Absolutely. Low-income housing is the perfect use for all this extra office space. San Francisco has a problem where the low-income people who work to serve high-income people can't afford to live in the city that they work in.
Converting office space into affordable housing is a win for everyone, except the landlords, but I won't shed a tear for them ;-)
We've tried to convert offices to homes in the UK, and there's something particularly dystopian about the result. I think they have to make strange trade-offs to make the space useful, and its ends up being not very nice. I'm sure it's better than being on the street, but it isn't nice.
I grew up in the Sedgwick projects in the Bronx, and my grandma still lives there. She's been in the same rent-controlled apartment for 40+ years, which was affordable to her as a small business owner (hair/beauty salon).
She's now living independently at age 86, thanks to a social security check and a community where she's everyone's abuela. Rent-controlled housing made it easier to divorce her abusive husband and start a business back in the 60s.
The practicalities of the original design and trying to adapt it means these conversions often have limited natural light, limited fresh air, are made from hard, unbreathable, manufactured materials, are very 'liminal', have bad acoustics. Have you read the theory of 'sick buildings'? Homes made from office space seem to end up very 'sick', with an impact on people's mental and physical health, and increasing isolation.
not the person you are responding to, but I think they meant dystopian as in the "vibe" of the place. For example, many housing projects in France (where I live), tend to be basically large concrete rectangles, with very little green space. When compared to posher neighborhoods, with lots of trees everywhere, this can seem a little claustrophobic/totalitarian/dystopian. It feels like a less "human friendly" environment than you stereotypical suburb with front lawns.
I see where that's coming from, but to offer an alternate perspective the suburbs seemed "dystopian" to me at first - we moved upstate for middle/high school. The same 6-8 Stepford model homes on every street, strip malls filled with the same 10 stores (Walgreens/CVS, Costco/Walmart, etc), people dressed VERY similarly, and nobody walked anywhere. The teens in my suburban high school seemed way less happy and did more/harder drugs compared to the Bronx.
I'm not saying the projects were lovely. The elevators smelled like piss. But public housing - even ugly public housing - was a huge part in enabling two generations of single moms (my mom + grandma) to raise their families, start businesses, and thrive.
You can't just convert office space into residential space. Completely different building codes. Just the retrofit for the plumbing makes it untenable.
I know this will get downvoted but, I say Throw the building codes out the window. Housing people is more important than regulations.
If it made a difference to your ability to get shelter, which would you rather choose: have shelter or live in a illegal tent under a bridge resting assured with the knowledge that there's a big book of rules in place.
The problem is not all codes are meaningless regulation, and some of the important ones are indeed expensive (and vice versa). If you yolo it, you get cases like the Grenfell tower fire, and a lot of people literally die.
This is how you get housing tenements, and SF has a history of over-paying for impermanent housing solutions (like tents in a parking lot, or cots in a navigation center).
Not all buildings in SF are high-rise open-plans. If you're imagining converting Salesforce tower, I see how that would seem impractical.
Most commercial office space in SOMA (old warehouse buildings) can be converted into live/work lofts.
If you're talking low-income housing, it could be closer to a dormitory setup. Common bathrooms and kitchens, etc. This used to be common in low-income urban rental property, and still is in some parts of the world.
Building Codes are words on paper. They can be changed more easily than physical buildings.
Think of most offices. Central elevator shafts and stairs and bathrooms. A massive floorplan with all the windows on the edges. How do you convert to residential? Have 5 feet by 500 feet units so everyone has light and a connection to plumbing by the elevator shaft? Residential buildings have a lot more access to natural light throughout the structure and they are plumbed entirely differently. Hvac and wiring too.
This doesn't describe a lot of office space in San Francisco, especially SOMA. There are a couple of high-rise open plans (like SF Tower), but many offices in SOMA are converted warehouses.
Check out 510 Townsend, one of the properties mentioned in the OP. What do you think about converting buildings like 510 Townsend into live/work lofts?
The problem with shared bathrooms & kitchens is that no single person is responsible for cleaning them and as a result they end up being messes. It can work (in theory), but in practice it ends up getting ruined by lazy jerks.
Dorm buildings are still thinner and have more access to natural light. No matter what you get these awkward units and dystopian unlit spaces internally. In places like nyc with huge, city block width apartments, there are actually internal voids that let in natural light deeper into the structure.
Theoretically, the wages should come up to make it possible to live there, assuming the service providers are actually having trouble hiring.
It seems to me there might be some disconnect in demand and supply of various labor types (not many unskilled jobs compared to the number of unskilled workers, vs not many software devs but lots of openings). It seems these forces drag the bottom down while pushing the top higher.
> Theoretically, the wages should come up to make it possible to live there, assuming the service providers are actually having trouble hiring.
Why, theoretically, would wages rise enough to make it possible for any worker to live in the city? I think the situation where workers with the worst alternatives and weakest negotiating position are stuck commuting into SF from outside is unfortunate but theoretically entirely understandable; SF wages aren't forced to rise to support someone living here, but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting.
"but only to be high enough relative to wages elsewhere to compensate for the cost of commuting."
True, but then the implied issues with not living in the city you work in become moot if truly compensating for the commute and cost of living outside the city.
I think maybe you mean something by "truly compensating" which isn't actually being achieved. But the lesser compensation we are achieving is still sufficient to impact people's behavior.
Suppose you're able to get two part time jobs with relatively little predictability in your shift schedule. Both are minimum wage, but one is in SF where the minimum is $17/hr and another is in Concord at $14/hr (the state minimum for a company with <25 employees). Say you live in Antioch, and can get to the Concord job in around 35 minutes for $4 with BART, and get to the SF job with more than 1h and $7.30 on BART (one way). So for every shift in SF you pick up, you get a $3 premium per hour relative to the Concord job, but for the first 2 hours that just goes to cover your extra BART fare, _and_ you lose an extra hour in transit. In dollars you still come out ahead on an 8 hour shift in SF relative to in Concord, but I think it would be unreasonable to say that "the implied issues ... become moot".
I say theoretically, because in a theoretical world the market would be efficient and the employee would be analyzing the income and costs. Your examples are using locale in a HCOL state. Now image if the workers there actually did analysis on moving to lower cost states.
Yes, the moot part is based on them being truly compensatedfor the extra commute, in which case it would be moot. It's much more interesting to me to look at the income inequality and market side than the "solution" of creating subsidized housing. I'd rather go after the true root problem than cover up one symptom and allowa the problem to persist.
You're looking at it as it exists today. I'm saying theoretically this other stuff should work (but may not in practice).
I think this line of thinking is just sloppy. "Theoretically" the efficient market only gets to pareto optimality, i.e. we can't make the commuting low-wager worker's situation better without someone else being at least slightly worse off, but there's no lower bound on how bad things can be for that low-wage worker. Nothing assures us that we converge to a state where at the low end "the wages should come up to make it possible to live [in SF]" or anywhere particularly close.
I find your thinking sloppy. There, was that helpful?
"better without someone else being at least slightly worse off"
Exactly. The point (if you go back through my comments) is that there seems to be a demand and supply imbalance based on the skill/type of labor. We should be looking at ways to slow higher end wage growth and promote it in the lower end. One way to do this could be around education. Essentially, increase the number of developers on the market while decreasing the number of people who are only qualified for the lower wage work. We've kind of seen this with the pandemic shrinking the labor force and driving those lower end wages higher.
Who wants to live in a city if you can work from home? If you are poor and need housing subsidies and there are no jobs for you, there is no reason to live in the city to begin with. People go live where the jobs are. Without "white collar" jobs producing demand for services, there is much less demand for "blue collar" jobs.
If it's just cooping people up, there are cheaper ways to house people than maintaining expensive buildings that need financing and upkeep.
Permits to build, permits to remodel, taxes for simply existing year-over-year, taxes for having too few people living in the house... is there a limit to how far government will go to control what people can and cannot do with their own property?
It won't be your property forever, and future tenants have a right to live in a place that was constructed safely. I'd rather not find out that the wiring of the house I bought was installed by an unlicensed amateur when it burns down the house. That house fire could also spread to your neighbors, so it's not just your property that's at stake.
I agree that some permitting requirements can get out of hand; for example, some jurisdictions require a permit for repairs as simple as replacing a kitchen tap. But I'd rather the law be too stringent in this regard than too lenient, and it’s easy enough to flout the law for simple things like a kitchen tap.
No, unless you think an empty lot in downtown Manhattan should continue to go unused forever. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that land is used effectively.
In college, I had a pretty based statistics professor who said: "a skilled statistician can make the data tell whatever story his employers want". I chose not to pursue statistics as a career after that.
Its one of those debatable stories. I have a very good penguin book called "how to lie with statistics" which is obviously not trying to teach that, its using perverse sarcasm to explain how people do mislead. Things like charts which don't start at zero and magnify the 1% variances between samples into apparently (visually) far bigger things.
On the whole, why we start and stop things is complicated. I chose not to pursue engineer status, after the computer science ethics class discuss the risk side of getting it wrong (therac case, the freeman-fox computation disaster which led to two box-girder bridge collapses, Mismanaged expert systems REI-ifying racial and sexist admissions policy to medical degrees) -But in truth, I was probably unsuited. Its easier to say this was my watershed moment, but there were many reasons including lazyness.
Maybe you were better suited to a life in statistics than you thought?
Calling people "anti-science" is something of a canard, a trick of speech designed to belittle and demean anyone who questions the validity of current research.
I might add that "the science" was consistently wrong about many things during the pandemic.
"The ongoing Pandemic has solidified my belief that that most people would be better off in this world if they listened less to laypeople who think they know a lot about medicine and instead listened more to people who have graduated medical school and have a whole bunch of framed diplomas and certificates on the walls of their medical office. It's also a good indicator of competence if they have a medical office."
And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
A question for you. Imagine you're a doctor and after extensive research and your own medical experience and praxis, you conclude that, for instance, vaccination is probably a less than optimal choice for individuals under the age of 40. How comfortable would you feel publicly expressing this?
One of the biggest problems when a society starts to become intolerant towards dissenting views is that consensus itself starts to become impossible, or at least meaningless.
Most people don't care that much about most issues. Make it sting enough to dissent, and you'll eliminate dissent from all but those willing to choose this hill to die on. But in such a case the lack of dissent becomes meaningless.
I assume by "publically expressing" you mean not saying things to friends over a beer but posting things online or that will go online in some fashion.
If I was a doctor it's unlikely I would be publically expressing anything.
As far as I know I've never been treated by a doctor who goes around publically expressing things on any topic.
When I see a specialist it's usually because I got a referral from a family doctor not because "This doctor has an exciting Twitter feed".
I would guess my doctors have no public twitter feeds at all, not that I've ever checked.
But your question is too vague. In this scenario am I a random "doctor" or am I a nationally regarded expert in the relevant field? And did I run my views past respected colleagues and did they recieve it well or tell me I'm being an idiot?
I think the job of practicing medicine is generally about going to conferences and basing your practice on what the doctors regarded as being in the top of their field suggest.
Just like the job of becoming a doctor is about answering the questions on medical school exams in line with what the teacher told you is true, not "sharing your original views" on how the teacher is wrong.
I was born before social networks existed and reject the implicit framing society works better when everybody debates everything on social media all day. Some things might work well being debated on social media, but not everything.
Doctors are supposed to be providing the public with medical advise in line with the standards of their profession, not sharing "opinions" on medical matters whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
If you can't convince your colleagues that your "opinions" have value and you have such a high opinion of your judgement relative to the rest of your profession that you insist on broadcasting these "opinions" to the world anyway, chances are you have a high level of confidence and a low level of competence and you aren't a very good doctor.
Especially if these "opinions" are outside your specialty.
I know the notion that a doctor should show intellectual humility may offend autodidactics who doesn't even think a layperson should show intellectual humility, but so it goes.
The story of penicillin is an interesting one. As the first antibiotic, it's without doubt single most important medical discovery in modern times. It was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He left a number of samples of a bacteria to culture while on holiday. One of his petri dishes had been inadvertently exposed and when he returned it had grown a bluish green mold.
But the interesting thing about this mold is that there was no bacteria around the areas where the mold had grown. It seemed to have repelled or killed them. He was quite excited by his discovery. But upon sharing his discovery with his colleagues they were largely dismissive. He gave a number of talks discussing the mold, where people were also universally dismissive. And he even managed to get a paper published, where you can guess the response.
This isn't the end of this story of course, though it is for our purposes. It would take more than a decade but of course eventually penicillin would eventually be refined and shaped into the life saving drug that it would rapidly become. The point I want to make with this is rather evident. Had Fleming taken public views into account before expressing himself it's entirely possible we might still live in a world without antibiotics.
And this story is the rule more than the exception for many of the most important discoveries in the progress of humanity. Human progress is heavily decentralized in no small part because the "right" answer often seems wrong at first, and is rarely enthusiastically adopted when it runs contrary to the views of a day. It was none other than Max Planck that remarked, "science progresses one funeral at a time", precisely because of this.
I don't think the moral of the Alexander Fleming story is the medical community should abolish the FDA and medical malpractice laws so every doctor can do whatever and say whatever any more than the moral of "science progresses one funeral at a time" is we should fire every scientist who is older than thirty.
To attempt to force a populace to discard their own intellect and intuition in favor of simply listening to the 'experts' (who are always self appointed) is the dream of every psychopathic authoritarian who has lived.
>"The ongoing Pandemic has solidified my belief that that most people would be better off in this world if they listened less to laypeople who think they know a lot about medicine and instead listened more to people who have graduated medical school and have a whole bunch of framed diplomas and certificates on the walls of their medical office. It's also a good indicator of competence if they have a medical office."
>And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
Well there are laymen, and there are knowledgeable skeptics. Conflated the 2 and one get to gleefully brush aside questions by dismissing knowledgeable skeptics as laymen.
