normal.
So you can spread your message of "statistically safe" as much as you want but everyone knows that new yorkers put up with a different amount of s*t than most.
Lots of NYers love living there, obviously - they are willing to pay far more for the privilege (another objective fact). You dismissing their preferences is just one person's baseless speculation.
Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.
If anything, the real # in 2023 of 386 only further proves my point. That it's ridiculous to assert even that many more murders is less safe than Stockton, CA.
Safety is about "am I more or less likely to have something happen to me" and no one is thinking that means moving to the tiniest country of 2,000 people where only 10 murders happened in the entire country last year.
I contend it is significantly safer in the majority of cities in the US than New York City.
You seem to be implying per capita is a bad measure of safety. But you're not being clear why. Can you elaborate?
Your conclusion is without any evidence and is in fact, wrong, based on the crime metrics we can easily compare.
It's quite uncanny that it's the people who most fear crime, think they're going to something like "stay the hell away from crime infested NYC" and proceed to move somewhere where they're more likely to be affected by crime.
Rational or not, proximity of crime freaks some people out much more than probability of being the victim.
You're factually wrong.
You may be thinking of a median or mode, which can differ based on the shape of the distribution curve.
People are just reaching for possible straws. Do you have any factual basis to say that? We can make up anything and put the word 'might' or 'maybe' in front of them.
I've spent lots of time in NYC and other dense, major cities, and I think I've seen one crime ($20 stolen). The interstate highway is more threatening, with the aggressive drivers.
Really, go to NYC. Look at the millions of people walking around without a care, going about their days.
You are correct that if the average number of observers per crime is higher, that could indeed make a place feel comparatively more dangerous since the while the liklihood of being a victim is lower, the liklihood of seeing a victim is higher. However, I would posit that a lot more goes into feelings of safety and we haven't seen any data on how large this effect size might be.
Yes, agreed (of course). I'm not sure what that says about the original statement.
> The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
First, it seems like we are really shifting the goalposts. Being victimized by crime is a lot different than witnessing it, though the latter isn't pleasant, of course.
How much does it matter? In a place that dense, you see a lot more of everything. For people there, it's a feature and not a bug. That's why people pay so much to live there.
Is witnessing a crime so bad? I suppose something traumatizing would be, but I think NYers are used to seeing 'everything, all the time', and they would not be traumatized by most crime. Murder? I think that would leave a mark, depending on what you saw, but that's very rare. Shoplifting? Public intoxication? A carjacking would be alarming, I suppose, speaking for myself.
I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?
There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!
You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!
I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.
And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.
I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.
Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).
Another thing might be that it feels unsafe due to social isolation maybe, for people who are actually there, but that is just a supposition.
I think it's reasonable that they feel it's less safe. I often feel things that I know do not exactly correspond to statistical reality, one should just try to be aware of where the feelings slightly diverge and not go arguing that what one feels is objective reality.
That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.
This applies equally to the outer boroughs. Poorer neighborhoods (in any borough) are scrappier, of course, than the rich areas. But they're just as full of life and vibrancy.
I really take your point on the media projection. It's relentless. And it really keeps an outdated image alive, especially in the minds of people who don't live here and can't directly contrast with their own eyes.
I agree, but I'm not that old and that's the image of New York City I grew up with because it was then true.
It takes more than a generation to overcome that kind of impression. I'm pretty confident that if you asked New Yorkers my parents' age what the South is like you'd get a lot of answers that were unpleasantly accurate in 1965. This is particularly true when a lot of political polarization is based on region and urbanization.
I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.
Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.
> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.
The campaign about Western cities is not from China, but from Western conservatives. Look at Trump and the GOP (and now the Democrat governor of NY!) repeatedly calling for the national guard or military to be sent into cities.
If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).
Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.
One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.
The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.
The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.
The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.
In GP comment - sorry too late to edit.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-saf...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...
In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.
[1] https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-law...
Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?
Here is yet another source from the U.S. Department of Justice [2]: "During the period from 2006 to 2010, 52% of all violent victimizations, or an annual average of 3,382,200 violent victimizations, were not reported to the police.".
Realistically speaking it is hard to measure unreported crimes given that by definition they are - after all - unreported. And yet the fact that some data is not collected or it is hard to collect, doesn't mean that the data doesn't exist.
> Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this?
I could be asking you the same question, based on your stance.
[1] - https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/Universit...
[2] - https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
I'm not sure how the no-snitch culture lowers the crime rate; it would seem to lower the conviction rate.
IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities.
I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments.
Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice".
The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.
Residential landlords are also much different than dealing with corp real estate owners. The terms, length of lease, laws and many other factors are completely different.
Office generally try to maximize square footage, this tends to result in floor plans that are very awkward to adopt into residential use, primarily because the building code virtually everywhere has some sort of "natural light"/window requirement.
This means that purpose built residential high rises tend to be "skinnier" to have more windows per sq. ft of floor space. Not to mention the very expensive changes (hvac, plumbing, etc.) required to support residential use.
If the building code was changed so that the requirements for office and residential use buildings were closer then it would make future buildings more easily convertible between those use cases. It does not solve the problem of the existing buildings however..
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre....
I said to the clerk "that's a 99-2003 GMC Sierra in case you want to tell them when you call it in"
And he replied "oh we don't even call the police.. they won't do anything"
I was so angry I called corporate on the way home. Corporate told me "oh yes that's right, that's our policy. We have insurance for that!"
I said "that's great you have insurance, but I'd like my police department and newspaper to know my town is going to hell..."
If you don't prosecute, it effectively stops being illegal.
You are saying, effectively, that we know that smoke always comes from fire simply because when you light a fire, you see smoke.
You can't argue that policing deters crime simply because when there is policing, crimes are prosecuted. That makes a lot of bad assumptions about the nature of crime itself that I don't think a single criminologist would follow you on.
Why couldn't you? Defund the police = less prosecutions, less policing = more criminals...
Why wouldn't someone argue easily proven points that more police = more safety (Yes, some corruption does exist but it's not like that corruption goes away when the police do.)
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when...
"...from that perspective, investing in more police officers to save lives provides a pretty good bang for the buck. Adding more police, they find, also reduces other serious crimes, like robbery, rape, and aggravated assault."
I don't see why this necessarily follows. Unless, e.g., the only reason you are not killing your neighbor is because your pretty sure you will be prosecuted for it.
To view the whole world as just itching to commit crimes as soon as they can get away with it is just already buying into the presuppositions of policing the original gp was interrogating.
Like its fine I guess if you want to have this pseudo-Hobbesian outlook to it all, but you can't pretend its something logical/rational. Because it simply isn't!
AKA: more "criminals".
"the only reason you're not killing your neighbor" thats a bit extreme but... yes.
"you can't pretend it's logical rational" Of course I can.
One, it is logical/rational - it's the same reason why people smoke less when you raise taxes on cigs. If it costs more? people will do it less. That cost might be taxes... or possible repercussions. Public shunning. Jailtime. Death penalty. You can pick your topic and if we look at push back against "bad" then the result is less bad.
Two, who says humans are logical/rational? We aren't that far out of the animal stage... we can pretend that we aren't driven by base emotions and the like. Humans are more often than not illogical and irrational. Making stupid decisions. IE: Gambling, drinking, drugs, cheating, etc.
So it's absolute defensible that more police (or, at a baser level, more consequences and more visibility of those consequences for bad decisions) results in less crime (or bad decisions). It's also absolutely defensible that humans are not rational/logical.
Can you think of any other?
The DA's resources are limited (unless all the Republican critics want to pay more taxes!). Arrest is enough of a deterrent for minor crimes.
It has nothing to do with deterring crimes or crime rates, it is just politics.
The police where I live are transparently useless. Someone tried to steal my car at bart. Even my auto insurance didn't bother asking for a police report while paying out $3k for a repair to the door. Everyone involved understands it's an utter waste of time and not a thing will happen.
For at least n=1, no crime happened.
Well, I don’t know. What should be done about this? I guess I thought my report might be tabulated, that perhaps a pawn shop or two might be called. My wife and I were living financial-aid-reimbursement-check to MGIB check to work-study check at the time. We got the one of the cheapest car stereos we could find, but it still hurt. We had just gotten it installed literally that day, and the next morning it was gone.
I’m sorry to have wasted your time, officer. There’s probably a kid with a one-hitter that you could arrest on your way back to the station.
https://www.cjcj.org/media/import/documents/san_franciscans_...
Take a look at the chart on page 2.
What does explain it is what explains many other things that don't match facts, about the economy, vaccines, climate change, election legitimacy, Obama's birthplace, etc. Whatever the conservative message machine focuses on, generally a large portion of the population believes.
It's easy to say there's less crime when you make stuff not a crime.
For reference: all the stores closing because of all of the theft not being prosecuted or that's no longer enforced.
IE: California where theft of under $1000 is no longer enforced.
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto...
In comparison, Texas has a $2,500 threshold for upgrading from a misdemeanor to a felony:
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...
Maybe, maybe not. From a very brief Google search, in 2022, 8% of felonies were not prosecuted, and of the remaining more than half of felony charges were downgraded by prosecutors to misdemeanors in NYC.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/apr/08/ron-desant...
This is a fact check of a claim by DeSantis, and the claim is true... with the caveat that it's totally normal and all the prosecutors are doing it.
Part me of wonders... others are saying "all that theft is employee driven" as a talking point (yeah, I've got my own talking points too. Se'la'vie lol) - how much of it is old data - data from a decade ago before the soft on crime, defund the police crowd took over - and how much of it is employees not reporting crimes that waste everyones time in the current climate.
It'll be interesting to see if we get real data over the years and can look back at this failed experiment on "justice" objectively enough to show what an utter disaster it currently is.
"Texas" Texas also has stand your ground laws and castle defense... so it's a lot easier to stop criminals. IE: Florida where a sheriff said "We have free gun classes so you can help save tax payers money when defending your property by not missing" (paraphrased).
The point still stands: CA took a $50 limit, bumped it up to $950, elects DAs that don't prosecute misdeamenors - and, as such, store owners don't report crimes that won't lead to prosecutions. Why waste the time? - so when you look at it from a statistical perspective? Oh look... crime numbers are down.
Never mind that more stuff is being stole on a more consistent basis... the lack of higher level crimes (Fewer felonies) and the lack of prosecutions (Why prosecute a misdemeanor as a DA... and why report stuff to police that won't get prosecuted as a business owner...) look better on paper but businesses and people are more unsafe than ever.
Where in NY are these stores closing?
I live closer to PHL and hear similar claims / rumours.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/it-s-started-shoplif...
I certainly agree there might be spin, but then why choose theft?
The progressive D.A.'s and A.G.'s, who own this project of mass downward departure from normal sentencing, do not expect things to change overnight by taking pressure off (mainly) the poor and the young.
But in 5-10 years if crime is worse and society more stratified, their project can be called a failure.
I've personally witnessed three blatant thefts in the last few years from my local Duane Reade (that closed down in April). Every time the clerks are like "pretty sure that was the same guy from yesterday". It's never violent or scary. It's just like watching a fight between homeless people in a subway station -- you look, think that's odd, and move on.
> Where in NY are these stores closing? 4 different pharmacies that have closed down since the pandemic just on my path to work, including two a stone's throw from the NY stock exchange. https://maps.app.goo.gl/fJcHCgjVacP5pEuHA https://maps.app.goo.gl/kmDXnjHruMCvS2CA6
I suspect it's not all shrinkage though. I imagine continued trends where we buy more and more things via online retailers like Amazon and the growth of online/by mail pharmacies has contributed too. CVS/Duane Reade are still opening new locations too, so it can't be all that bad.
Not the main thing I've been arguing, per-se but the fact that the national guard is being deployed into places like the subway seems to bolster the notion that NY isn't doing well.
https://abc7ny.com/subway-crime-nyc-statistics-assault/14381...
"According to the NYPD, there were 570 reports of felony assault on trains or in stations in 2023, that's the highest number in more than 20 years and a 53% jump from pre-pandemic levels."
January crime was up 50% compared to 2023 - and yes, that's a 2 year snapshot. Statistics is the game of picking the two points and saying "SEE! I'M RIGHT!"
but the main points is that violent crime is up.
The main point of my comments is more general crime - its hard to say crime is down when recent decisions to raise the bar to charge people has literally made fewer things crimes so "crime is down" can be true from a "statistically reported" perspective while actual numbers are up.
Look at California that raised the level of misdemeanor to $950... so felonies are down? Gee... I wonder why? Even though objectively more crime is happening, less is getting reported because people won't waste their time on "misdemeanors" that won't get charged by soft on crime DA. Crimes down? True... but also a lie.
Crime is running rampant as criminality is now, for all intents, legal if you're under a threshold. (or, if you're of the right demographics to "atone for past injustice")
S&F has been "unconstitutional" for over a decade - and that's not counting Defund The Police shenannery, open border policies and stuff like "bail reform".
IE: Illegal immigrants attacking police and getting released without bail.
Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".
Think of an old brick building with several stories and a window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with windows spanning multiple floors.
The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge cost.
The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building not purposed for this is challenging (where does the "contaminated" air go out?).
It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.
consider a detective office in a movie from like the '50s. the office is small, primary illumination is from large, openable windows, maybe there's a front section for a secretary. that happens to be pretty more or less around the ideal size for an apartment as well, though for more bedrooms you probably need to merge adjacent offices.
now consider the office block from Office Space. it's extremely large and dark in the middle. it is so large that there is no way you could possibly get natural light into the middle easily. in Office Space that's kind of the point, the darkness and required artificial lighting makes it super depressing and a dystopian commentary on the modern economy. who would want to live in an interior like that?
Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.
Nobody wants to work there, yet lots of people work there since they need money. And it's the employer who chooses the location. Of course top talent does not need to work in a crappy company, but that's the theory. Also empty space = less trafic. And you can get food delivered. If you can afford it.
People are foreced to work in crappy open plan offices all the time.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Ka...
California and Indiana both had a population of about 2.7 million in 1916. Indiana had a dense rail network and California didn't. Indiana is only ~5x smaller than California.
This is what the rail network looked like in 1916:
https://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/4400/4401/4401.htm
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wx98GRYpPaRbrcRg6?g_st=ic
This seems off. If you consult this map and chart [0] Paris seems to do something very similar to NYC with regard to density. There's the city of Paris proper (75 on the map) which has a slightly higher population than Manhattan but a much lower density (52k/sq mi in Paris vs 74k). Then as soon as you get out of that 40 sq mi (about the size of the Bronx) into the the petite couronne density drops to well below that of any one of the five boroughs besides Staten Island.
So, yeah, if you take an area the size of a single NYC borough in the Paris region that's drawn specifically around the densest population zone then it has a higher density than NYC taken as a whole. But if you compare most-dense-zone to most-dense-zone then NYC is denser by a fairly wide margin, and if you compare areas that are of a similar size rather than only including the City of Paris proper then NYC wins again.
It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris
I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC, so comparisons between NYC boroughs (which are each almost as big as the city of Paris) and Paris' surrounding departments are clearly favorable for NYC.
If you compare cities of similar size, i.e. Paris with Los Angeles (which is still bigger, both city and metro area), then the european capital is significantly ahead in density (and I did not cherry pick Los Angeles specifically, it's the same for Chicago, Houston, etc.), and the difference is very significant: Even the core of those US cities (excepting NYC) is less dense than the 3 inner Parisian suburb departments (!!).
Isn't that just another way of saying that they drew the city boundaries differently than they did in NYC? If you extend the boundaries out to the 814 km^2 of Greater Paris, that gives it a fairly similar population to NYC (7m compared to 8.8m) with a very similar area (814 km^2 to 778 km^2).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris
The 'secret' of European downtowns is that they are not uninhabited.
There never was a housing shortage, there’s just a shortage of people willing to live in vibrant urban neighborhoods.
is that a euphemism? DC used to lead the nation in murder rate for decades -- the DC basketball team used to be the Washington Bullets, which stopped being ironic and funny after a couple years. There are still DC neighborhoods where the police won't send cops without 3+ cars of backup.
DC has gotten much better but is still like #12 or #13 in the US, and it's bad areas are still very bad. The rest of the Fed-Gov areas in the city are locked down hard, but no one lives there, and nearby areas Georgetown or Tenleytown are expensive. Source: from the area, went to AU, had to do background investigations on dudes in SE DC.
Houses that are in bad areas where no one wants to live willingly isn't part of acceptable housing inventory.
"In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place")."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...
There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.
It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings.
Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.
This is unlike the office towers mentioned in the article, which don’t really lend themselves naturally to being apartments.
It's changing though I'm seeing 40 story (luxury) apartment complexes go up all over Dutch cities.
In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular traffic.
[1]https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous...
Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it.
Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes.
I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad.
I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.
They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.
Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.
One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West, where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and in their remuneration levels.
> That means facilities are spotless
I can assure you no stations are remotely spotless. In fact I'm surprised some of them aren't considered fire hazards. Ueno, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Akihabara, all have extremely messy areas. Newer stations appear clean but that's only because they're new AFAICT. Just commenting because I don't want people to ge the wrong impression. They might be cleaner than SF, NYC, Paris on average but they're not as clean as Stockholm or Singapore
But I agree with you that the others are a mess. Shibuya and Ueno look like half the stations are falling apart, and Shinjuku is some kind of non-euclidean labyrinth, every time I go there, I get lost. If there is even a fire there, the death toll is going to be immense.
In Japan, at major train stations I find the bathrooms reasonably clean and good to use. In New York, it smells of poop and pee because the odds are that someone probably publicly urinated, or some pipe somewhere in the subway tunnel is leaking sewage.
That said, the bathrooms between JR Shinjuku and Marunouchi-line used to smell pretty rancid. I haven't used them recently though.
MTA in New York City has about 70k employees.
That’s the objective reality, in most of the USA.
The only way they’ll attract people that aren’t forced to use it, for financial reasons, is to remove the piss and puke from the floor, the stains of the same composition from the seats (although rock hard plastic is getting popular to compensate), and prevent, not remove, the guy with obvious drug and mental health issues, and now has his dick out, from boarding.
If you want something to be attractive for the general population, it has to, literally, be attractive, or at least not repulsive. Otherwise, the shorter commutes and clean interior that personal transport gives is the obvious choice, as it currently, measurably, is.
But, that can’t happen, because anything nice will be destroyed/vandalized, because anyone can board. The goal of not discriminating against anything or anyone is a choice that society has made (probably the correct one) that makes public transport literal shit.
I don’t miss the few times I used it, then noped back into my car.
You of course need a plan for the poor but that should be a minority.
So by not paying your ticket/subscription, you only had to hope for not seeing controllers who could fine you.
A few years ago, they said that too many people were not actually paying for usage, so they decided to put physical restrictions (fare gates?).
Journalists decided to investigate and they did the math. Basically they came up with something like : once you take everything into account (building and maintaining physical machines for buying fares and controlling access, managing everything around billing, enforcing fares with human controllers...), on every euro spent by a user, more than 60% went to the costs related to the fare system itself. Less than 40% was actual money that the company could use to improve the UX.
And obviously, the overall UX decreased because they also raised the fares. So we're paying more, there's still lots of bad people in the stations/subway, but now we have to go through a metal gate to prove that we have paid the fare and do the same to exit PT. Which, obviously, creates virtual congestion at peak hours, because the human flow is slowed and the width to pass is much narrower than it used to be.
Meanwhile, in another city, they went the other way : free PT. I have yet to hear of some regular users seeing it as the decrease in UX.
A lot of public transit where I live (Mumbai) is subsidized, which means its not profitable to run the way it is run.
That was a very popular decision at the time (help mobility of the poor), but it ends up with massive underdevelopment as the needs expand. There’s no money for private companies to invest in the infra and it waits on election cycles to push investment.
I feel that if it was actually profitable to build new trains / metros / etc it would have happened much quicker.
I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.
I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.
I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.
So even if you turn into apartments the areas close to windows the rest of the space is still taxed even if empty.
Thus, in areas like Manhattan it's virtually impossible to convert those buildings or you need to literally cut off the center of these buildings.
Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.
Kansas City's Power & Light district, which you mention, was built by the Cordish Companies, which cut and paste in Louisville and Baltimore, among others.
https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts
Certainly there are benefits of revitalizing urban spaces but the fact that it is entirely engineered, has little room for local entrepreneurs, and most financial benefits flow to a small cadre of real estate giants, is also somewhat concerning.
There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.
Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space.
Tldr; idk, necessary evil?
One issue is theres longstanding zoning laws on conversions that limit what can be converted based on year of construction. The year doesn't automatically move forward annually so a new law has to be passed to adjust it otherwise it remains stuck at 1965 or something like that.
KC is an underrated city, and a surprising tech area. Getting Google Fiber first definitely helped. It is commonly called Silicon Prairie.
It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but still worth pointing out.
Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.
70m2 for anyone wondering
The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit.
But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?
If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.
I once toured a building that had been converted from an old warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned the space directly across the hallway. They were very large, and people had transformed them into offices, arcades, workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have been.
You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.
Maybe, but you can't throw out the building codes. A warehouse, certainly, can be retrofit. But office towers? Almost certainly not.
Elevators are not sized for residential; electrical service not sized for residential loads (dishwasher/dryer/microwaves/ovens); HVAC not sized for residential heat loads (same as above); metering requirements means the existing electrical rooms are not large enough (they are never large enough); plumbing and sewer are not sized for residential.
It goes on and on. Even if you got the building for free, you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again. It's not entirely clear whether it is or is not.
It can be done if you make huge, expansive apartments, which has to be read as "really expensive". There aren't that many really rich people who can drop 5 figures per month for an apartment.
Dishwashers are negligible; microwaves are a souped-up gaming PC and run a lot less; ovens and dryers are more of a concern, but as with HVAC, I'd like proof that an office's draw (with all its attendant equipment) is more than the what you'd have with a dozen (tops) condos. Plumbing and sewer are the only legitimate concerns I've seen yet. And yet: will, way.
>you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again
These numbers never include externalities like the carbon and refuse footprint of demolishing and rebuilding. How many million metric tons of steel and concrete do we need to dispose of if this becomes a de-facto national policy?
Also, the lighting is probably 277V in an office. This precludes any owner-installed fixtures, the super has to do all of that. Moving it to 120V means more transformers, for which there isn't room without sacrificing rentable space.
HVAC, assuming CW/HW to VAV boxes, has the pumps sized for the number. Which may be less or more in residential, depending. It also precludes (or at least makes very difficult) the ability to meter HVAC usage per apartment.
The point isn't that is is impossible. It's just expensive. That expense has to be borne by somebody.
Tearing down good buildings and building new is wasteful and causes more pollution then repurposing. These for profit corporations externalized these costs upon us repressing.
Planning for those who plan to use planned obsolescence to generate a profit.
Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.
In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.
What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.
But once you choose high-density, you don't get much in the way of do-overs. For much the same reason that once you choose thinness as a positive metric for laptops, you lose a lot of flexibility.
I personally don't think it'd be bad to have a larger chunk of buildings be more versatile but you'd lose some of the economic efficiencies (agglomeration effects and positive spillovers) from the concentration of firms in business districts etc.
In every scenario you win some and lose some, and it's not always clear to me we should go all in on any of the bets.
Building codes and practices are different for commercial and residential for good reasons.
Would probably make it take more cooling?
Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.
Unless they specifically tear it down during redevelopment (why would they?), there should be plenty of air circulation.
Conventional wisdom is that there won't be too many windows available to throw conventional wisdom out of :-)
(Cue arguments on how dystopian this is. But hey, if the daylight simulator was to-spec, it wouldn't be the worst of things.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munger_Hall
Lots of basement bedrooms that don't meet egress codes.
It was spectacular.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/cit...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
Note that things such as arcades may need additional power demands that the area isn't sized for (fire risk). Workshops may need added ventilation and woodsheds would require additional power too. A theater type area could have issues with fire codes and occupancy.
It’s a beautiful building, with roomy communal spaces and vintage timber all over. I probably would have bought there if I weren’t too noise sensitive for timber floors.
I've forgotten of that place for years. Truly magical. Thank you for the memory. I almost shake recalling it.
In St Louis, the largest building in the state, which is 1.4M square feet and 44 stories, recently sold for $3.5M. It sat empty for several years despite being offered basically for free. The new owners have not announced plans for it.
It's a pretty pure test of your claim. I guess we'll see what happens.
I just think there is so much space that you can use in a residential setting without natural light. Your movie room. Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy it at a discount if it were offered to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Garry_Hoy
> While giving a tour of the Toronto-Dominion Centre to a group of articling students, he attempted to demonstrate the strength of the structure's window glass by slamming himself into a window. He had apparently performed this stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced harmlessly off the glass. After one attempt which saw the glass hold up, Hoy tried once more. In this instance, the force of Hoy slamming into the window removed the window from its frame, causing the entire intact window and Hoy to fall from the building.
Pulling oneself up onto something by one's fingertips takes a lot of strength. Should have tried that beforehand. (It looks easy in the movies, but those stunt people are very fit.)
In a system like this, if the AHU stops for any reason, the whole floor is effected. Since chillers and associated equipment are very expensive, I would imagine the maintenance fees would be uncomfortable. (get it? Sorry.)
(In NYC, we all agreed to believe that there is no such thing as residential air conditioning that is not in the form of a window unit, however.)
We don't generally design safety regulations around "should" and averages, but instead when edge cases happen, as the magnitude of the outcome is very important to take into consideration. I'm not sure what you're trying to express with your comment.
1: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-persons-d_691.html
The residential stories have casement windows, within the curtain wall, that can swing up to 4 inches (100 mm) outward. In addition, some condominium units have motorized windows at least seven feet (2.1 m) above the floor.[1]
The condominiums start on the 32nd floor, according to the same article.
If building can't easily be retrofitted to allow openable windows, then I would assume they either can't be used for residential or they could try to get some sort of exemption if they can prove it's safe. I'm mostly going off what I know about building codes and what I've read previously on the topic when it's posted and it's delved into what the actual problems are in converting to residential.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Tower
Commercial building windows in general do not open at all.
The problem is not that every window needs to open, it's that some windows need to open. In the building codes I've seen in the past for residential homes, that was expressed as a percentage of square feet of the room or entire building.
So, are you saying there are plenty of tall condos where no windows in a specific dwelling open, or that they have some windows that don't open? If they have no windows that don't open, do you mind mentioning where, as I'd be interested in what the solution was to the problem of needing to allow for passive ventilation.
My friend owns a condo in Vancouver. No windows open.
Also Seattle: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/s2s7bx/cant_open_a...
Also https://www.reddit.com/r/askTO/comments/omdxmp/downtown_unit...
It does appear to be that in New York it might be required though[1], so it's possibly still a problem depending on area. I'm not going to act like I'm an expert on reading building codes or that one in general though, so I could be misinterpreting it. SF had what clearly seemed like a mechanical ventilation exception in it when I just looked, but SF and Manhattan are the only things I looked up to compare to see if I could find whether it seemed fairly universally allowed or not.
1: https://up.codes/viewer/new_york_city/nyc-building-code-2022... and https://up.codes/viewer/new_york_city/nyc-building-code-2022...
Nobody is exiting the 60th floor of a skyscraper through the window. We don’t even have ladders that go that high on firetrucks in New York [1].
[1] https://www.fdnysmart.org/fire-trucks/ 95 ft, or about 10 stories
The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to be 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.
Yeah, if it doesn't meet the legal definition of a bedroom, it can't be listed as one. That's partially why there are so few interior rooms - lower property value vs if it was a bedroom (but mainly consumer demand for windows).
Most able bodied adults can break drwall between the studs. It’s not a particularly strong material.
You keep an axe in your bedroom?
But the long handle makes it difficult to swing in a melee, and slow to swing, and once the swing starts it will be very hard to change its arc. Hence, your target can easily sidestep it. I suppose it would be good against plate armor, but not many villains wear plate armor these days. You also have to be careful with a fire axe to not chop your foot if you miss. I don't think I've ever seen a war axe/hatchet/tomahawk anywhere near that size.
For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.
P.S. I am no martial arts expert.
Wielding a baseball bat, you have to constantly worry about the opponent's getting his hands on the bat and wrestling it away from you: a screwdriver is better.
Eh, not really. That's still a lot of unbalanced mass and potentially excessive length. There's a reason batons and other strike weapons aren't made like bats.
The second best is something that you've extensively practiced with, and designed for the purpose.
When we were looking for a new house we toured one that had a bit of remodeling done. What was done was the back patio was enclosed to turn it into a room. The detail was that there was an existing bedroom that had a window onto the patio.
The solution, which I have to assume passed code, was simply to retain the bedroom window, even though it did not lead to the outdoors. So this house had an interior window.
Yes, here's an article with great visualizations on how developers are coring out the center of repurposed office buildings in order to create columns of natural light (and how, in certain jurisdictions, this lost square footage can then be reclaimed via new construction stacked on top of the building): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings and skylights.
Oh well.
If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the middle block pushed out on each level.
In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so of the potential floorspace.
So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME
You're losing 100% of the floor space when it's an unused commercial building.
An un or under-rented building has some potential value based on various hand-wavy factors. Things may get better next year and you've only lost a year's of potential revenue. You may be able to hand the burning bag of dog crap to some star-eyed dreamer.
Taking out a loan, applying for permits, etc, locks in the loss. You get to tell your bank the asset they've got for collateral is worth a lot less, but hey you've got a plan that involves chopping the building apart so there are big holes in it so you can rent it to residents instead of commercial leases.
Hey it's a brand new market and a wonderful opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightwell
The 'zoning' here is more building by building rather than neighborhood based.
But I mean the same kind of administrative issue holds back conversions here. Most Office buildings here would be ideal. They're not that big because here it's illegal to offer office space without plenty of daylight.
And you’d mainly be missing the yards.
Most of these office buildings they’re talking about should just be knocked down and new purpose-built multi-use buildings built in their place.
Delivery costs could also be super cheap.
Methinks people buying right before COVID at rock bottom interest rates has clouded the judgement of many. This is not a sure fire road to success right now, I can tell you that much.
The government will give you a bunch of free money to leverage an investment in real estate. This isn't true of other investments.
Yes, but for most of them you need to convince someone else that giving you the money is a good idea.
Such is the dreaded once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe like COVID and the money printing scam that happened after that that destroyed so much value in money. But others that got in before me at historically low interest and reasonable asset prices just tell me I need to buck up and work harder. I bet you they would be shitting bricks if they were in my shoes. It's like a nightmare I haven't been able to wake up from. :(
The job market isn't as competitive as the Bay Area, but if you can remote work and/or get a local non-tech job making a livable wage (there's so many lifted trucks out here, these guys make money), it almost doesn't matter what you do for work, it pays the bills and you can spend time with family after that. You have a house, you have a car, you have a family, maybe you even have a camper like many others around you, and you go camping at the lake every month in the summer! Truly, rural living can actually be an idyllic paradise if you do it right!
And yet... I wish we could. I know it's not a great investment monetarily, but there are the fringe benefits, like being able to make the place my own or knowing that I'm not going to have to relocate the kids in a couple of years with a few months' notice because the landlord decides he wants the unit back.
Lots of recently-built suburbia is a money pit [1].
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...
I grew up in various times in a rural place with all sorts of animals where it was just me and my brother for miles and I also grew up later in a city where there were so many kids we would self-organize into all sorts of games and sports.
Personally, the rural place was great and the urban place was great, but the suburban place has neither adventure nor abundance of playmates. Hundreds of nearby families is the absolute dream!
Having a shared space where there are enough families around that there will be 10 kids guaranteed on the playground is nicer in a lot of ways than having 3 kids try to decide whose spacious yard is the gathering spot today.
Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces. In the beginning, they were low cost because of some undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not possible?
Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some of the most in demand housing because of the large space and natural lighting.
Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of small volumes and poor access.
Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work. Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc
A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try. Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.
Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.
Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction.
So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability.
Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.
Additional leftover interior space can be used for amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the existing space that doesn't require tearing down a building.
Maybe a bit like the industrial lot to condo process that happened in NYC and other places awhile ago?
It’ll be weird, but folks will adapt.
I’m not sure why folks wouldn’t just build in the ‘burbs (and work remotely) in most cases though?
If one of the mega-big buildings would be converted to studios, meaning they could 'slice' 20-30 studios per floor, keep one floor for gym/dry cleaners/etc. they would be making a (financial) killing.
...they could be used as home-offices perhaps?
The question is why, and what's wrong with marginal housing (sounds like a great way to reduce homelessness)
The numbers show that Americans order delivery and eat at restaurants more (and cook less) than they have in recent history.
It's intriguing because while flipping and renovating kitchens to have more space - stoves, ovens, and refrigerators is on the rise, fewer families actively use the space over the last decade. (The same can be said for colleges moving from dorms to apartment style housing)
This especially applies to marginal households, but also significantly to upper middle class -> upper class and dense housing.
That's not to say it's healthy for our diets.
But the answer is because sometimes you do need a kitchen, even if it’s to boil some water or whatever or reheat takeout, or because your Mom is visiting and wants to make something. Sharing a kitchen is often a nightmare if you can’t control who else is sharing it - constant fights over dirty dishes being one example. They often get tied up exactly when you want to use them too.
And having your own bathroom (the two are highly correlated as both require ‘wet walls’, and custom plumbing) is great when you want some privacy, are sick, etc. or have some safety concerns.
It can get even more gross and disturbing to share those when you can’t control who you’re sharing with. It’s a common friction point to share a bathroom even with room mates. A lot of people (especially women) flat out avoid public bathrooms due to safety and ‘ick’ concerns.
Imagine if the only toilet you could use if you woke up at 2am and needed to pee was a public toilet.
There is nothing wrong per-se with marginal housing, except they tend to attract ‘marginal people’ that bring with them trouble that others don’t want to deal with if they can avoid it. It does help with homelessness and the like - but it tends to self filter into dangerous territory, because who is going to want to stay at a place where homeless people stay unless they are homeless themselves?
Sharing them is always a step down in experience. It is always cheaper though, as the kitchen and the bathroom are usually the two highest maintenance and ‘most expensive’ rooms.
Most folks stuck in those situations move out ASAP - think dorm rooms and barracks. Or homeless shelters.
Singapore is extremely far along in the ‘eat out at restaurants’ side (it used to be, most Singaporeans ate out at least a couple meals a day), and even they have kitchens and private bathrooms in all the subsidized flats.
This is addressed in TFA. There was one building the profiled architect designed where they spent the $$ to turn the elevator core into a courtyard. He was able to add back the "lost" square footage as additional floors, which made the project profitable enough to build out.
Plumbing work is not cheap.
And yet, results in a shitty experience that residential users just won't accept...
(And yeah, it's shitty for commercial users too.)
There's something very wrong with the entire thing.
It’s common to run wiring in conduit, use hung ceiling (with space for running lots of extra services), construct the framing out of steel and concrete (instead of wood and stucco), and electrical and HVAC demands are dramatically higher. Networking needs to be more reliable and easier to manage at scale. Electrical needs are often orders of magnitude higher. Everything from locks, to outlets, to flooring needs to be sturdier to handle the increased traffic and wear.
Even a dentists office or hair dresser will need to mount heavy chairs sturdily, pull lots of extra power, and have to worry about weird chemicals or x-rays and the like hurting other tenants.
Additionally, they’re zoned to have access to high volume transit and/or parking.
It’s not a surprise why commercial is more expensive. It’s made for a different use case.
It still is only going to be ‘good enough’ most of the time. And by ‘good enough’, that means tenants pay. Anything else is usually ‘lipstick on a pig’ as it were.
Yout get a self-contained flat, but kitchens etc. will be tiny, and then on top there are shared spaces like co-working facilities, lounges, cinemas, gyms, and staff arranging social events etc.
I'd imagine former office buildings could work well for many of the amenities for projects like that.
[1] https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/lifestyle/coliving_london/1...
The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.
I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. I don’t think the problem is whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in place to encourage it.
It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to solve these problems end up being against the building codes. Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how clever your technical solution is.
I signed that "right" away with the county recorder, it was no problem. Been able to do that for 2 decades in my county. Turns out when people build what they like you get weird shit but little to none of the "but muh codes" fire hysteria came true.
Meanwhile California morons building with regulatory checks out the wazoo get ate up in wildfires. It's like watching actual insane people.
But if you've read anything about disastrous fires throughout history, the reasoning for modern fire codes is rather apparent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nightclub_fires
The deadliest structure fires in history pretty much have one thing in common: people couldn't get out. There's something to be said for a homeowner who builds their own death trap, but it's a good thing that large commercial properties have to jump through hoops to ensure they don't create a death trap for hundreds of others, just to save a few bucks.
Wildfires are something else entirely -- forests are not man made and their creation is not subject to laws. You wouldn't argue that laws against murder are silly just because you could be attacked by a wild animal, would you? We regulate buildings because people build them.
Most forests today kind of are, in as much that the way a forest is 'designed' is down to a whole collection of active choices made by the forest owners to intervene or not intervene in different ways. There are lots of things that one can do to mitigate the risks of forest fires, and doing or not doing those things is a choice they make.
The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans
The vast majority of trees close to large number of humans are however owned by someone who responsible for them and gets to decide if they grow up and become big trees or not.
Of course the building inspector sees the charred bodies he didn't prevent, but he doesn't see the frozen and exposed ones he created through his policies that handicap supply. The incentives of code and inspection are horribly perverse.
There's a lot more to fire codes than just sprinklers and fire escapes. If you could ignore all fire codes (and related requirements) then it would definitely be possible to build both more and cheaper apartments than you can now. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, and they almost certainly wouldn't be nice places to live. But a lot of people would take unsafe, uncomfortable and affordable over safe, comfortable and completely unaffordable.
But given the demand inelasticity for housing, it's not even guaranteed it would be cheaper.
Having built my house the price and accessibility absolutely spirals out of control with code inspections. Remove this madness and let the masses do what I've done.
Our regulations often treat different structures in different places differently because they have different risks. That's okay. Your custom tiny home shouldn't be treated the same as an urban high rise.
In the US windows are also a required means of egress from a bedroom in case of fire. Technically the requirement is two means of egress of any type, but in effect this means the door and the window, where someone can be rescued by a fire truck, escape onto a different path, etc.
Punching through a new set of pressurized, fire rated stairwells would be significantly more expensive.
1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates.
2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.
Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on. Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you’d find in a mixed use city with cheap real estate.
Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to simulate outdoors.
A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each.
One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture, some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even with doors.
Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows.
And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves. Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have windows.
The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use as a buffer for something which becomes unused and inconvenient.
Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for non-living purposes.
Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?
Definitely the classier (and older!) had windows.
Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written the way it was for a reason.
Skyscraper windows aren’t usable for egress. This is a solved problem.
And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors.
This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations.
You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside.
I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it.
Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away.
I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep.
At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains.
It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics.
Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.
See https://www.slowboring.com/p/legalize-housing-not-tent-encam...
The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to have plumbing ubiquitously.
I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall.
I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.
R R R R R R R
R R O O O O O
R R O O O O O
R R O O O O O
R R R R R R R
C = communal space/corridors/elevators.
E = empty
R R R R R R R R
R C C C C C C R
R C E E E E C R
R C C C C C C R
R R R R R R R R
R R R R R R R R
R R R R R R R R
E E E E E E E E
R R R R R R R R
R R R R R R R R
If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in.
And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper.
These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it?
Here is another idea:
R R R R R R R R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R S S S S S S R
R R R R R R R R
You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.
There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind...
I know there is an HN thread.
Yes, the wealthy can have apartments with windows around the outer parameter and the poor can live in the center with no natural sunlight.
Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a building for natural light and your office and workshops in the unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these buildings excel at providing.
Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in NYC for 40 years.
We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really important consideration, in almost any human venture.
I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff.
Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster.
Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space.
And, you know, incentivize minimal use of water.
https://news.ucsb.edu/2021/020455/munger-hall-qa
https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive...
Needless to say, conventionally minded experts of all stripes vociferously objected to it, including architects:
https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/the-munge...
...But I wonder if maybe cities should conduct small-scale tests of Munger's ideas to find out if they help put all that abandoned office space to good use.
> Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects.
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-it-really-takes-to-conve...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk
Admittedly, it's Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and the adjacent blocks are residential.
Here's some information about the project: Cloud 9 Sky Flats: https://www.homes.com/building/cloud-9-at-sky-flats-minneton...
A recent article about one of the condos going up for sale: https://www.startribune.com/corporate-office-turned-condo-in...
I also almost bought one that was in a converted school. I'm sure some people could come up with reasons for why that is impossible too.
Zoning is the only absolute impediment I can think of and that is a self imposed one.
While the looks can be argued, the mixed-use seems like an interesting idea. Not aware of too many other such buildings here, so will be interesting to see how it fares.
[1]: https://www.archdaily.com/1016072/vertikal-nydalen-snohetta
[2]: https://vertikalnydalen.no/
The environment needed for maximizing work is often at odds with the environment for maximizing leisure.
In city where I live some rich dude contributed to our city governor’s campaign or something. Now governor has to “return the favor” by relocating thousands of government employees from downtown area which is close to a lot of people’s homes to outskirts of the city where nobody lives and where that rich dude owns office space for rent.
https://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/article281...
Wasting hours in traffic every day/week won’t give you any time for leisure.
Or single family homes with a large yard and a white picket fence 1+ hour outside of the city...
The huge issue in conversions is the amount of plumbing needed (and associated cost).
It's not uncommon that an entire office floor might only have 1 restroom area & 1 mini-kitchen.
But that same floor, configured as apartments, might have 10+ apartments ... which means 10x the plumbing for bathrooms and kitchens that didn't exist before.
And having feeder plumbing that can support that 10x (or more) increase in water/waste volume.
They installed eight multi-stall bathrooms where once there was a single room in the corner with one toilet through the revolutionary act of running PEX and digging a trench in the slab for sewage.
It is trivial to do the same in a high-rise. If anything it will be easier because instead of digging a trench you can punch holes in the floor and route plumbing and ventilation through the plenum (or whatever is up there).
Water supply and power isn't a problem because here's a secret: commercial spaces almost always use more power than residential, especially in the extremely esoteric and rare cases where workers have computers and copiers. Hell all of these buildings have phat 3-phase service. A dude watching Netflix and using his microwave in a space that once housed a dozen workers, half of which had space heaters under their desks because the HVAC was set to 70 in the summer will be a break for the transformer.
I once had a clogged drain in my apartment. When it was fixed, I was politely asked not to run the water until they could inspect the ceiling in the unit below. They wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to leak on my neighbor below.
And, because of zoning reforms, no new building would be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan street the way the hulking towers of the postwar period did. A developer who constructed a tower the same height as 55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice twenty per cent of the rentable space.
The target demographic doesn't care about windowlessness:
New York remains a place where many ambitious young people go to start their careers, if not to stay, and this demographic is ideal for the hotel-style conversions for which office towers are most suitable. Moreover, Berman said, “young people are social—they don’t want to sit in the middle of a forest on a Zoom call.”
Renters are now used to the layouts of chain hotels, where there’s one window by the bed, so Berman’s bathrooms and kitchens didn’t need to be sunny, and the kitchens could have a minimal footprint. “Our demographic doesn’t cook,” he said. He referred to the other rooms without windows as “home offices.”
Avinash Malhotra, an architect who has done several conversions with Berman, noted that a single office tower can be carved up into hundreds of little units, as in a hotel. “He is not making housing for the homeless,” Malhotra said. “But I often joke among my employees that what we do is slums for the rich.”
Together, this will help create walkable, vibrant downtown with no need for a car to commute to work. The only thing preventing this is zoning, which currently bans most new residential.
As a side benefit, the new housing will relieve price pressure on existing, overpriced older housing.
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/how-much-of-your-city-is-...
WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in person, and relatively few people have the luxury of an at-home office, especially those within urban areas. Perhaps you're happy with your employer pushing office costs onto you, but I prefer an employer that provides me with an office that I can walk/bike to instead.
I work in a large multi-site company so I'm either at home on zoom for meetings or in the office on zoom for meetings hearing 60 other people also have zoom meetings. There's vanishingly small benefits for coming to the office for me because the people I could conceivably benefit from in person collaboration with are hours away so no matter what my day lives on video calls and Teams chats.
> WFH is great for some jobs, but many jobs are better in person,
I'm increasingly convinced this is simply not true for most jobs and it's being pushed by a) middle management who like in office because they can wander by and check in on everyone easier or b) the real estate arms of companies trying to justify extremely expensive leases they can't get out of. Personally I think b is the ultimate reason because it looks bad to have this cost sitting around with no 'justification'.
Anecdotally our leadership was effusive with praise about how productive we were during the 2 years+ of complete work from home and yet no matter how much feedback they get that people aren't happy with RTO we've been slowly ratcheting up the number of days required in and increasing the level of tracking of adherence to this new policy no one but the C-Suite seem to want.
Great for you you love WFH. Go move to the burbs and let the cities build homes for those who don't. No one is forcing you downtown.
If it's not a place where people make money / strive / want to make something of themselves, it's either a retirement community or a vacation town: just in sustaining mode.
The residential helps businesses stay open 7 days a week, instead of closing for the weekend when no one is at work.
What I'm missing: if business scales down, thus population and culture scale down (unless populated by people independent of these things). This means higher vacancies of existing residential, so how much new residential is needed?
I guess what I'm ultimately wondering: what's the "critical mass" of a city? At what point, does the commerce/social engine get small enough that it's no longer sustainable? We already saw many US cities were "weekday-only" cities, devoid of anything interesting, before the pandemic.
The only problems are a lack of political will with regard to zoning and codes. A common retort is, "well some apartments won't get access to natural light" or "utilities are in one place".
In many countries where housing security is tight, there are people who live inside apartments without windows.
Secondly, share housing where kitchens and bathrooms were used communely (aka a dorm) used to exist for many working class poor. Again, if the choice is the street versus a share house the choice is obvious.
No one said affordable housing needs to provide natural light, private bathrooms, and kitchens. Until the political will exists to return to what used to be normal for America and in many respects the entire world homelessness will continue.
Sometimes a roof over ones head and a place to sleep is all the homeless want. Price it accordingly.
There is way too much ultra-luxury buildings getting built in NYC. It's simply too profitable and there's little to no incentive to build (or convert) apartments normal people can afford.
Another problem for NYC in particular, a lot of the buildings that exist already would be illegal to build now. I get the desire to avoid streets being in constant shadow from surrounding buildings but large footprint buildings are simply a more efficient use of space once you factor in things like elevators, fire escapes and electrical/mechanical ducting.
The NYC government works at the behest of property developers so this is unlikely to change.
In Canada's major cities, for example, we see such luxury and non-luxury units being bought as stores-of-value by wealthy foreigners trying to avoid risk or capital controls, rather than as something to be actively lived in by them or anyone else. Supply is consumed, without any being relinquished.
Even when the owner might reside in such a unit, it ends up being more like a dedicated hotel room for them. They'll simultaneously own luxury residences in other cities and/or countries, and travel between them. Again, supply is consumed (in multiple markets), without any being relinquished.
The luxury market really isn't like the broader housing market.
I don’t know how this is sustainable given that Manhattan is an island.
The set of laws is different for office buildings and apartments.
- There's a massive economic downturn resulting in job losses, power briefly shifts from the employees to the employers, and the incumbent office-heads indeed insists on RTO.
- But they would soon go out of business competing against new employers that are remote-only and have far lower overhead, killing RTO again.
EDIT
One other scenario that just came to mind is an extreme amount of new building and revitalization in cities. If they build enough units, and enough big, nice units, and spruce up the place a bit, living in a city will become cheaper and more practical.
If I can live in a huge nice condo with decent rent, no homeless people on the sidewalk, and close to the office, I wouldn't mind RTO so much.
As it is, city living only makes sense for those in their 20's or those who are truly dedicated to the city lifestyle.
Step 1: Let all the landlords go bankrupt. The buildings will be repossessed and owned by creditors, but still there.
Step 2: New people buy them for a fraction of even the current price, and redevelop them. Or nobody buys them, and we get an empty lot.
Any other plan is an attempt to transfer wealth from the people to the landlord class to save their skin. Hard pass, let them use their 75 years of ill gotten rents.
If no one truly buys them, you don’t get an empty lot. You get abandoned, dilapidated buildings and all the associated social/environmental problems that comes with that.
But of course, we’d have to be a lot more aggressive about invoking eminent domain for this to be effective. To that end, it would make sense to also establish policies ensuring it’s easy to invoke it fairly and transparently - ie, easily allowing other parties to bid against the city for higher prices in cases where eminent domain is to be used this way (stipulating that those parties also take measures to restore the building, etc).
https://parkingreform.org/parking-lot-map/
https://www.stlmag.com/history/looking-back-over-a-decade-at...
https://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/ipjho8/save_histor...
You let rich interests create a situation where they make more and more money for doing nothing. In this case, sitting on downtown real estate. They use the money to manipulate the system to tilt the economy more and more in their favor. They kill off attempts to introduce rail. They fight against increasing capacity for housing or office space, because when demand goes up and supply stays the same they get higher rent for doing literally nothing but continue to own the same properties. They bribe politicians to force you back into the office downtown for no reason.
This is literally called rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Landlords have been doing this for thousands of years to the point it is a fundamental economic principle.
Then, when they get in trouble, and they might lose some money, you have to bail them out or they will ruin your cities. They are going to ruin the cities either way. If you bail them out they will take the money and then do none of the things they were supposed to do in exchange. They are only going to do whatever puts the most money in their pocket, and they play a long game.
Here is a counter proposal:
- Tax any vacant building at a rate high enough that any owner will be forced to put the building into use or sell it to someone who will. This applies both to buildings that are 'abandoned' as well as just sitting empty due to lack of tenants.
- Tie property tax rates directly to the rate of supply. Whenever an action is taken that artificially increases property values, increase the rates to offset that increase. If the planning commission kills a new apartment building that would increase the number of beds in part of the city by 1%, increase tax rates by 1% (1% of the current rate). This will penalize existing landlords (and homeowners) for rent-seeking and NIMBY. This can be done at the state level and the funds can be earmarked for low income housing and job programs, or parks.
- Offer tax incentives for things that lower property values but increase quality of life. These would include housing programs, railroads and stations, high density housing, etc. This would help balance out the rent seeking behavior of landlords and de-align their group interests. For example, if I own a large apartment complex and there is a proposal to build another large complex next door to mine, I am opposed to it. More housing will lower my rents. However, if I get a permanent tax cut when the new complex is built, it will not take much of a difference in tax rate for my profits to increase (since the lowering of marginal rents will very small from one building and spread over a wide area, whereas the tax benefit is concentrated in the area where I benefit). Landlords would then be forced to use their influence to try to steer new development to be near their own properties, rather than using their combined influence to kill all development.
If your next suggestion is that all landlords be government run or run as a coop, no freaking thanks to the first and while coops are great I don't think only coops is a good solution. If you want only wealthy homeowners and the rest of the population living in communism style housing, very hard disagree.
Go look up GHI in Greenbelt, Maryland. It's one of the oldest and largest co-ops in the USA. Housing in GHI is a fraction of the cost of the surrounding neighborhood, and the cause is that you cannot rent out GHI units. Only owners can live in their own units, which means speculators and landlords are simply banned from bidding up the costs. As a result, the cost to buy a unit there is a fraction of what it is right next door, maintenance on the units is better, crime is lower, services are better. It's a 100% walk able community that is run democratically. It's really a model for how housing could be built all across the country, but I guess you are the expert, we should keep doing what we do now and just let a couple billionaires complete a monopoly on having a roof, and hope that they only ask for 100% of our income and not more.
They need a place that caters to their culture(including the town or city itself - micro culture) - they need a place to hang out with people of like mind, they need hobbies and places to go, they need restaurants, events, parks, quiet places, loud and busy places, areas to connect with nature, areas to focus on business or meet fellow enthusiasts. It's not a numbers game .... it's human emotions and reality.
we need hospitals and daycares and public pools, arcades, shops, zoos, heritage sites, pop ups, concerts, etc ...
it's more than just walls + plumbing and electrical codes.....
Its just economics. The answers to over coming economic disruption are always the same: be where you are not expected or do that which others cannot.
Cities were traditionally a side-effect of communication hubs, trade collocated with rail/shipping locales, and centralized labor-driven stable factory lines. Communication is now decentralized due to technology changes since the early 90's, trade is now settled with online brokerages/logistics, and factories were either outsourced or moved into more favorable tax districts to maintain competitive posture.
Most modern cities are now running unsustainable theme-park service economies. Note municipal districts are never stripped of jurisdictional tax boundaries, and this still holds true even for areas in economic decline due to mismanagement/arrogance.
Have a wonderfully awesome day, and I thank god it is not my task to try and fix these issues =)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
The idea quickly falls apart once you need a car to get to either social events or to work.
If your work is nearby, that's just chef's kiss, then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292219
So we might have to wait until it makes economic sense to demolish and rebuild before life returns to the cities
Yes, there are many desperate enough to flock anywhere if they see a possible accommodation, but how can they survive locally?
After the '80s logistic revolution and then TLC/IT progress finally making offices useless in cities there is no viable economy anymore. The new right density for the economy of scale are single-family homes and small buildings spread enough to have room to change but not too far, intermixed with homes enough to avoid the US suburbs error. We can't have a new deal in dense cities.
P.v. works best for self-consumption only and we heading toward cheap enough batteries to make almost-autonomous homes the norm in a large slice of the inhabited world (30kWh capacity per home at minimum), we can collect and store and clorate enough water to make semi-autonomous homes and various shops. It start to be cheaper than creating large aqueducts. We start to being able to treat sewers enough to been able to have local treatment instead of a sewerage network, we are not there, but near enough. The world change and we have to change accordingly meaning we can't keep up the immense infra we have made for cities while people move around to escape too frequently flooded areas, too hot areas and so on. We need infra for industries, and many industries need a certain size to be viable, but the trend it's clear we need to produce modern way to live less and less dependent on complex services existing on ground networks. We still need roads, personal air mobility and last-mile air mobility is still far despite certain claims https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but we know where we should go. Smart cities can't work like the old Fordlandia can't. Classic cities already not work anymore, so we do not have other options so far and we need to evolve anyway.
In a city, if I have a gifted child, I almost certainly have several options for what school to send them to, many probably within walking distance. In a sparse suburb, I have one, unless they want an hour-long bus ride.
Same goes for restaurants, and social activities -- and people! (i.e., potential friends)
Cities are drastically more efficient. PV does -not- work best for personal consumption, that's actually the hardest way to go because you're not sharing available resources. Same goes for almost everything else you listed.
What's not awesome are cities defined by gridlock and huge highways, something that is itself addressed by increasing the amount of residential space relative to office space.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I live in about as suburban of a town as you could imagine and there are 2 public elementary schools, a charter school, and a private Christian school within about a 15 minute walk. Within a 5-10 minute drive there are probably 5 more high quality charter schools, a few more private schools and who knows how many more public schools.
(Now, that said, from my spot in the city, there are about 10 different elementary schools within a 2 mile radius.)
I suspect we're using the terms in different ways because the term itself is a little .. messy: https://medium.com/pew-research-center-decoded/evaluating-wh...
Also, don't confuse my comment about choice with quality -- many US suburbs have higher quality schools than some of the cities they're adjacent to for reasons of historical racism and wealth inequality. A very separate issue from the benefits of density!
The point is not what is there now in a specific place of the Earth but what we could do in various places on Earth. The society and the economy I've found here, arranged as described, do works very well. In the region there are a significant variety of human settlements ranging from the ITER nuclear research center, the European Design Center of Toyota, to various sheep farms and tourism. All spread in few hours car range in an economy that's still flourishing and alive even in the current global state of things. There are many different people intermixed, only around my home there is a home an USA-French top manager working mostly in the middle east and aside his home one of a retired chef of a small restaurant in Monaco, in the neighborhood at a walking comfy distance we are no more than 30 people, with 7 different nationalities and a variety of expertise and wealth. Oh, it's a small place, but there are many small places like that and they can thrive as well. From where I'm from I barely know my neighbors in the same building. Oh sure, I've study at the uni just 1km away from my old home, nice, but for what? If I have a child till the high school anything is there, for high school there are still some local options (but I might not like their quality) and I can buy him/her an accommodation elsewhere where he/she can star experiencing an autonomous life because yes, teenagers nowadays need to be autonomous and most of them are totally unable to be due to their glued, iper-surveillant parents. After their studies, after having started a career and a family they can choose whatever they want to live, after parent's death they can choose to go back or sell the old settlements and the society keep turning.
A day we will have flying cars? No issue, there is space for them. We have added p.v.? No issue again, there was already space for it. Geothermal heat pumps? No issues the tallest home is three story on it's own ground. The blacksmith shed 3km from here start to be used by the blacksmith and became something else? No issue is just a shed with a bit of space around, easy rebuilt and converted to something else. In a dense city NOTHING is possible or at least it's terribly costly and complicated. Just try to look why the USA can't build a high speed rail where they need it: it's simply too dense, in France was possible simply because a large slice of population leave spread in the country. A new airport? Good luck in a dense city that growing and growing have surrounded the once upon a time very on the outskirts. Good luck turning useless office towers in apartments. Good luck restoring a new working economy in a dense city. Just to get on-line retails delivery is a nightmare, while here switching from classic mailboxes meant for paper mail to huts-like ones for packages or adding remote opening to the entryphone was pretty simple and cheap.
That's why I'm saying the city do not work. I understand well that some want it, feel the need of it, feel depressed outside, I know personally a handful, personal or family friends, they have all the rights for their preferences but they also should acknowledge that such model can't stand anymore in the present changing world. It's not a matter of preference, it's a practical fact. Like those who love more and more frequently flooded zones, they love them, they have all the rights to love them, but they can't expect insurances pay an year after another big money for after-flood restoration.
Well, before I can choose restaurants from all over the world, some fitness centers, some events, always and only services to consume and no real personal activity. Traffic congestion, lack of space and so on complete the game. no, thanks.
In social terms my social life here with FAR LESS people around is IMPROVED because being less we are more social, we meet much more with different people instead of being in bubble if friends, very isolated from all others humans around. Surely mean cultural level is far lower, but due to the general cultural degradation these days to find interesting people for interesting dialogues internet is the sole means, we are too rarefied to meet IRL casually.
Schools? Here every school have large green space and plenty of outdoor activities, yes not at walking distance but who care? Primary schools are normally in 30km radius on good roads, high schools are more rare, but not that far away and if young start to going out of home to study is a good thing for them. Universities became a bit more costly since you must be around them but again it's not that special.
Cities IMO are SOLD to be efficient, and they are definitively not. Starting from the office model where you have a place to live, almost unused during the day, and a place to work almost only used during the day, and we build such mid/high rise buildings to use them only a bit less than half a day, wasting time for commuting, how efficient.... Oh, sure, to farm humans is efficient, to live farmed inside definitively not.
P.a. actually work ONLY for self-consumption because on scale sharing energy is a nightmare for the grid, we do not have superconductive links, sharing means sharing locally, so have a locally very unstable demand for big power plants, the worst scenario for network stability, they can't keep the frequency with significant p.v. on grid. Instead IF we focus on self-consumption p.v. offer options to heat large quantity of water to have them in the night, when needed, to have geothermic heat pumps, heating the ground in summer to balance the heat get in the winter and so on.
BTW cities can't exists without much highways: there anyone eat, and the food came from outside.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-subur....
We do many inefficient things just because we like them, just think how absurd is smoking tobacco. Smokers have all the right to state "it's a pleasure for me", but a pleasure does not means automatically a good, sustainable and efficient thing. Personally I really like smoked salmon, however I life far from salmons natural environment, I still buy it because I can, but of course I know it's a very inefficient and absurd practice (specially since I know a bit the supply chain).
"Cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas, and the city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York."
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/taub...
"In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. While households located in more densely populated neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice the average. In metro areas such as New York, GHG emissions in these outlying jurisdictions are readily apparent: Emissions in Manhattan average lower than 38 tons per household annually, but in exurban jurisdictions such as Sussex County, N.J., these emissions exceed 66 tons per household annually."
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-not-just-cities-subur...
You're radically under-estimating the efficiency gains of sharing infrastructure. Consider a simple metric like paved road-miles per person, or electricity-line-miles, or distance to school, etc.
It's absolutely fine to have a preference for a rural environment - I grew up in the foothills of the mountains and I miss them terribly - but efficiency is a measurable metric, and cities win, for better or worse.
Long story short is like a train: formally is far cheaper than a plane, if you just observe a single fully-loaded trip. But you have to count all you need to build and maintain the train and the relevant infra, and here things start to change much, than you have to count the flexibility over time: a plane can go from any A to B in a certain distance range, a train need rails and build/change rails take an enormous amount of work.
Long story short again: yes FORMALLY under specific windows of observation the city is far more efficient, but in TCO terms is definitively not.
I dont think many people value efficiency as highly as you do. Tons of people are fine with being inefficient, they certainly wouldnt call their actions absurd. To me there's nothing wrong with transporting salmon, and Im honestly not really sure why you think there is. Most lox is factory farmed so not like its threatening the species.
Personally I left the big city for mountains in a not too far area, with enough services and there I see the green new deal working, in kWh terms I consume much less (considering I do not consume gas, diesel, petrol etc anymore), my life quality is improved much, local economy works better than many others so... I propose this as a model.
This is absolutely true.
Problem is living in a suburb is even less efficient and even less ecological than living in a city. That's kind of the issue.
It's kind of like what they say about democracy. Living in a city is the worst way to live on this planet, except for all the others.
So, public face / private face stuff.
Commercial real estate is in a much worse place than they care to say.
In my opinion we have already crossed the rubicon on this topic and the pandemic caused a paradigm shift that means it’s very hard to put that genie back on the bottle, regardless of how many news articles they write.
Organizations are finding it extremely hard to hire if they have an in-office policy. Few people want to lose two hours a day commuting in cities like London and rammed into busy public transport which used to be the case.
2) older buildings are more viable for residential conversions, if subsidized into positive economics
3) permit + incentivize residential construction - you'd be surprised how much of typical US downtowns are made up of parking lots/structures which can easily be scraped for housing.
Lastly as people do fill into downtowns, that will naturally convert into the ecosystem that serves those people - for all but capital intensive projects which will need to be spearheaded by municipalities and developers alike.
And if you can live closer to work, there's a better chance you'll want to show up in person instead of telecommute.
But you know what does increase crime rates? Vacant buildings.
the unfortunate circumstances surrounding NYCHA properties was due to concentrating poverty, in singapore public housing is economically integrated so as to avoid the same problem
On a certain level this is common knowledge, reflected in the real estate markets of all big American cities. Dirt-cheap housing stock can be found in large swaths of Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, et cetera. It's cheap because even the most desperate families would rather live anywhere else, around anyone else.
The Free Market solves this perfectly - let people own their property and have a stake in where they live and maintaining the community and safety.
We just need to let people build and bring a real free market to property.
And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
Owning land doesn't give you the right to build anything. You need planning permission - which means permission from the local council, local homeowners and consultation, etc. which gives the NIMBY attitude so much power.
There aren't piles of empty houses. There aren't enough houses at all.
There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free market principles stop applying, since they presume a basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a government perspective is to remove the agency of those who are so drug addled that they cannot make good decisions.
And failing this: - displaced urban wildlife - tear it down and make space for plants
What?
The Austin Plaza Saltillo project is a great example. Shops at the bottom make it useful for the whole community. Parking is in garages underneath which promotes walk ability. When you see someone going to their place you don’t know if they are on food stamps or are a tech millionaire. There’s less stigma and more respect for all neighbors.
Or what could go right. Service and civic workers would finally have housing that wasn't 2 hours away from their city jobs.
There are more people for whom ex-commercial housing would work - than there are (or ever will be) units to house them.
Even in a tough neighborhood I'd of done it, if I had work nearby. I once parked the I was living in my employer's parking lot.
So it's not working well.
The cities I live near seem to have no problem attracting young singles and couples. Young urbanites I've worked with have all moved out when (a) they have kids and realize how bad the schools are, (b) when one of them gets mugged, (c) they get married to a non-urbanite, (d) they want local governance that is at least slightly sane.
Typically, office building parking ratio is currently around 4 spots per 1,000 square feet (1). With two people sharing a 750 sqft 1BR apartment, there should be 50% extra parking spaces.
(1) https://www.commercialrealestate.loans/commercial-real-estat...
The idea to turn office towers into apartments tries to address the second issue without explicitly trying to solve the first (which is make downtown more desirable to live in).
I have not really thought that through; at first blush it seems obvious that one would want to save these downtowns. But also some of the best innovations arise out of the creation that follows destruction.
I’m open to clarifying opinions on the matter
And then of course there are knock-on effects to placing people like that (typically young professionals and artists) together like that to rub shoulders, talk about ideas, start businesses etc...
Sounds like https://vxtwitter.com/GoodGuyGuaranty/status/175753305627604...
Evolve? Yes.
If you turn office towers into apartments, where are people gonna work?
May work in some cities that benefit of high tourism or are high status enough (Manhattan, city of London) that you'll always fill them, but it just doesn't scale beyond them.
Ain't nobody dreaming about living in downtown Columbus or Cleveland or Detroit. You live there if you work there.