mixed offices and apartments in the same building sounds good... would cut the commute
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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I lived in a building thay was mixed residential/office space in Buenos Aires. It was really good, during the week you saw movement in and out so it felt alive, ar night and weekends was pretty empty and calm, and you could throw parties without bothering the neighbors.
lets defy the government and do it either way
I worked in an office once that was large enough thst you could absolutely live in it without being caught
Just live at work! I can see the LateStageCapitalism posts writing themselves
"This is little Sally. She's getting ready to leave for school, but first she needs to put on her blinders and ear plugs so she doesn't see or hear what the marketing boys are up to on her way to the elevator. Keep your eyes on the prize, Sally! And remember, what you hear at the water cooler stays at the water cooler... you don't want an enforcer/landlord to intervene... that might hurt mommy's due date cost, and then there will only be a lump of coal in Sally's stocking. It's therefore also important to remember: report communists and anarchists."
I see no way this could go horribly wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Mixed use buildings for actually quite common in much of the world and can work quite well. See what you do though is you put them on the market for anybody to rent, and not force people to live in your company housing.
If you go into any major city you're going to run into mixed use buildings.
I think if companies are interested in cutting commute times, they'd normalize work from home. Doesn't seem to be the case sadly
Yes please. Let's give corporations a reason to convert their office buildings into apartments so we can all go back to WFH. Plus, the more housing we have in the city the cheaper it gets.
I'm hopeful that a lot of these will turn into condos so people can get into ownership instead of renting.
Fuck yes. As a libertarian it bothers me that I can’t make my home in any space I can own.
I understand not building rendering plants next to houses. Some zoning is okay. But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
Libertarians: Always finding the rarest of occurrences to continue their dismantling of government and the systems that gave them everything they have. lmao
The rarest of occurrences?
Ubiquitous government meddling (in the form of, among other things, rules like “no more than one dwelling per half acre”) in the real estate market has resulted in this housing crisis we all face. People are dying of stress related illnesses and self inflicted gunshot wounds, and the survivors are dealing with enormous amounts of anxiety and hopelessness, because rents keep rising and rising,
Supply is artificially, heavily suppressed and people wonder why prices skyrocket.
Everyone attributes it to “landlord greed” but provider greed is regulated by market competition when supply is allowed to follow market forces.
A person having to spend $1500/mo just to sleep when they’re trying to run a business, when they’re perfectly willing to crash on a couch in their office, means the threshold for going into business for oneself is artificially raised.
I could rant about other markets too but there’s plenty of government-created horror to be found in real estate alone.
Also the notion that the government “gave them everything they have” is ridiculous. The government gave us the Drug War and a nuclear-armed Israel. Other governments gave us The Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, the Trail of Tears, and other unimaginably horrific acts of human savagery.
Humans’ ability to negotiate and make deals to trade resources and cooperate on projects — willingly — is what gave us what we have today.
I have a counter-point that I’d like to hear your thoughts on: at least to some degree, it seems like part of the housing crisis is caused by private equity firms not being restricted from buying up property, artificially reducing the supply of housing that can be purchased by then renting it out, which artificially increases the cost of housing and making it less accessible. More of the population then has less wealth, while smaller portions of the population end up with more wealth, again making homeownership farther out of reach.
Yeah, that’s the proximal cause. A small cartel gains control of the limited supply, allowing them to set higher prices.
This happens all the time. The thing is, free markets have a solution for that. It’s a negative feedback loop that goes like:
- Party A buys up all the Xes, then raises their price by 100%
- Parties B, C, and D, who weren’t interested in making and selling Xes before, suddenly see a profit in it now that the prices are higher
- Instead of putting their resources into producing Y, they switch to producing X, chasing that profit
- With more parties entering that market, supply increases
- This nullifies A’s ability to control the supply
The problem I’m talking about in our housing market is that step 3 is blocked. Despite other companies or individuals wanting to get in on this gravy train, by building their own housing to start producing profit, they can’t because there are laws prohibiting them from doing so.
Now, it’s not impossible to do new construction. But it is far more expensive than it naturally would be.
Like, let’s say a certain area is highly sought after. Let’s say there’s 1000 people who’d like to live there. But there are only 100 units (houses, apartments). Some billionaire buys all 100 units, and now controls the supply of housing. For each apartment they have ten candidates willing to outbid one another. They get to crank those prices up like mad.
The solution in a free market would be that a different billionaire (or maybe a lowly millionaire, or a coop composed of twenty fifty-thousandaires), or a big corporation, or whoever, decides they’re gonna build 500 more apartments.
Now you’ve got 600 apartments for those 1000 who want to live there, and you don’t have quite the same power to ask ridiculously high prices.
But the way our housing market works, it’s either extremely costly (like you need an environmental impact statement and you don’t know how it will turn out and if it turns out against your favor you can’t proceed, losing everyone you’ve invested so far), or zoning says “you can’t do more than ten dwellings per block here” and instead of 500 new units you can only build 50, or it’s just straight-up impossible to get permission to build.
That’s what I mean by an artificially-constrained supply.
The real ideal is for those 1000 people who want to live there, you’ve got 1100 housing units, and now the landlords are in competition with one another to attract tenants. 100 units are vacant and that is a source of negotiating power for the tenants.
But because we’re so stuck seeing that would-be investment — that would expand the supply — in terms of rich people getting richer, (and for many other reasons) we block that new construction and keep supply limited, which is to the benefit of the people who control that supply, and to the detriment to both (a) the people who would like to come in as alternate suppliers, and (b) to the people who need to use that supply.
I mean, even if we don’t want to think about incentives or negotiation, if we only want to focus on physical events in the world you can see, if there’s a housing problem the solution is to build more housing, and laws against building more housing are a problem.
It's artificially limited, but I don't think the number of housing units is necessarily how the limitation is imposed. You see, landlords aren't actually interested in tenants, they're interested in property values going up. Why? Because land and housing are legally considered capital, the value of which they can leverage for loans. That results in what we see happening in NYC and many other places, where apartments and retail spaces can lie vacant for years because the rent demanded by the owner is absurd, but to ask for less rent would lower the building's valuation. It's also why we have far more empty housing units than homeless people in this country, about 27 empty units for each homeless person. If these landlords were honestly participating in the market, or if housing wasn't considered capital, housing prices never would have gotten this high - and I suspect the same is true of the number of homeless.
The hyper-wealthy basically gave themselves a cheat code decades ago and have been abusing it to the detriment of markets and regular people ever since. We have a government body, the FTC, that's supposed to put a stop to this kind of market abuse, but the last time it really did its job at all was when it broke up Ma Bell forty years ago. For far too long it's been content to let corporations that are already far too big and have far too much influence over the market continue buying up their competitors or colluding to inflate bubbles.
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This is what most Chinese food joints around here do. They are usually family owned, and they live in the back.
And, lo and behold, Chinese immigrants tend to be successful. They work hard, ignore the rules trying to hold them down, and as a result kick ass and make the world a better place.
Those of us born here tend to be too naive and trusting to break the rules, and we complain about how the system is designed to hold us down.
Except people think the economy is that system that’s been designed to hold us down. No, it’s the law. Law can be useful and helpful but the way we use it is harmful. And it’s the part that is actually designed. Like, we literally have committees dedicated to designing the law.
TOS can be kinda shit, and negotiated contracts in general can be lopsided and unfair, but that is mitigated by competition. A person must select between a handful of cell carriers, which sucks that it’s not more, but nobody’s choosing governments, at least not without dedicating like 10 years of their life to the process of switching.
Thank god we have a federated system in the US, because that allows people to shop around for governments to a quite limited degree.
Anyway. I have high praise for immigrants who are willing to break the rules. I think it’s a sign of maturity to be at least capable of breaking the rules, and I think it’s telling that the set of people who arrived here through a harrowing journey, as opposed to just being born, are the same set of people who give the finger to stupid laws.
Yeah but the combination fried rice has to be on point
As a libertarian
Why are you attracted to children?
Wait why can’t you do this? People definitely live in their gas stations / offices / whatever. It’s just not zoned for that, meaning it wasn’t made for that purpose, it’ll be suboptimal. But like, I don’t think the cops are out to look for your sleeping bag.
All high rise office buildings should be incentivized to have residential space. Let’s try and fix the housing issues and reduce cars/traffic at the same time.
The incentive is already there, it's just prohibited because of zoning and building codes many places. All the government has to do to fix this is stop getting in the way.
Can we finally get mixed zoning??
Offices are actually chill if you take out the cubicles and stuff. They are spacious, neutral, and have a bathroom and roof access.
This is another proof that office buildings are an anachronism.
They always were, it's just corporate landlords stood a lot to lose from them losing prominence so kept them artificially in demand. Went so far to lobby that corporations need to have an office by law, even if their structure doesn't necessitate one.
It all sounds good, but im so jaded now all i can think about is how will the rich find a way to make sure this doesnt lower cost of living for the lower class.
Biden wants to give money to wealthy landlords so they can build luxury apartments using our tax dollars, so they can rent them out and increase their wealth.
Anyone saying "We need to build more houses" rather than saying "We need to fill the existing houses" has no interest in solving the problem.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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Joe Biden's administration has come up with a plan it thinks can help address the housing crisis: encouraging developers to turn unwanted office buildings into apartments.
Converting offices to residential properties can be challenging due to the expense of refitting, as well as complying with zoning laws and other regulations.
But the White House initiative will make more than $35 billion available from existing federal programs in the form of grants and low-interest loans to encourage developers to convert offices into residential.
(tldr: 2 sentences skipped)
Following the rise of home working when the pandemic struck and the reluctance of many employees to start commuting again five days a week, business districts have been struggling.
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Last December Silverstein Properties, one of America's largest commercial landlords, announced plans to raise more than $1.5 billion to convert unwanted office space into residential housing in markets ranging from New York to San Francisco.
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Conversions are faster than new construction, 20% cheaper, and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, the White House added.
The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Excellent stuff from Dark Brandon. NICE!
Sounds hard.
Instead let's convert them to Airbnb units! 🤮
Shut the fuck up, Genocidin' Biden. How about you stop killing kids in the middle east and start taking care of your own citizens for once.
What the actual fuck are you babbling about? Biden went there to tell israel to not do an invasion.
Take care of his own citizens... isnt that exactly what this article is about? Converting office space to residential space?
Take your pills, grandpa.
Whose funding them. Who is funding Israel's war machine, motherfucker??
Congress. They're the ones with the power of the purse.
Republicans and the corporations that they constantly prop up, thats who, motherfucker.
Republicans LOVE war and genocide.
Next time you think you have something smart to say, shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down, bitch.
liberals having a normal one
Defense != Offense
When you give money to a country that already has funding, they have a habit of reallocating their funds. Also harder to comfortably start an offense when your defenses can be cracked. If you're still convinced that funding any part of a military doesn't just make a bigger military, I don't know what to say.