> Residential brings life to the monotonous business areas and helps to improve housing supply (often not by an awful lot) but on the other hand, once you lose office sites they are generally gone forever
I am not a town planner, but this makes little sense to me.
There's a range of factors for why not endless mixed use. A few of the big ones:
The clustering nature of businesses wanting to be close to each other. Most commercial areas are limited in expansion and a big 'critical mass' helps to drive the success of all the businesses.
Office workers dont like to look out at residential uses (hanging laundry etc.).
On the economic side its important to note that office-only zoning is effectively a government subsidy to encourage business. If they have to compete with residential some businesses will die and others will struggle.
There's also issues with sudden change. If you convert zoning from office only to mixed use quickly expect 10 years or so of no new office buildings leading to flight of the best businesses seeking premium accommodation and office buildings start to run down and other building also seeing a lack of investment as their owners eye tearing them down soon.
If the market swings back towards office over time it will be harder to respond to. As I say also its easy to convert office to residential but almost impossible to convert back.
> If the market swings back towards office over time it will be harder to respond to. As I say also its easy to convert office to residential but almost impossible to convert back.
Additional complexities of a return to office mandate that some management blowhards want seems like a win for office to residential conversions in my opinion.
I am not a town planner, but this makes little sense to me.
Can you not have mixed use?