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It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic. From the ~7

It's kind of odd to me (as someone who used to live there at its latest boom time) that nobody talks about Kansas City when it comes to this topic. From the ~70's until the early 2010's Kansas City's downtown was in a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc... In that city 75% of the metro lives in suburbs, drives in to downtown for work and promptly leaves. Until about 2012 or so. Urban redevelopment kicked in, adding (free!) transit, boosting retail, arts district events, a new stadium, and crucially - *massive office to housing conversion projects*. There are tons of success stories like the historic Fidelity Tower at 909 Walnut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/909_Walnut), a huge 35-story tower that sat vacant (creepy) for the better part of a decade and is now home to 159 units. Ditto with the Power & Light Building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Power_and_Light_Bu...) (36 stories) - largely vacant for the better part of 20 years and now home to nearly 300 units. I could go on, every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments. I myself lived in the 30-story Commerce Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Tower) for a while and it was incredibly cheap to do so (~$1100/month for 750sqft 1 bed on the 14th floor), I had a 10 minute commute by foot to my office, it was awesome. Even the more squat, broad midsize banking buildings have had major success with residential conversions. These kinds of conversions have been proven out when there is willpower to do so at the city level - people will move in and prices typically get competitive fast if done at scale. I've lived in SF for 4 years now and I'm convinced its a policy problem not an economic problem.

RankingMember 2y ago
I was under the impression that Kansas City was still in a bit of a dire situation as far as crime is concerned[1], so I appreciate you highlighting some positive developments. In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular traffic. [1]https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous-places https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous...
- nox101 2y ago
  I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run. People generally devalue thing that are free in my experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it must be for poor people, not me). Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it. Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes. I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad. I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.
  - jen20 2y ago
    My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13 years I've been going.
  - ensignavenger 2y ago
    Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a small one. It will be interesting to continue following their experiment.
wolverine876 2y ago
> a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc. That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely: Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services? > every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem
  - wernercd 2y ago
    The problem is the differences... IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities. I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments. Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice". The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.
    - causality0 2y ago
      I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like that crime is happening less on paper?
melenaboija 2y ago
I have seen something similar happen in Birmingham, AL while living there since 2015 to 2022.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
justanother 2y ago
To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda pleasant place. Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.
- tylerFowler 2y ago
  The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.
matt-p 2y ago
I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite a while, many apartments were once factories or something else 100 years ago. I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.
- tylerFowler 2y ago
  Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Yes I'm thinking of buildings probably 1980/90s onwards. We are tearing them down and rebuilding apartments in some cases I'm aware of. That seems like a real shame to be honest. I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Also, you pay property taxes on the actual floor sizes. So even if you turn into apartments the areas close to windows the rest of the space is still taxed even if empty. Thus, in areas like Manhattan it's virtually impossible to convert those buildings or you need to literally cut off the center of these buildings.
- weberer 2y ago
  They've been doing it in the USA for quite a while as well. Most former factories are now "The Lofts at [name]"
asdfman123 2y ago
I'm hardly an expert on this, but it seems the exact same thing happened to all sorts of cities in the 2010s. Millennials wanted to live in cities. It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but still worth pointing out.
- Yeul 2y ago
  There's a massive demographic increase in single person households. If you're single you have to meet people you can't just retreat into your suburbia castle with your family. Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.
- tylerFowler 2y ago
  Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.
aquova 2y ago
I know people who live nearish the KC downtown area, and live in an old elementary school that was converted into an apartment complex. A bit weird architecturally, but they seem to like it.
listenallyall 2y ago
Redevelopment of derelict downtowns has been outsourced to massive real estate corporations who have created a successful formula that they can pretty much copycat over and over. Kansas City's Power & Light district, which you mention, was built by the Cordish Companies, which cut and paste in Louisville and Baltimore, among others. https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts Certainly there are benefits of revitalizing urban spaces but the fact that it is entirely engineered, has little room for local entrepreneurs, and most financial benefits flow to a small cadre of real estate giants, is also somewhat concerning.
- Leherenn 2y ago
  It feels hard to avoid. You need scale to make the project viable: a single small redevelopment in a run down area is unappealing, but if you do the whole block, that's a different story. There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.
- tylerFowler 2y ago
  In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time. Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space. Tldr; idk, necessary evil?
b800h 2y ago
One problem with doing this - as seen in Manchester in the UK, is that the new residents will demand that their neighbouring bars and clubs be closed to cut down on noise and disturbance. It has the effect of gutting a city centre of it's culture and nightlife.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Same thing is happening in London's Soho. New 'luxury flats' blocks are being built and life gets sucked out of the place through gentrification, but I guess Soho Estates is happy. Another victim of this short-term developer greed is London's Denmark Street where Jimmy, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the rest of the world's rock and pop royalty used to hang out, record, and shop for gear. That area could have been turned into London's mini Nashville with recording studios and clubs, but instead we got the Outernet monstrosity. Most of the old shops are gone, the only ones surviving are maybe three guitar shops. There are a couple of new ones, Roland and Korg, but the staff are so incompetent that I don't see them lasting.
ido 2y ago
This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say as a European how crazy it is to keep finding out the US is so large that even some third-tier city I ± never heard of is big enough to have a downtown full of outright skyscrapers[0]! It reminds me of reading about some minor Indian city and then looking it up in Wikipedia and seeing it has a population in the millions. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Kansas_City_-_Downtown_-_panoramio_%2815%29.jpg/1280px-Kansas_City_-_Downtown_-_panoramio_%2815%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Ka...
- loftyal 2y ago
  Wait until you see China. There are multiple cities bigger than NYC or London that most people have never heard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...
  - cedilla 2y ago
    Many of those cities are compromised of enormously large areas though. Chongqing is larger than the country of Austria and has a population density of 390 people per square km. London has a population density of 15000 people per square km. There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.
    - Ographer 2y ago
      It sounds like you may be comparing the population density of a large, diluted area and not the downtown areas alone. It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings. Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.
- arethuza 2y ago
  Well Europe and the EU both have larger populations than the US and quite a bit higher population densities (even though the continent of Europe is slightly larger) so wouldn't you expect Europe to have more skyscrapers than the US?
tetris11 2y ago
> 750sqft 70m2 for anyone wondering
steveBK123 2y ago
It is a policy problem. There was an OddLots podcast on the topic of NYC CRE to Resi conversions a while ago. One issue is theres longstanding zoning laws on conversions that limit what can be converted based on year of construction. The year doesn't automatically move forward annually so a new law has to be passed to adjust it otherwise it remains stuck at 1965 or something like that.
zikduruqe 2y ago
Can confirm, I worked in 909 Walnut, and witnessed downtown transform. KC is an underrated city, and a surprising tech area. Getting Google Fiber first definitely helped. It is commonly called Silicon Prairie.
pookha 2y ago
They also converted old factories into these wild thrift stores and concert spaces (West Bottoms).

RankingMember 2y ago

I was under the impression that Kansas City was still in a bit of a dire situation as far as crime is concerned[1], so I appreciate you highlighting some positive developments. In particular, I'm surprised and impressed they made transit free- that's something I experienced in Estonia and thought was an amazing idea considering the cost of policing turnstiles and fare collection itself plus the benefits of people moving around a city via mass transit over individual vehicular traffic. [1]https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous-places https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-dangerous...

nox101 2y ago
I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run. People generally devalue thing that are free in my experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it must be for poor people, not me). Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it. Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes. I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad. I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.
- jen20 2y ago
  My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13 years I've been going.
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a small one. It will be interesting to continue following their experiment.

wolverine876 2y ago

> a similar "doom loop" of crime, undevelopment, decaying historic buildings, etc. That's not the doom loop in the OP, which results from office space demand decreasing due to so many working remotely: Urban theorists describe a phenomenon called the “doom loop”: once workers stop filling up downtown offices, the stores and restaurants that serve them close, which in turn makes the area even emptier. And who wants to work somewhere with no services? > every block has similar projects of 100+ year old buildings of nontrivial sizes that are now super unique apartments Per the OP (and I've read elsewhere), older buildings are easier to convert because their floors are smaller, which makes it much easier to give a windows to every apartment (a law in many/most/all places).

jvanderbot 2y ago
It's easy to imagine that the two doom loops are in fact connected. A vacant downtown is essentially what GP described, and the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem
- wernercd 2y ago
  The problem is the differences... IE: Soft on crime policies in large cities. I seriously doubt a lot of these larger cities that are in the "doom loop" will have the same results with the current differences between 20-30 years ago and today with simply turning buildings into apartments. Just look at New York where businesses are closing all over because of rampant theft. They aren't closing because people aren't there. They care closing because they can't afford to have half their wares walk out the door because New York is refusing to charge criminals because of "justice". The world we live in is vastly different than it was and the doom loops aren't just because of remote workers.
  - causality0 2y ago
    I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like that crime is happening less on paper?

melenaboija 2y ago

I have seen something similar happen in Birmingham, AL while living there since 2015 to 2022.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

justanother 2y ago

To your point, I've watched with interest the redevelopment of the West Bottoms. I don't live anywhere near Kansas City anymore, but in the 1980s and 1990s, we teenagers used a large portion of the Bottoms around the 12th Street Bridge to play hide-and-seek at night, and we never encountered another soul (people were just too scared to be in the Bottoms at night, but we were young and crazy). Just a desolate area with tall neglected brick buildings from 1900, with some alleys that were still dirt. But I'm blown away now at how small businesses are taking it over block-by-block and turning it into a kinda pleasant place. Surely this could not have been possible without some civic backing (the soil contamination in the Bottoms was simply awful and required extensive EPA cleanup and then some), but as you note, policy plus cheap prices appears to be turning it around.

tylerFowler 2y ago
The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.

matt-p 2y ago

I think to be fair we have been doing this in Europe for quite a while, many apartments were once factories or something else 100 years ago. I think, from my understanding, the greatest challenge is in turning modern office blocks into housing. They are usually really big (10,000 -40,000 sqft) floor plates so there's very little natural light to go around and the shape of the flats needed to get window access would be really impractical. Meanwhile the slab to slab heights, floor loadings and locations mean they're not good for industrial or any other use beyond offices.

tylerFowler 2y ago
Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.
- matt-p 2y ago
  Yes I'm thinking of buildings probably 1980/90s onwards. We are tearing them down and rebuilding apartments in some cases I'm aware of. That seems like a real shame to be honest. I know in canary wharf for example they are turning some into children's nurseries and schools which feels "interesting" I'm absolutely certain if they could cost effectively be converted for much much more lucrative apartments they would be.
epolanski 2y ago
Also, you pay property taxes on the actual floor sizes. So even if you turn into apartments the areas close to windows the rest of the space is still taxed even if empty. Thus, in areas like Manhattan it's virtually impossible to convert those buildings or you need to literally cut off the center of these buildings.
weberer 2y ago
They've been doing it in the USA for quite a while as well. Most former factories are now "The Lofts at [name]"

asdfman123 2y ago

I'm hardly an expert on this, but it seems the exact same thing happened to all sorts of cities in the 2010s. Millennials wanted to live in cities. It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but still worth pointing out.

Yeul 2y ago
There's a massive demographic increase in single person households. If you're single you have to meet people you can't just retreat into your suburbia castle with your family. Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.
tylerFowler 2y ago
Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.

aquova 2y ago

I know people who live nearish the KC downtown area, and live in an old elementary school that was converted into an apartment complex. A bit weird architecturally, but they seem to like it.

listenallyall 2y ago

Redevelopment of derelict downtowns has been outsourced to massive real estate corporations who have created a successful formula that they can pretty much copycat over and over. Kansas City's Power & Light district, which you mention, was built by the Cordish Companies, which cut and paste in Louisville and Baltimore, among others. https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts https://www.cordish.com/businesses/entertainment-districts Certainly there are benefits of revitalizing urban spaces but the fact that it is entirely engineered, has little room for local entrepreneurs, and most financial benefits flow to a small cadre of real estate giants, is also somewhat concerning.

Leherenn 2y ago
It feels hard to avoid. You need scale to make the project viable: a single small redevelopment in a run down area is unappealing, but if you do the whole block, that's a different story. There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.
tylerFowler 2y ago
In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time. Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space. Tldr; idk, necessary evil?

b800h 2y ago

One problem with doing this - as seen in Manchester in the UK, is that the new residents will demand that their neighbouring bars and clubs be closed to cut down on noise and disturbance. It has the effect of gutting a city centre of it's culture and nightlife.

surfingdino 2y ago
Same thing is happening in London's Soho. New 'luxury flats' blocks are being built and life gets sucked out of the place through gentrification, but I guess Soho Estates is happy. Another victim of this short-term developer greed is London's Denmark Street where Jimmy, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the rest of the world's rock and pop royalty used to hang out, record, and shop for gear. That area could have been turned into London's mini Nashville with recording studios and clubs, but instead we got the Outernet monstrosity. Most of the old shops are gone, the only ones surviving are maybe three guitar shops. There are a couple of new ones, Roland and Korg, but the staff are so incompetent that I don't see them lasting.

ido 2y ago

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say as a European how crazy it is to keep finding out the US is so large that even some third-tier city I ± never heard of is big enough to have a downtown full of outright skyscrapers[0]! It reminds me of reading about some minor Indian city and then looking it up in Wikipedia and seeing it has a population in the millions. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Kansas_City_-_Downtown_-_panoramio_%2815%29.jpg/1280px-Kansas_City_-_Downtown_-_panoramio_%2815%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Ka...

loftyal 2y ago
Wait until you see China. There are multiple cities bigger than NYC or London that most people have never heard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...
- cedilla 2y ago
  Many of those cities are compromised of enormously large areas though. Chongqing is larger than the country of Austria and has a population density of 390 people per square km. London has a population density of 15000 people per square km. There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.
  - Ographer 2y ago
    It sounds like you may be comparing the population density of a large, diluted area and not the downtown areas alone. It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings. Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.
arethuza 2y ago
Well Europe and the EU both have larger populations than the US and quite a bit higher population densities (even though the continent of Europe is slightly larger) so wouldn't you expect Europe to have more skyscrapers than the US?

tetris11 2y ago

> 750sqft 70m2 for anyone wondering

steveBK123 2y ago

It is a policy problem. There was an OddLots podcast on the topic of NYC CRE to Resi conversions a while ago. One issue is theres longstanding zoning laws on conversions that limit what can be converted based on year of construction. The year doesn't automatically move forward annually so a new law has to be passed to adjust it otherwise it remains stuck at 1965 or something like that.

zikduruqe 2y ago

Can confirm, I worked in 909 Walnut, and witnessed downtown transform. KC is an underrated city, and a surprising tech area. Getting Google Fiber first definitely helped. It is commonly called Silicon Prairie.

pookha 2y ago

They also converted old factories into these wild thrift stores and concert spaces (West Bottoms).