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A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off
- phendrenad2 5mo agoWhen I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.
- hedora 5mo agoYet there is still a widespread housing shortage.
- nine_zeros 5mo ago[dead]
- LinuxAmbulance 5mo agoCommercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.
- ZunarJ5 5mo agoSounds like a job for people who don't have one, and a roof for people without.
- MyHonestOpinon 5mo agoYeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoWhat will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years?
- ipaddr 5mo agoMarketing
- red-iron-pine 5mo agounless you're an owner and control the means of production anywhere you live will be a slum in ~20 years
- blitzar 5mo agoThey have a roof that isnt a motorway.
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoThe context I'm referencing here is victorian flophouses and HK bedspace apartments, not American homeless encampments.
- supertrope 5mo agoColleges call these dorms.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoWhy is public housing in Vienna not slums? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=vienna%20housing&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- kube-system 5mo agoBecause they are designed to be residential housing?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> What will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years? The neighbourhood. When I moved to New York in my twenties, I had roommates. Everyone had roommates. That meant sharing a bathroom and kitchen. Not only did this breed camaraderie and teach me to not be a dick, it also freed up cash so I could enjoy the city and save.
- evklein 5mo agoExcept this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms). It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.
- adjejmxbdjdn 5mo agoThis is historically incomplete. American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city. An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent. The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws eliminating them. Before the white flight to the suburbs, the attempt was to keep the poor out of cities where the rich lived by eliminating housing of this sort since the poor couldn’t afford single family housing. This led to a proliferation of laws that required bathrooms and kitchens in every unit, etc.
- mono442 5mo agoIsn't it also the fact the almost no one wants to live like that? The expectations has changed and there's probably little demand for such type of housing.
- triceratops 5mo agoPeople rent bedrooms in single-family homes all the time. The only difference between that and dorm-style housing is the size of the building.
- Sam713 5mo agoGenuine question, who would actually want to share an intimate space like a kitchen or bathroom with dozens of other strangers on a daily basis? This is obviously a common setup in college dorms or prison, but that is specifically because it’s a temporary (and extreme) cost saving measure, or because you’ve lost the right to participate in society (i.e. prison, which is viewed by some societies to be cruel and inhumane). I lived with housemates for many years to save money and afford housing, but I could at least choose the few housemates with whom I shared those spaces.
- MyHonestOpinon 5mo agoI honestly do not know hoping that someone smarter than me figures it out. I suppose it will depend on the execution. If it is comfortable, looks nice, if it creates community, amenities, price, location, etc.
- mothballed 5mo agoHaving lived in some midwestern cities with a bunch of extra "not easily converted" warehouses, I've seen lots of "illegal" art collective operations where they just put all the extra plumbing on the ground floor where it is easily retrofitted (you can even raise the floor with a false bottom for plumbing if no other option) and then everyone shares a big kitchen, then the upper floors where retro fitting is more difficult are for habitation. Maybe the HVAC unit is undersized or something, or some other safety factors are substandard due to these people not having the money to improve it further, who gives a shit it is better and safer than living on the streets. Obviously since it's illegal these aren't advertised but they're quite prevalent, and issues are rare enough that now decade past muh Ghost Ship Warehouse is the constant drum being beat by the brain dead building code worshippers who actually bought the line of bullshit that having people homeless and freezing and shitting in the streets was actually a 'written in blood' advantage.
- gopher_space 5mo agoCommercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats. The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.
- LinuxAmbulance 5mo agoIt's not so much the owner's financial situation, but rather that it'd be cheaper to build new homes than to retrofit a ten floor+ building's plumbing. You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own. And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a large commercial building would generate with 24/7 occupancy vs 8/5 occupancy. The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential isn't because it's not wildly profitable, but because building new purpose-built residential buildings would be cheaper than a conversion for anything other than one or two floors.
- ReflectedImage 5mo agoOh no, I live in a flat in a converted commercial building. They have been going wild in the UK converting office space to residential.
- gopher_space 5mo ago> The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential I do see this. That's my point. Your plumbing problem has been solved by not jamming a ton of people into the building.
- joquarky 5mo ago> the increased amount of sewage How is there more than an office full of people?
- quickthrowman 5mo ago
- _DeadFred_ 5mo agoWeren't the feds buying these to convert into very dense ICE detention housing? So they can support high density human habitation according to the Feds, but not normal housing according to who?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted I still haven't seen numbers that show this is a physics problem versus zoning problem. Worst case, make some things (e.g. washers and dryers, maybe even showers) communal.
- postalrat 5mo agoWidespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.
- mothballed 5mo agoI literally just built a house for ~$60k a couple years ago. A burned out trailer even in a rural shithole with no jobs in my state is about $100k+. An actual functional house, $250k+. This is counter-intuitive but it makes sense in context of the recent COVID 0 real interest mania. Meanwhile all the shithole land with no "dwelling" on it was never eligible for mortgages so people weren't able to bid it up to oblivion on debt that they locked in with 30 year mortgages so you get weird results like the cost of vacant land is way cheaper than the same piece of land with a house that can really only be bulldozed (latter would be cheaper in most times in history). End result is I built an entire house on property cheaper than a burned out uninhabitable trailer. Building on unmortgagable land is a way to bypass the fact houses are all locked up in 30 year loans at negative real interest rates. End result is it's far cheaper to build a house than buy even a shitty burned out one because to do the latter you have to buy someone out of their money printing machine of a negative real rate loan, which obviously they are only willing to do for a king's ransom. ------ re: location --------- I won't share my address but if you are looking to do this yourself: look up fishing canneries in Alaska, most of them are close enough to cheap plots you could do this on, often even without permits or property tax. These canneries are also usually desperate for workers and pay a livable wage to those with refrigeration technology certifications.
- postalrat 5mo agoI'd like to see what kind of house you built for 60k. My assumption is its some small maybe 300 sqft box with no sewer you spent many hours yourself building. Not something something most people would do and while cheap in dollars certainly isn't affordable if you are putting a lot of work into it.
- mothballed 5mo ago
- milkytron 5mo agoFor a long time, the US had the money to build things, use them, let them slowly deteriorate, and then abandon them. It was cheaper to simply let things fall into disrepair, and build shiny new buildings and developments further away from the city center. Rinse and repeat. This is why a lot of inner ring suburbs are filled with strip malls that can't maintain their parking lots, don't have the residential density to support nearby businesses, etc. It's kind of an interesting development pattern that's been pervasive since the 1950s, and some towns and cities are trying to reverse it with infill.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoDebt funded sprawl. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt... https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2025/4/14/cities-are-already-defaulting-on-their-debts https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2025/4/14/cities-are...
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoWhy did it fund sprawl? Why didn't anyone choose to develop density on existing sites? We built that stuff just fine from 1870 through the 1940s. What changed? Surely it wasn't the proliferation of government regulation of the development process (and the financials thereof) that caused developers to optimize for greenfield sprawl crap that could most cheaply check the boxes, get the cheap money, get the approvals, be compliant, etc, etc.
- toomuchtodo 5mo ago> Surely it wasn't the proliferation of government regulation of the development process (and the financials thereof) that caused developers to optimize for greenfield sprawl crap that could most cheaply check the boxes, get the cheap money, get the approvals, be compliant, etc, etc. I'm sure white flight was a component, as well as subsidizing the auto manufacturing industry and a car centric planning model with federally funded highways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://nlihc.org/resource/myth-white-suburb-and-suburban-invasion https://nlihc.org/resource/myth-white-suburb-and-suburban-in... https://www.governance.fyi/i/191825260/the-money-problem-is-real-also-not-real https://www.governance.fyi/i/191825260/the-money-problem-is-... https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-end-of-suburban-white-flight/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-end-of-suburban-white...
- nitwit005 5mo agoLook into US retail space per capita. It has far exceeded other nations for some time. Some retail store CEOs have directly discussed too much supply.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Look into US retail space per capita Recommend a source?
- nitwit005 5mo agoIt was harder for you to quote that and ask me, than to figure it out on your own, so I'm going to pass.
- blitzar 5mo agoI tried going out to shops again to buy things recently - its so much harder, more expensive and time consuming than having it arrive through my letterbox the next day.
- jerlam 5mo agoI've shifted in the opposite direction. It's hard to judge the quality or fit of items online, especially when major platforms have been easily gamed. "Anything goes" marketplaces shift the burden of choosing good products to the buyer, while showing duplicates of indistinguishable products at seemingly random price points. Shippers have become unreliable and returning things comes with a time cost.
- bombcar 5mo agoWhat, you don’t like buying product from md5(u_int64(rand))?
- triceratops 5mo agoOnline shopping is a demoralizing, soul-sucking, time and energy drain. Hundreds of options and no way to tell if anything is good. Reviews mean jack shit. I do the bulk of my shopping IRL.
- mono442 5mo agoThe AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoWill never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements. And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.
- mbg721 5mo agoThe lower-friction result is that the offices become huge apartment buildings with reverse-commutes to the suburbs, hoping the "stuff to walk to" survives. There are issues with that too, like plumbing and windows.
- red-iron-pine 5mo agomost of those issues will be very expensive or insurmountable for most high-rises -- a non-starter you're basically rebuilding from scratch at that point.
- mbg721 5mo agoMaybe this is a US perspective, but those are attractive properties.
- nitwit005 5mo agoAI was already supposed to have replaced all of us.
- silexia 5mo agoOffice buildings are going the same direction horses went a hundred years ago after the invention of the internal combustion engine.