Having lived in many an unconventional domicile over the years, it seems to me that there is an untapped market for the type of furniture solutions that you only need when you're living somewhere not designed for living.
I lived in a hotel for a while. White carpet! White marble sink! Don't drink any grape juice or wine!
When your kitchen is just a mini-fridge, hot-plate, electric kettle, and a toaster, everything takes so many extra steps to protect your environment from any possible spills. Had to do dishes in the tub, and while the laundry was broken, also did laundry there and then turned the whole room into a drying area.
Things like this are going to be happening with increasing frequency. Landlords and property managers are going to get mad or at least very stressed about %$#@# dangit these &@#^@# people how can they live like this!? Meanwhile the tenants will be pissed about living in the converse situation wondering @#$@#$ dangit how are we supposed to live any other way if the facilities are built for other activities!?!
lot of the airbnbs are equally bad - no desk to work at for more than 20 minutes, small kitchens not designed to be used for more than a wine and some bread..
As a resident of San Antonio, I was happy to see one of the projects here featured in the article. I've been happy living here, with among other things, the low cost of living, great parks, unique culture, nearby beaches and wine country, plus a few options for gigabit fiber internet.
However, the city's never had a lot of tech employers, and the vacant office space downtown seems like such a waste. It is good to see it being put to use.
As an aside: with the expansion of major tech employers in Austin and pervasiveness of remote work, I wonder if there is much demand for optional hybrid setups like teams from in the region going into the office once a month or so for collaboration. I am not sure if I'd prefer it to full remote, but in person meetings with coworkers can be quite enjoyable.
Allowing people to live a little further from Austin while commuting in occasionally seems like a good way to get some of the benefits of in person work while letting people choose locales with a lower cost of living.
Getting between San Antonio is currently a poor experience that really holds back that idea to me. I35 is absolutely no fun during peak usage and requires car ownership. The train is insanely cheap but too slow and leaves once per day at extremely early / late times between the cities. Nicer busses like the Vonlane don’t run between the cities.
High speed rails would absolutely transform the paradigm overnight. It would solve a lot of affordability issues in Austin while introducing more money into the SA economy. As it currently stands, SA has virtually no tech scene (relative to other major cities), is too sprawled out, and too much effort for people to want to commute between regularly in my opinion. It’s a hard sale for younger developers. There’s a lot of potential though!
Yeah, I used to work there, initially out of the SATX office. They did have daily buses between the two locations for a time as well, if I remember correctly. Never got around to seeing the Austin office.
FWIW, I've lived in a converted office building in Seattle. It was actually pretty nice, much nicer than most purpose-built apartment buildings. When they did the conversion, they re-engineered the interior pretty heavily and re-purposed some existing elevator shafts for other purposes that weren't required prior to the conversion.
Some office buildings will be more amenable to conversion than others, so part of this would likely be selecting buildings for conversion where the conversion is both straightforward and will produce nice apartments. You want buildings that have many floors but relatively small area per floor.
I live in a 12 story office building, built in 1932. When the interior was converted to living space, 2 of the elevator shafts were re-purposed to provide additional floor space. They simply but in a "floor" where once was a "hole".
Floorplate depth is usually the big issue. Residential generally doesn't like being much deeper than around 20m/65ft. Most tall office buildings built after the 70s or 80s will be deeper and maybe impossible to design into comfortable residences.
Services is the other big one. Many more rooms needing hot and cold water and wastewater connections, more AC outlets and customisation, etc. Even if you have the space to do so (as office floor to floor heights are typically higher than residential). Plus remodelling facades to give more residential style windows etc.
And does your basement have enough space for the cars residents will demand?
Its an expensive business to add this all in and sometimes may be cheaper to just knock it down and start afresh.
I think these are big reasons. Offices built longer ago (if the buildings are still around) designed to let in lots of natural light can be good for this type of conversion as the floorplates tend to not be so deep. And having higher floors can be good too as people often like that.
Another thing is that offices can have worse sound insulation.
Residential buildings tend to be a donut hole shape or an H to keep distances to windows about 20m. Office buildings are usually big, deep squares or rectangles.
yep, plus many countries regulate what can be called a "room", and most "rooms" need to have a window, so this means either huge rooms (so they can have windows and go deep inside the building to use the space), or the rooms in the central part of the buildings used for non-livin rooms (eg, storage).
It surely depends on the country, but it is not like "a window" is enough, usually construction codes ask for "windowed surface" being not less than 1/8 or 1/12 of the area of the room (so you cannot make bigger than this limit), in order to classify the room as "suitable to permanent stay of people", in practice - as you say - all the rest becomes "non-living", storage, or window-sless (mechanically ventilated) bathrooms.
I lived for a few years in a converted meat packing factory in west Chicago. The apartments were really nice, except for the giant house centipedes that would occasionally migrate inside when it rained and would drop from the ceilings. It was essentially a long warehouse type building, so they put apartments/windows on each side with walking corridors down the middle and multiple floors, and a parking garage in the basement.
I'd never even heard of a house centipede, so I googled it. I've never seen one before and I live in the UK. Apparently they occasionally sneak into the UK in imported food packaging, but they're not native or common here.
Nearly all instances go unrecorded, so precise frequency of distribution in England is impossible to determine. But they have spread across the globe to all countries and all continents except Antarctica, so chances are nearly certain you've got them in your home, even in England.[1] They're a little startling, but harmless to humans, and help keep your spider population in check. Even though I have probably only seen 5 of them in the last 20 years in places I have lived spanning the Eastern Seaboard of the US, I have no delusions about they being there regardless of spotting them. Unless they're disoriented and dying, like most "bugs," these things are supremely sneaky.
>> S. coleoptrata is indigenous to the Mediterranean region, but it has spread through much of Europe, Asia, North America and South America.[2]
house centipede are evil looking but completely harmless to humans. Actually they're good at eliminating other bugs that are pests like roaches and some spiders. If you see a house centipede that means it has prey which is likely something you really don't want in your house.
If you think of house centipedes as a sort of "insect cat" and that they are hunting even more disagreeable creatures for food, it becomes kind of easy to let them go about their business.
The building codes are likely very different. Think about a shopping mall and the idea of converting it to cheap housing. All of the plumbing and electrical is for stores - maybe 1 sink per small store and department/anchor stores have 8 bathroom stalls all in one area. Then you have the fact that these buildings were likely constructed using asbestos in various ways.
Gutting the interiors entirely is necessary, maybe they even need to gut major areas of the building to support more utilities as well. It’s probably not cheap so affordable housing may not be in the equation afterwards because of the renovation costs.
In the UK the change in need has for years (ie even before COVID) driven planning changes so that it's easy to get an OK to convert say an office building into residential. The results definitely vary, between "This is legal but nobody should have to live like this" (e.g. far too much light from floor to ceiling windows in some rooms while others are dark, not enough bathrooms, poor heat and noise insulation) to actually rather nice places to live. Most tend to be rental units for young people, rather than family homes, but it all helps.
Where bureaucrats actually get to just make the decisions at a high level, rather than everything being second guessed by NIMBYs it's just really obvious what you have versus what you need. If you know your city has an inventory of empty mid-size office buildings sat on the market for months, yet apartments within walking distance of the city centre go for crazy money, it's a no brainer to authorise conversions. Whereas if the last office building was snapped up an hour after going on the market, while residential sales are crawling, a conversion from office to residential is nonsense, tell them to go away.
There are a few conversions like this where I live (also in the UK) and I agree that the results definitely do vary. Where the conversion is in the heart of the city, it seems to work pretty well -- sometimes even better than knocking down and rebuilding, because the existing offices usually have stand-off space around the building that would be lost in a high density redevelopment. And from an environmental perspective, keeping all of that 1950s/1960s poured concrete in place has got to be a good thing.
What really doesn't work is the partial conversion of offices on industrial/commercial parks out of town. It seems to lead to completely incongruous buildings, dumped essentially in the middle of parking lots, without basic amenities such as verges and pavements. Those buildings tend to be flimsy, and it's hard to see the environmental argument for keeping them. I would rather see those sites razed and rebuilt as better quality housing.
1) Office building and space is in demand but the market rate is much lower than the residential rate.
2) The owner of the office building will 'pretend' there is no interest in the property (sometimes for more than a year), so they can plead to the planners that they want to convert th building to residential.
The planners authorise the conversion and the owners make a tonne of dough.
They can - but that requires both parties to the contract to agree on modification.
If I'm a bank holding a commercial mortgage, it's very finely honed to minimize my risk; as part of that, I contractually limit what can be done with the building.
Why would I, as a lending institution, throw that security away for something much riskier? If the emptying out of commercial buildings that we saw during the pandemic accelerated, that might have provided the incentive. But it seems like that trend line isn't going to continue in force.
I think converting high density commercial properties to residential is a great idea in a lot of cities. But ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free.
> ultimately it's going to be done almost exclusively in buildings that are mortgage free.
Not at all. Your commercial mortgage lender will always help you increase the productivity of your asset. Phone call. Excel docs. Talk terms. Lawyers. Done.
If you don't know this, nobody loaned you $#,#00M and you'll never need this advice
Far more likely than a mortgage modification is a straightforward sale of the property to new ownership (who then goes on to refurbish as residential and sell or lease the units). The banks have a specific dollar amount that pays off their obligation in full, at which point it's the buyer's problem (and their financing).
2016 Main was converted from a hi-rise motel into condos years ago, they are pretty nice but there is always the feeling that it's not a complete domestic environment.
At least the plumbing was there.
There's a couple more of these nearby that were left over from the oil crash of the 1980's, which were eventually abandoned after years of reduced energy travel. Looks like one of them has been gutted recently and might be under conversion now.
In practice it seems very hard to make such changes happen in US cities. I think Texas doesn’t really do zoning the same way so there’s not so much of an issue.
There's also the issue of windows. High-rise office buildings frequently have large floors with windowed offices around the perimeter and huge windowless areas filled with cubicles in the interior. However, residential buildings are generally required by building codes to have a certain number of windows per apartment (or even per room).
You solve this by making sure every unit has part of it along the curtain wall, the units might need to be more narrow vs more rectangular, but most office towers have a 20k sq ft floor plate where the curtain wall is never more than 50-70 ft from the building core (elevators and mechanical/electrical rooms)
You just add more plumbing risers and put point of use water heaters in the units. You might need to upgrade the building water service to accommodate higher water usage, but it’s literally just adding pipes and pumps in an existing mechanical chase or core drilling thru each floor to add plumbing risers. Some really tall buildings have tanks on top of the building to provide water pressure at the top via gravity.
You can add drainage the same way, you just don’t need pumps for the drain stacks.
Out of curiosity, why would it be plumbing? There should be enough capacity to handle both fresh and black water, considering the high occupancy of typical office buildings.
I learned this when my company leased the floor of a big office building in Philly. You can do almost anything you want, except for with plumbing. Especially bathrooms. Despite having almost 150 desks there is a limit of 3 sinks, 6 stalls, 2 urinals, and 6 hand washing sinks. Full stop.
I wonder what causes these buildings to have such restrictions on plumbing. Maybe it's like elevator shafts where they eventually take up a lot of space if the building is very tall.
It's more an issue of volume. People showing, doing laundry, cooking etc use significantly more water, so the pipes entering and leaving the building need to be sized differently.
Conversely, adding more toilets, for example, may also pose a challenge. My dad helped design the plumbing system for a rebuild of a football stadium. One of the final tests was to have a bunch of volunteers go to every sink, toilet and urinal in the building and turn them on / flush them simultaneously to ensure that water pressure stayed high and the drain pipes didn't back up.
Adding more toilets in a building not meant for them can be a big deal right after lunch / around "busy" times... Some may not be able to flush or overflow if the pipes can't handle the extra activity.
I didn’t get that involved but was told it wasn’t a matter of cost. There were very limited hookups that could be moved slightly for the sinks. Bathrooms could not be moved or modified in any way. I assume it’s a limit on the overall building in/output.
There were very limited hookups that could be moved slightly for the sinks.
This means you couldn't chip up the concrete slab to place new pipes, the way we could in e.g. a strip mall. This is an understandable limitation, because the integrity of slabs is important for tall buildings.
However, this wouldn't be a limitation in a residential remodel. They aren't going to mess with the slab or the pipes in it. They're just going to lay everything over the top of the slab. If the new toilet is 40' from the utility shaft, that is 3" for the pipe plus 5" for the fall. Add an inch for the floor itself. Average residential ceilings are much lower than average office building ceilings, so there is definitely at least 9" to spare.
It's all roses when you're living on the top floor. If you're on any other floor, waste water from other people's units will be flowing through your space. The lower your floor, the more of other people's waste will be flowing. I know this from experience of living in a building converted from commercial warehouse to residential. SSOL for those in Dallas
Plumbing for both fresh and black water in many office buildings are limited to specific areas for high capacity restrooms, so you might have a large supply to one spot. That's not practical for housing, in which each unit needs its own plumbing.
Retrofitting all that additional plumbing is expensive.
But grey water is different, yes? Couldn't it be held in holding tanks and then allowed to flow out during off hours?
Toilets are obviously a different story. But as long as no one is shitting in their kitchen or bathroom sink the water flow post-usage can in theory be managed.
> Couldn't it be held in holding tanks and then allowed to flow out during off hours?
I don't think it's a timing issue. The issue is that the fresh and wastewater plumbing simply doesn't exist in the places you'd expect in housing, so there can be a significant cost to adding it, beginning with just figuring out where you can run it through the existing spaces.
A holding tank and whatever pipes then are used to empty it are still plumbing, and even more complex than regular plumbing, unless you are suggesting that people would haul their own waste out periodically.
Also recall that wastewater pipes need to be at least slightly angled so that they drain properly using gravity, further constraining their potential paths. This can be quite difficult to design even when remodeling a regular house.
Not sure I agree. The other comments seem to say that office buildings are designed for a certain amount of water capacity. So even if you supplement (?) and add nodes (?) there's still a bottleneck of capacity. So, if water collected in tanks on each floor then it can be dripped out (so to speak) to not exceed capacity.
Even if total wastewater disposable capacity was the issue (which would be surprising considering the highly correlated toilet use in many office buildings after breakfast and lunch), the more fundamental problem is that the drain pipes are not distributed in a way conducive to residential use, or put another way, most people don't want communal bathrooms.
Drains need to be sloped to the riser pipe. And in nearly all offices thats concentrated in the middle, which implies a huge slope for drains coming from several dozen feet away.
It's probably very expensive to retrofit a large office building to provide plumbing in every new unit. Most floors only have a handful of bathrooms and probably 1 or 0 showers.
Because most office buildings have plumbing run up a narrow corridor, rather than branching out on each floor, as you would need to serve plumbing to separate units.
Many office buildings have a single bank of toilets per floor. If a given floor is subdivided into n apartments, n-1 of them are probably not proximal to the existing toilet plumbing, so it's an expense, at least.
You can drill dozens of 10” holes through a concrete floor in a commercial office tower. The structural part of the floor are the tensioned cables inside the concrete, as long as you dont’t sever those, you can drill a ton of holes without impacting the structural integrity.
I used to work in concrete construction, doing post tensioned and SOMD for elevated slab. Coring might be simpler for SOMD, but post tensioned has such a high density of cables that I don't think it would work.
Could you run vertical pipes on the outside in back of the building, and run horizontal pipes through space between adjacent apartments that you specifically leave for that purpose when converting the interior?
If you need intermediate pumping stations or holding tanks due to the height of the building, those could be inside adjacent to the outside pipes.
If you have seen a residential tower and an office tower being built side by side, you know why.
The residential tower is built with concrete layers separating every floor (not always every flat within the same floor unfortunately). An office building has no separation between floor, only a thin sheet of metal.
I would never live in a converted (purpose built) office building office, except perhaps if it is to live on the top floor.
This isn’t correct. You probably saw a concrete residential building and a steel office building by chance. It does not follow that every single office building is built this way. There are concrete office buildings all over the place, usually with thicker slabs than a residential building, because the office building actually needs to be designed for much higher loads.
By the way, the thin steel deck you saw gets concrete poured on it too once installed.
That’s the opposite of my experience. Office buildings are built to last and residential seems to have been built exclusively with clearance items at Home Depot.
I'll guess that it's a very upscale residential tower (the rich don't want to hear the upstairs neighbor stomp across the floor), and/or a local fire code requirement for anything tall and residential.
I think the OP was just pointing out that Houston doesn’t have zoning laws (in comparison to California). Note that this has not stopped Houston from becoming a sprawling suburb with massive amounts of parking lots. Houston didn’t build good density (or even a city really) despite the lack of zoning laws. I don’t think zoning is the culprit here but it’s difficult to compare cities and compare them across different states.
Also I’m not sure there’s a meaningful distinction between zoning laws and a local regulation like parking minimums. The effect is the same so zoning laws as a concept becomes a bit of a red herring unless we take zoning to include all general rules and regulations that govern how buildings can be built, transit, etc.
Houston's parking minimums are absolutely the main culprit for the amount of sprawl it has even in its downtown areas. Every single business needs a parking lot so everything is in a strip mall and therefore unwalkable.
Sure but I don’t think it’s helpful to try and separate those from zoning regulations here. Also I think even without those mandatory minimums a city like Houston is dead set on cars at all cost. Frankly, all of America is this way too it’s just that there are a few cities where geography has constrained sprawl. I fear for my own city, Columbus. The state, county, and city governments just do not understand that car-first infrastructure is a failed policy and will bankrupt us.
OT, but can I ask where you're from? I'm from CA and I generally hear "different from" (not "different to"). I've lived elsewhere in the US, but never Texas, and wouldn't have expected them to say "different to" — which I think of as being a British English construction. Do people say "different to" in Texas?
Midwest and I've definitely always believed "different to" was a British phrase and not even grammatical in US English (i.e. a native speaker who hadn't encountered it throughout life in UK publications would judge it as flat out wrong)
Interesting. What about the opposite? "Similar from" sounds incorrect to me. So why do we prefer "different from" and "similar to" vs. "different to" and "similar from"? Why is there any implicit directionality?
The username was part of what led me to ask. Probably not many UK/AU folks would choose that handle!
But you're right — I've heard some native Spanish speakers say "different to", and it's likely because they say "diferente a" not "diferente de" (where "de" typically translates as "from").
This situation raises an interesting philosophical question: is it ungrammatical for a native Spanish speaker living in CA to say this? I have always considered it to be an ungrammatical/incorrect usage. But coming from a British person I wouldn't consider it incorrect. I would consider them to be speaking a different dialect of English.
If a student said this in an English literature class in CA, my guess is that the teacher would correct the native Spanish speaker but not correct the British student. Or at least this would be my intuition as a native English speaker who studied linguistics a decade or two ago!
I wouldn't be surprised if it was regionally common/"not weird", but I don't know!
A personal data-point: I'm a native English speaker from norcal/oregon, and my wife is a native Spanish speaker from Monterrey, Mexico.
Since learning Spanish and being exposed to her good, but definitely not native, English, I didn't even notice "different to", and it doesn't seem particularly "weird" to me. But if I think about it I'm pretty sure it would've seened very weird to me back when I was in Oregon!
(It goes the other direction too. E.g., she's caught herself saying "vino rojo" instead of "vino tinto" and "hacer linea" instead of "hacer fila".)
In general I think it's pretty common when two languages are in close-contact to get some cross-contamination like that.
> California has some of the strictest in the nation.
Typically to stop the encroachment of commercial or industrial buildings into residential areas? Wouldn't this, offices into apartments, be rather amenable?
If only there were a group of people responsible for making sure that the laws served the interests of the people. Perhaps California will establish such a system one day.
California lets ordinary voters permanently amend the constitution without the intervention of any Evil Lawmakers, which has worked out Great(tm) so far.
I guess you're talking about laws being designed to serve the interests of certain groups (e.g. teachers' unions) at the expense of everyone else.
If so, is that problem unique to California? If the problem is worse in California than elsewhere in the US, then what about the design of the system could be changed to improve the situation?
Not for me. One of the reasons to live downtown is to be close to the office, and to benefit from other people being around. If you dont have an office and the local shops and restaurants are closing, why live downtown?
If this trend continues, you'll be around even more people, and even more amenities will spring up to accommodate all the new people. The only catch is that your next job might not be close by in the city. Perhaps it'll be remote, or you'll be commuting out of the city. Thankfully, logistically, this is far preferable to the inverse.
If you live in downtown Dallas, it's generally easy to drive out in arbitrary directions because you're going the other direction from all of the people sitting (literally) in the opening traffic jam from Office Space.
I like this trend for Dallas and think it is long overdue. Covid made it very obvious. The city has grown a ton in recent history but has had a hard time bringing people to downtown for anything other than work. It's usually dead in evenings and on weekends. Restaurants struggle unless they cater to the lunch crowd, etc. While it's improved in the past ~5 years or so versus the previous ~10; I've seen recent numbers that say there are only about 10000-12000 residents in the Downtown area. Anyways, I've been reading a lot on the local happenings and am interesting into how this trend will reshape the area culturally/economically. For example, Texan's don't tend to put up with homeless issues like they exist and the city really needs to figure that out or this could be a wasted opportunity. These are all new "luxury apartments" and those folks aren't going to tolerate the homeless issues but even that's hard to say since we've gotten such an influx of more liberal minded folks that are more compassionate on those issues.
Every new apartment calls itself a luxury apartment. Don’t get hung up on the marketing buzz words. Each new apartment that is constructed lowers the rent, particularly on old apartments. Dallas, compared to other cities, has done a fantastic job building more apartments. Rent keeps going up in Dallas because people move in faster than apartments can be built and inflation. The solution isn’t to require non-luxury apartments but to keep allowing apartments of any kind to be built. A luxury apartment today is affordable housing tomorrow
> A luxury apartment today is affordable housing tomorrow
I'm not sure I understand. You probably don't mean that literally unless "tomorrow" is 50 years from now. How does it lower rent to make some housing affordable, simply by increasing supply?
Luxury apartment from 50 years ago is an affordable housing right now is another way to look at it.
Same principle behind targeting the high end market first for new products. Affordable iPhones are the used ones or the older models… not the latest models. Outside of government subsidies, the private market doesn’t target the poor for new stuff because it doesn’t make economic sense.
Yes it lowers rent by increasing supply. Same principle behind old iPhone models going on sale when the new model comes out. The rich people buy the new phones and flood the market with old models.
If you also look at the iPhone mini experiment it had abysmal sales… the phone was a new model that targeted the lower end. People Penny pinching tend to also look at used phones or actual old models.
I mostly agree with what you said in regards to housing, but the iPhone mini is a bad analogy. It wasn’t a low end model, it was a mid/high end model with a small screen, and apparently there’s a vocal but not nearly large enough minority that likes small devices. The iPhone SE is the low end model, and it appears to be selling quite well.
Ok mid level maybe but definitely not high end. The mini did not have any of the high end features like improved camera, lidar, etc. SE is more or less rebranded old model.
But I think it still fits with my point that the new stuff doesn’t sell well with the poorer market.
Luxury apartments are often more affordable and attractive than the alternatives, which are: low density homes nearby, low density homes really far away, old as hell medium density homes nearby since nobody has been able to build anything new for decades.
I haven't been interested in buying any of the available houses in my city for 10 years now, but recently they've been developing medium density townhouses and apartments in locations that aren't the CBD, but also not suburbia. That's a fair middle ground for the middle class that we have today.
It is as simple as more units = more choices and assuming the number of people chasing those units isn't infinite, more units on the market means they now have to compete for the renters.
Build more housing is a part of the solution. Not an ideal solution but better than doing nothing.
Housing price or rent is completely uncorrelated with what kind of building it is or how old it is in most cities. Labelling something luxury and putting a shiny facade on it does very little to alter how much the building costs and rent will be inversely proportional to supply. Even large apartments are still better than detached homes as it will reduce competition for spots.
Austin might get freezes periodically, but they do not get the same ice storms that Dallas gets, certainly not as frequently. The blizzards that Oklahoma and Kansas deal with, Dallas gets a taste of that for 2-3 days a year, but that 200 mile north-south buffer between Dallas and Austin is a significant one.
The sadistic belief that the dumber you are, the more in shit you should live. If I'm going to live in a meritocracy, let it at least be one that judges merit based on ethics, rather than by intelligence or who your parents are.
Homelessness is a complex subject. No one in good faith thinks a homeless addict needs to just bootstrap harder.
At the same time, barring a major felony, and sometimes not even then, nobody is exactly forcing them into a successful engagement with a recovery program either. If someone is unable to make a rational decision on the subject, who's fault is it if they continue to be untreated?
You’re showing your own biases by assuming that all homeless people are addicts. There are tons of people living in their cars and barely scraping by. It’s the price of housing, we need more housing units full stop.
I didn't say all homeless people were addicts. I was illustrating my first sentence -- homelessness is a complex subject.
I agree we need more housing. I also think we'll have "homelessness problems" even if we built enough housing to go around. There are a lot of intersecting problems.
100%. Feel free to ask any clarifying questions. However, please note that although I do believe your situation in life is due to your own choices, that does not mean I have no compassion for people and the choices they’ve made.
Most people want homelessness solved in their city.
But if the number of visible rough sleepers falls, most people won't look too closely into whether the city provided treatment+housing+employment; or whether the city gave them a bus ticket to another city and send the cops to hassle them.
On the contrary, it's much easier to justify institutional harshness if you assume individual compassion in the population.
Then you get policies like "we don't need a social safety net (institutional compassion) because we have tax-deductible donations (institutional, discretional compassion)". Or similarly "we don't need progressive taxation because wealthy individuals employ more people" (i.e. the trickle-down fallacy).
Maybe a nice in-between stepping stone: let people choose what portion of their taxes goes where.
Maybe we find out that good portions of government spending like education, social welfare, etc all get a huge boost in funding whilst leaving military and other policies with less funding. Maybe it makes everyone happy that they are doing their part for the things they believe are important, like charity. Instead of fighting for crumbs for their cause after most of the tax revenue has been allocated to wasteful projects.
We don't even get to pick this basic thing right now. I don't know about you but it spoils the taste of this supposed democracy to me. And then to be told I'm an asshole for wanting such basic autonomy is the cream on the top. This is not noble and just at all, democracy doesn't deserve such descriptors.
Perhaps they donate less because that disposable income is taken via taxation by the government? Seems equally plausible to me.
Bucketing people so simply is a mistake. Often libertarians (similar to communists or any other political ideology) genuinely want to make things better and have genuine complaints about how things are run that would stand up to analysis.
I lean libertarian myself in many ways. I don’t care who you marry or if you dye your hair blue. I don’t care if you get an abortion (your right to choose - I’m a strong supporter of abortion rights), etc. I support exploring universal healthcare as well because it’s clear that solutions we’ve tried in the past are suboptimal and we are being outcompeted here. Environmental concerns are something that libertarians strongly support. You polluting the air harms me and others. Destroying the rainforest harms me and others. But I also think market mechanics tend to solve problems better and we can see that with environmental concerns where public policy isn’t enough - you need a 1-2 punch of policy and market mechanics like a carbon credit or coin or something. The public schools are a problem for example because Conservatives believe that Liberals have taken them over (untrue IMO) and are dictating teaching political ideology. This is a problem because if you lose power (as liberals have done in many states) then you are now subject to what the other party wants taught. There’s room here to explore - and universities (which need reform) show how choosing where you go to school instead of basing it on regressive property tax systems which require housing by-in could work. There’s a lot we can figure out.
I think for libertarians they should look at government less so as a thief and more of a platform. One thing you’ll note though is that libertarianism can accommodate communism, while the reverse isn’t true. That’s a key problem with certain ideologies like fascism or communism. People have been starting communes and worker collectives in America for a long time. There were never free markets or entrepreneurs starting new businesses in a meaningful way in Soviet Russia or Maoist China.
It also works the other way around: high taxation absolves me of moral obligations towards charitable causes, because through government we have institutionalized our compassion. The government's moral failures in that area are not mine to bear personally.
(not that I don't give to charities, but I tend to view my charities as political acts rather than moral acts).
> For example, Texan's don't tend to put up with homeless issues like they exist and the city really needs to figure that out or this could be a wasted opportunity. These are all new "luxury apartments" and those folks aren't going to tolerate the homeless issues but even that's hard to say since we've gotten such an influx of more liberal minded folks that are more compassionate on those issues.
This observation is pretzeled enough that I do not understand what you are trying to say. But I take exception at the suggestion that there is some political group that is more compassionate when dealing with homeless people - everyone of every stripe has compassion for homeless people. Charity is a near universal value. The political debate is 100% about:
- What is effective.
- What help should be compelled, and from whom (there are issues of fairness here).
- What is the root cause of any given case of homelessness.
And besides, in this case I note relaxed regulation that lets offices convert to apartments (without tripping up some zoning permit problem) is more effective at getting people into homes than compassion.
I think that’s true but those numbers are inflated, falsely IMO, by those who disagree on what’s effective/who should be compelled/what’s the root cause.
For instance, if you say that we should both give twenty quid to a homeless bloke we see, and I disagree because I genuinely don’t think it’s a good way to help, you (if you were so inclined) might call me uncaring but that wouldn’t be true. Then you argue that I should be compelled to give the money and I’ll fight you on that, for several reasons, and before you know it you’re casting me as evil.
Compassion is worthless unless it results in a roof overhead and food on the table, and/or mental health care. We've seen plenty of "compassion" from behind locked gates however, and it is worth every penny. i.e. none.
My experience with the homeless is limited, but I feel this isn't true.
I've heard from friends that work with the homeless, as well as from reading online, that many of the homeless feel invisible. People don't stop to talk to them, they don't make eye contact, they don't say "hello" while passing on the street.
From this I feel that treating the homeless as people -- even if it isn't something that tangibly benefits them -- is beneficial. Making small talk, or even just making eye contact and saying "good morning" while walking by would make them feel a little more human.
Obviously this doesn't solve the problem, and I expect that most homeless would prefer food and shelter over chit-chat, but when we're talking about "compassion for the homeless", I think that this fits perfectly in that hole.
Not sure your list is equaling 100%. As a life long Texan, the red and blue lines are far and wide here and purple is thriving in certain areas; largely based on transplants. The purple, and especially the blue part that is changing the gradient; is to be feared by the MAGA republicans. Even people I consider non-extreme GOP Texas standard politics over past ~50 years type people do not want to tolerate the reality of modern day homelessness. Our culture in Texas is very NIMBY on this topic. Zero tolerance as in "I will pull out my shotgun if you step on my property." Nearly every pre-Y2K teenage boy has a story to tell about that if they grew up in Texas.
I suppose I consider this part of the cultural phenomenon that comes with growth. Although, fused within politics. Also, economics because the reason this is even happening is the city of Dallas has been losing to it's suburbs in the economic department. That's why so much office space is vacant. The pandemic ruined it for sure but it has been bad for a long time.
> Even people I consider non-extreme GOP Texas standard politics over past ~50 years type people do not want to tolerate the reality of modern day homelessness.
Can we blame them? Who should tolerate homelessness and poverty issues? Aren't people in deep blue urban areas getting their own anecdotes about homelessness right now? Aren't we seeing people avoiding situations and neighborhoods there as a result?
Personally, and I can definitely be wrong here, I expect that relevant mental health issues aren't going to be simple enough to just throw earmarked housing, destigmatizing, etc. at. Local government is going to have to take some responsibility for the behavior of the mentally ill one way or another.
It sounds like the ambiguity should be resolved the other way around, as "person who was a teenage boy before Y2K", rather than "person from before Y2K who is a teenage boy".
Almost everyone would give lip service, at the right time and place, to values like charity and compassion for the homeless.
But there are many, many people who would never for a second even consider the welfare of homeless people as a factor in any decision they ever make, personal or political.
So for all practical purposes charity is definitely not a universal value.
> everyone of every stripe has compassion for homeless people
The conservatives in my hometown of Seattle are fairly vocal about not giving a fuck. It's sort of their defining feature. As in, they differ not at all from the liberals except on homeless issues.
Conservatives tend to be transparent when they don't care about things. But that doesn't mean they care less - because that is a relative thing.
I gather homelessness in Seattle has been getting worse for years [0] and that the city is something of a liberal stronghold. So the question is open - are the liberals more compassionate, or are they merely identifying ineffective policies as compassion? Because I would expect real compassion would cause homelessness to decrease. More compassion -> less homelessness is the link I'd like to see if I were out there being compassionate. Or at least growth in line with population rather than exceeding it. Compassion implies that people are about to do something useful.
In short, what you observe is consistent with conservatives being less compassionate, but also consistent with conservatives being equally compassionate but more realistic about policy effectiveness.
Try to put up a shelter and watch the true colors of so-called liberals emerge. Happened here. Nimbys too when someone tries to build an apartment. Looks like one side is better at hiding human nature.
> The trend seems tailor-made for Texas. Office-vacancy rates in most of the state’s major downtowns are high (roughly 25 percent in Dallas and Houston, in the teens in Fort Worth and San Antonio). The cost of single-family homes has skyrocketed and interest rates have risen, making many would-be buyers renters. And relatively few apartments are available, with vacancy levels in the single digits and pricey monthly rents expected to get even pricier
Similar trends and numbers apply nationwide, if not worldwide. You could certainly say all of this (indeed, to an even greater extent) for places like San Francisco and New York City.
I would certainly welcome some life returning to downtown Dallas. When I worked there in the aughts it looked more or less indistinguishable from a lot of the Rust Belt downtowns I visited during the same period. Skyrocketing vacancies and anemic accommodations because of all the the companies who fled to real estate deals in the burbs.
I'd love it if these developments would grant equity to its tenants. But then they'd just squat on the land, making it useless.
Is this really the best of all possible worlds, where a small number of investment groups with vast wealth can keep accumulating the core real estate of cities, to extract wealth from its citizens?
This needs to be done everywhere. Move as much people to remote as physically possible, which is basically everyone who works in an office, and change all that into residential real estate.
There have been a number of church to condo (and house!) conversions in Seattle and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. They have pretty unique interiors due to the architectural constraints put on them by the original building and the prodigious quantities of vertical space.
Yes, cities are (almost by definition) more crowded. What is subjective is when they become overcrowded. By a pragmatic metric (say, infrastructure spending per capita) that's not happening in cities even most Europeans would consider overcrowded.
They're also louder, but that noise is contained within relatively small pockets. Fans of quiet suburbia need not worry.
Apartments full of people sitting in some tiny room all day zooming into their meetings. Imagine allocating 25% of your expensive 1200sqft apartment for your work from home office. 25% allocated to the sole use of your employer. And it isn’t even tax deductible because you are a w2. It’s like Uber only instead of people using their own property to drive other people around they are using their own home to benefit your employer. Behold the brave new dystopian future.
This stuff is a fad. I don’t care what people say. Sitting on some tiny urban apartment working at home all day makes zero sense. Neither does paying for some co-working space to escape said tiny apartment. Might as well go to the office… oh wait… same thing in this brave “new normal”
All we are seeing is the rebirth of white flight to the suburbs branded as some kind of new revolution in tech work.
It’s a fad. Covid mitigations we’re temporary. Pendulum is gonna swing back. It’s just a matter of time.
They likely do not live in an apartment and are trying to apply their home office square footage to an apartment. Based upon the many zoom backgrounds of coworkers and interview candidates, many set at most a desk as a permanent WFH space. The more common is not having any exclusively WFH spaces and using the work laptop in various sources throughout their apartments.
1200 sqf is on the larger side of a 2br apartment but rooms are not normally 300 sqf. A 2/2 apartment usually has following "rooms": 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 storage closets, HVAC closet, laundry, and a living room combined with kitchen. Out of these, the living room/kitchen area might be 300 sqf or more, the rest of the rooms are much smaller. The OP likely meant 25% of living space, e.g. taking away one bedroom and its bathroom and storage since your working there would render them unusable to other people living in the same household.
We have power dryers in the US, they are installed together with washing machine in a laundry room/closet. In houses people often put them in the garage because they can be quite noisy.
With that comment I was referring to the fact that to me in a 150sq ft office there's still room for something with a fairly large footprint. Perhaps I was too specific about what exactly.
Ah, people can have all kinds of furniture in their "offices", the point is that it's useless to others while that person works. Unless it's also unheard about having an uninterrupted work environment in your country it should be pretty obvious.
>Personally I wouldn't know what to do with 1000sq ft and up
Well, its easy for me :P
Server rack, 3D printing station/workshop, home gym, kitchen, storage, bathroom, yard equipment (typically a garage, tbf), home theater, deck (does this count?), kids rooms, etc.
That certainly wouldn't fit into 1000sqft.
I mean, I believe its totally possible to live within 1000sqft. You just have to "give up" a lot of things or a lot of potential... but you also gain some. I hate mowing the yard, for example, lol.
I think it doesn’t make sense too. But full WFH opens the option of moving to another LCOL city to have a bigger place for less money and potentially more quality of life too.
People that can do this would end not taking into account the location of the job when choosing the place to live. This will take time to sink, but in my opinion is the likely consequence.
I lived in a hotel for a while. White carpet! White marble sink! Don't drink any grape juice or wine!
When your kitchen is just a mini-fridge, hot-plate, electric kettle, and a toaster, everything takes so many extra steps to protect your environment from any possible spills. Had to do dishes in the tub, and while the laundry was broken, also did laundry there and then turned the whole room into a drying area.
Things like this are going to be happening with increasing frequency. Landlords and property managers are going to get mad or at least very stressed about %$#@# dangit these &@#^@# people how can they live like this!? Meanwhile the tenants will be pissed about living in the converse situation wondering @#$@#$ dangit how are we supposed to live any other way if the facilities are built for other activities!?!