this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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The reason for high cost of living in cities was that's where the offices were...
Now we don't need offices. So convert them to apartments to lower housing costs in the short term, and telework means people won't move to cities as much in the long term.
This is actually a good idea...
Developers will do this anyway if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?
The developers are doing fine, it's the average American that's struggling, stop funneling money to the people who already have a shit ton of it, trickle down doesn't fucking work
Agreed. This is a good idea overall, but the implementation smells like a bailout of commercial real estate developers to me.
Ding dong ding!
But also to a point, it will take a significant amount of work to convert office space to residential. Just utilities alone will be an adventure, and you'd better hope the building was set up with decent truck lines down the core of the structure to begin with. It's not like "hey let's throw up some walls, boom, apartments." You need adequate power distribution, and water/sewer connections to each apartment to fulfill each unit having it's own kitchen and bathroom. Commercial spaces are generally build to accommodate different usage.
The Biden administration is doing that also, it just doesn't make as good a headline.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/16/white-house-announces-new-actions-on-homeownership/
I don't think what they are doing is as strong as you imply.
"Sorry your parents have a home they got in 1996 for basically nothing"
There's nothing wrong with favoring the people with the least generational wealth first and foremost
That is a major assumption there is generational wealth. ESPECIALLY with trans/gay people being family-less in many situations. The down payment could easily be collected via estate tax to where everyone had the option of it but the wealthy paid more in. It can also completely ignore a lack of generational wealth like parents so wealthy they only rent multi million dollar apartments in Manhattan.
I'm happy for those people who will benefit. But try being a kid of parents who have the mindset of "FU I got mine". I'm not on favorable terms with my parents and won't see a penny until they've passed, if they decide to give me anything at all.
It's an odd requirement that should've been workshopped a little more.
Then why are we giving twice that to developers who own office buildings?
Just like with Covid and the PPE loans, they coulda given the money directly to the people but this is capitalism and the money has to go to your neo-feudal lord now before you can have any of it. Just wait for that trickle down. Trickle down from your boss, from your landlord, from your parents... your need for a place to live can wait.
Always happy to be pleasantly surprised.
Even tho it's half what developers are getting, it's better than nothing.
Refitting office space to make it liveable is actually super expensive. Commercial spaces don't have the electric, plumbing, or insulation typically required or expected by residents. It can be cheaper to gut or even tear down the building in order to add the necessary MEP and framing, which is why you see developers are still building new rather than converting old commercial spaces. The money will encourage redevelopment which is far less wasteful and combats sprawl.
That said, I agree with you that you could make the money available to buyers instead of developers, but developers are the ones ~~paying the bribes~~donating to campaigns.
Then those millionaire (from the examples in the link, billionaire) developers can let their building sit empty...
This is America, where a single cancer diagnosis can bankrupt a family for generations. If we were a civilized country, sure, bail everyone out.
But I don't have sympathy for them when normal people are in such a tight spot.
Like if you're a cardiologist and you're helping someone you saw sprain their ankle, you'd be an idiot to keep helping them when there's five people having heart attacks in the same room.
The problem is that they are happy to let the building sit empty most of the time
The value of the land and building continue to go up as an investment, even if they aren’t earning money today on the space .
So they don’t actually give a fuck if it sits empty, but society does 
I'm with you, but you're kidding yourself if you think the billionaire is going to suffer. They have leveraged the value with banks, and would skip on down the road with their fortunes while the banks that make mortgage loans have to shore up their books at the expense of common folks. Homebuyers, small businesses, and taxapyers will be expected to cover the losses.
$35B sounds more like it's intended to find a way to make these conversions possible and create a "blueprint" to be used elsewhere.
These conversions are already possible. It's a big financial decision because you basically have to gut it, but it's not hard work. (No you don't have to demolish the whole building like the other guy says). Each building will be different so you can't make a generic blueprint.
There are people developing solutions to this one of which is essentially building panels that house all the equipment and hookups and installing them at location. This is the mobile home industry trying to adapt.
SIP panels aren't going to increase the main stack capacity. Commercial buildings just don't have the capacity for all of the sinks and toilets being used at once. It's a neat idea, and a low voltage lighting system could save a ton of energy, but you still need to gut the building and add critical MEP infrastructure.
I'm going to choose to agree with you since you seem to know what your talking about. It sounds like what you're saying is they are built differently and it's found to take a lot of work to being them up to mass living condition.
Can you back up any of the points you are claiming?
See here https://youtu.be/imyPVFFACTk/?t=1m38s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/imyPVFFACTk/?t=1m38s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
99 percent invisible did an episode on it recently.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/transcript
I'm mostly speaking from personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt. But there's a lot of developers writing articles based on their experiences.
Developers won't do it though. Otherwise, we'd already have this happening. What they do now is call it a loss and get a break on their taxes.
Which is why all incentives for empty buildings should be eliminated. And if you move, convert or remove the old building instead of leaving an abandoned eyesore
Because that doesn't do anything but provide guaranteed cash to existing property owners at the expense of people trying to stop renting. Until the supply side issue is addressed, homeownership will continue to be out of reach for most. The best case here would be to convert these buildings into condos or whatever the local word for apartments you own instead of rent is, but just rentals us a good second choice.
Developers don't want to touch this. The amount of work it would take to turn an office building into an apartment building is more than you likely realise. Building code for the two are very different so fully gutting the building is first on the list. The amount of plumbing that would have to be added and so on. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I think it's a great idea, but to get it done you have to make it profitable or the government will have to step up and hire engineers and contractors and operate the building after, which is of course comunism, and so will never happen. Full aside from the political issues, it just makes more sense to knock down the office building and build a whole new one that is actually designed for residential use. Too little too late no matter what happens with the office buildings. It should never have been allowed, from the start, for corporate entities to buy up housing at all. Not apartment buildings, not single family homes. That has to be fixed first.
Dude, yes it's a lot of work to gut it, no it doesn't make more sense to knock it down. You gut it. It's not that hard. You basically have a free shell, foundations and parking and all.
The point of a down payment is if you default (don't pay) your mortgage immediately, the bank keeps it, like they keep everything you pay before you default.
So if the government guarantees it, that means instead of putting (easy numbers) 10k down on a 100k house and having a mortgage for 90k, the government "co signs" and if you default in the first X years, they have to pay the 10k. But since you didn't pay the 10k, your mortgage is still for 100k
When rent is more than a mortgage payment, this allows people to buy a house without spending years saving up a down payment
We have that already.
They are called usda and fha loans
The Mortgage Insurance Premium (FHA) and Annual Guarantee Fee (USDA) make either costly in the long run. You get to skip the down payment, but the added cost of mortgage insurance (irrespective of how it's labeled) hurts lower income borrowers. Both are costly, and neither are necessary. The property is the collateral. The lender loses future revenue and is inconvenienced if the borrower defaults, but they obviously do well enough overall to shoulder that burden.