231
White House opens $45 billion in federal funds to developers to convert offices to homes
(www.marketwatch.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
231 points (98.7% liked)
News
23376 readers
1978 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, every time I bring up this possibility, experts on this site tell me how office high rises don't have enough plumbing or electricity and would need a major refit and that blowing up the building and rebuilding from the ground up might be less expensive than the refit.
That's correct. Now imagine the U.S. government's perfect corporation-boosting answer to that: give billions away to developers to just go ahead and do it anyway. Anyone opposed to it gets painted as anti-housing, most people's attention span isn't long enough to read the details of why it's like lighting money on fire, and as long as corporations get richer the parties in power are guaranteed another few years in charge.
I knew there was a catch
It's totally possible to refit office high rises for residential use. But it is a major refit (though much cheaper than rebuilding the house) and you will get rather bad flats in the end.
Double floors, double ceilings and easy-to-move plasterboard walls are great for offices, since they can change up the layout of the office extremely fast.
But in residential buildings this translates to walls that are too weak to hang stuff on them and bad sound proofing.
Not impossible to live there, but considerably worse than a high rise that was built for residential use.
This in turn doesn't make perfect financial sense, since the owner of such a building is now not renting out expensive office spaces in good locations, but instead low-standard cheap flats.
It can be done, but it's not something an office building owner would want to do without additional financial incentives, and then only if there is no chance that they can rent out the space as offices.
It's even possible to do without those incentives. Or at least it was before interest rates spiked.
I know of 2 buildings in my city that were converted in the 2016-2019 timeframe.
Both had to have the interiors gutted and new interior walls built, new plumbing on the floors added, new curtain wall glass, upgraded elevators, new HVAC and upgraded electrical.
It was a multi-year project (so no revenue and plenty of expense for a couple of years), but both have full residential occupancy now, where in the several previous years they were around 50% office occupancy.
.
That said, given current borrowing costs, going without revenue for a couple of years during construction is not going to appeal to many owners unless there is some other incentives.
Just like with high rise construction, you start at the bottom and get those occupied while you work your way up.
A very specific set of stars need to align for this to be in the owner's financial interest without additional financial incentives, but it does occur sometimes.
I've heard something similar, but I'm wondering if that isn't the full story. What if it would be cheaper to tear down office skyscrapers and rebuild them as residential...but it would take an extra 10 years to do that. Their statement would be truthful, but missing the larger goal of making affordable housing in desirable locations available faster.
It's a major redo to get plumbing, stove/dryer outlets, and individual heating control to each unit, but it's not blow up the building difficult. Conversions are a big decision, but not difficult. (You also usually lack a balcony, which is a not so small loss for tenants.)
No balcony is pretty common in new apartment/townhouse builds now.