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), 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_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) 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.

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).

That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates.

> Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

What makes you say that has changed from the past?

Murder may be low.

Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

> Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.

The relevant bits:

>>>Only 37 percent rate public safety in their neighborhood as excellent or good, down from 50 % in 2017 [1] (yikes!)

>>> In fact, New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the DAY now as they felt on the subway at NIGHT in 2017 [1]

In fact, this source confirms my entire premise, that while murder has been down vs the horrendous stats of 20 years ago, nonmurder felonies and other crimes have spiked only recently. These 2 now EXCEED the stats of horrendous stats of 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://cbcny.org/research/straight-from-new-yorkers [2] See article, figure 2.

> In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”

> Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

What shows that it's high? It's circular to say that the unknown numbers are higher, not lower, because you think crime is high.

> a large Democrat-dominated city

What does the political party have to do with it, unless this really is about your politics? Republican areas of the country have higher crime rates, last I checked. If you think there's a correlation between party and crime rate, feel free to show us.

> (Pew data)

It's great to have some data, thanks. I don't know that anything has changed, however, though I imagine numbers were different during the pandemic and immediately after.

Numbers could be better now, for all we know.

You have actual data - why kill your argument by exaggerating it?

The stats you posted are about perception, not actual events. If people read other people constantly badgering them about safety, of course they will worry about it.

I've read one news story on an analysis of Broken Windows (so not a lot of data) said that outcomes were not correlated with that strategy. Crime went down everywhere, whether or not they used Broken Windows.

Mayors and police chiefs, etc. are called geniuses or fools in strong correlation with national trends, especially the economy. Lots of 1990s mayors, etc. were geniuses as the economy boomed and crime came down nationwide.

I never felt unsafe in LA, but I sure as hell felt disgusted when someone spit on us, and a bunch of other negative emotions when you saw the worst of the homeless population or drug use or anything else.

Was I unsafe ? No, but was it clearly disorderly? Yep.

In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.

(Tourists' impressions of safety are a really terrible guide to anything, and can be dramatically incorrect in either direction.)

As less persecutions end up in convictions, and as accusations of bias can mean the end of a police officer career, there's also a more lax attitude from the police force.

Crime becomes less risky and more rewarding, what drives crime force recruitment up, the culture becomes more and more accepting, and petty criminals over time graduate to more serious crimes. Substance abuse, violence, it all just adds to the culture.

Soon you'll start noticing that there areas of the city where police presence is virtually inexistent, and the people who live on those places realize that involving the police could bring unpleasant consequences. Those liberated areas are for all practical purposes, outside the reach of the State.

Soon, murders start going unnoticed, fights against rival gangs lead to deaths, but unless the bodies are found, nobody is going to involve the police. People simply cease to exist and disappear, no records.

Politicians, prosecutors and police chiefs soon realize the political advantage of not digging too much into reality and promoting the lie that the official statistics, utterly corrupted by the incomplete data collection, are trustworthy and represent the reality.

Terminally political people and journalists, that are nowadays basically propaganda officers, start gaslighting everyone that dares to say otherwise. You can't feel safe in the subway, but you are either crazy or a simpleton if you don't believe NYC is one of the safest places in the world, look at the data!

'Everyone knows' is a group of people repeating something to each other enough that they believe it must be true. Those are the things that most need skepticism, an objective factual basis. Look at your comment - there is no factual basis for any of the claims. Some is conspiracy - if they disagree, they are gaslighting, incompetent, etc.

Objective facts are our only salvation from our own delusions - which we're all subject to. There is factual basis to say that NYC is very safe, but it's not conclusive. That doesn't support baseless claims. If you have an alternative claim, there's not reason to believe it without factual support.

Almost everyone you're talking to here lives in the developed world, and it doesn't seem like they 'know' the same thing.

> You can't feel safe in the subway

You can, and many do. I do.

But I also think it’s odd that you think NYC is underreporting murders and not going after serious crimes, when if you go into rural areas, you’ll find many that are a few Sheriffs stretched thin over hundreds of miles, and infinite more potential for “murders going unnoticed.”

https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...

Paints a picture

You may be thinking of a median or mode, which can differ based on the shape of the distribution curve.

People are just reaching for possible straws. Do you have any factual basis to say that? We can make up anything and put the word 'might' or 'maybe' in front of them.

I've spent lots of time in NYC and other dense, major cities, and I think I've seen one crime ($20 stolen). The interstate highway is more threatening, with the aggressive drivers.

Really, go to NYC. Look at the millions of people walking around without a care, going about their days.

Yes, agreed (of course). I'm not sure what that says about the original statement.

> The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.

First, it seems like we are really shifting the goalposts. Being victimized by crime is a lot different than witnessing it, though the latter isn't pleasant, of course.

How much does it matter? In a place that dense, you see a lot more of everything. For people there, it's a feature and not a bug. That's why people pay so much to live there.

Is witnessing a crime so bad? I suppose something traumatizing would be, but I think NYers are used to seeing 'everything, all the time', and they would not be traumatized by most crime. Murder? I think that would leave a mark, depending on what you saw, but that's very rare. Shoplifting? Public intoxication? A carjacking would be alarming, I suppose, speaking for myself.

You are correct that if the average number of observers per crime is higher, that could indeed make a place feel comparatively more dangerous since the while the liklihood of being a victim is lower, the liklihood of seeing a victim is higher. However, I would posit that a lot more goes into feelings of safety and we haven't seen any data on how large this effect size might be.

Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.

That said, I understand the desire to frame crime in the absolute. Either you’re the 1 guy who gets unlucky and experiences a crime in your small town, or there are 999 people like you in the big city). Crime is a problem of scale, and a bigger scale freaks people out even if the coefficients are the same.

It freaks out people who live elsewhere and all they know of cities is what they see on cable news, especially a certain channel.

> There’s a psychological reason (rational or not) people equate cities with violence

Maybe it's simply that it's repeated at them endlessly - a simple, effective tactic used by conservatives for decades.

Majority of murders are among people who know each other. You personal risk is all about who your partner is, who your friends are, how much aggressive your uncle is. A guy you never met that is just about to murder his wife has nothing to do with your personal risk.

Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.

If anything, the real # in 2023 of 386 only further proves my point. That it's ridiculous to assert even that many more murders is less safe than Stockton, CA.

Safety is about "am I more or less likely to have something happen to me" and no one is thinking that means moving to the tiniest country of 2,000 people where only 10 murders happened in the entire country last year.

I contend it is significantly safer in the majority of cities in the US than New York City.

You seem to be implying per capita is a bad measure of safety. But you're not being clear why. Can you elaborate?

Your conclusion is without any evidence and is in fact, wrong, based on the crime metrics we can easily compare.

It's quite uncanny that it's the people who most fear crime, think they're going to something like "stay the hell away from crime infested NYC" and proceed to move somewhere where they're more likely to be affected by crime.

Rational or not, proximity of crime freaks some people out much more than probability of being the victim.

I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?

There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!

You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!

I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.

And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.

I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.

Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).

Another thing might be that it feels unsafe due to social isolation maybe, for people who are actually there, but that is just a supposition.

I think it's reasonable that they feel it's less safe. I often feel things that I know do not exactly correspond to statistical reality, one should just try to be aware of where the feelings slightly diverge and not go arguing that what one feels is objective reality.

That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.

This applies equally to the outer boroughs. Poorer neighborhoods (in any borough) are scrappier, of course, than the rich areas. But they're just as full of life and vibrancy.

I really take your point on the media projection. It's relentless. And it really keeps an outdated image alive, especially in the minds of people who don't live here and can't directly contrast with their own eyes.

I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.

> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.

There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.

The campaign about Western cities is not from China, but from Western conservatives. Look at Trump and the GOP (and now the Democrat governor of NY!) repeatedly calling for the national guard or military to be sent into cities.

If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).

Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.

One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.

The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.

The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.

The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.

In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.

Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?

Here is yet another source from the U.S. Department of Justice [2]: "During the period from 2006 to 2010, 52% of all violent victimizations, or an annual average of 3,382,200 violent victimizations, were not reported to the police.".

Realistically speaking it is hard to measure unreported crimes given that by definition they are - after all - unreported. And yet the fact that some data is not collected or it is hard to collect, doesn't mean that the data doesn't exist.

> Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this?

I could be asking you the same question, based on your stance.

[1] - https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/Universit...

[2] - https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf

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.

Residential landlords are also much different than dealing with corp real estate owners. The terms, length of lease, laws and many other factors are completely different.

Office generally try to maximize square footage, this tends to result in floor plans that are very awkward to adopt into residential use, primarily because the building code virtually everywhere has some sort of "natural light"/window requirement.

This means that purpose built residential high rises tend to be "skinnier" to have more windows per sq. ft of floor space. Not to mention the very expensive changes (hvac, plumbing, etc.) required to support residential use.

If the building code was changed so that the requirements for office and residential use buildings were closer then it would make future buildings more easily convertible between those use cases. It does not solve the problem of the existing buildings however..

Part me of wonders... others are saying "all that theft is employee driven" as a talking point (yeah, I've got my own talking points too. Se'la'vie lol) - how much of it is old data - data from a decade ago before the soft on crime, defund the police crowd took over - and how much of it is employees not reporting crimes that waste everyones time in the current climate.

It'll be interesting to see if we get real data over the years and can look back at this failed experiment on "justice" objectively enough to show what an utter disaster it currently is.

"Texas" Texas also has stand your ground laws and castle defense... so it's a lot easier to stop criminals. IE: Florida where a sheriff said "We have free gun classes so you can help save tax payers money when defending your property by not missing" (paraphrased).

The point still stands: CA took a $50 limit, bumped it up to $950, elects DAs that don't prosecute misdeamenors - and, as such, store owners don't report crimes that won't lead to prosecutions. Why waste the time? - so when you look at it from a statistical perspective? Oh look... crime numbers are down.

Never mind that more stuff is being stole on a more consistent basis... the lack of higher level crimes (Fewer felonies) and the lack of prosecutions (Why prosecute a misdemeanor as a DA... and why report stuff to police that won't get prosecuted as a business owner...) look better on paper but businesses and people are more unsafe than ever.

Where in NY are these stores closing?

I've personally witnessed three blatant thefts in the last few years from my local Duane Reade (that closed down in April). Every time the clerks are like "pretty sure that was the same guy from yesterday". It's never violent or scary. It's just like watching a fight between homeless people in a subway station -- you look, think that's odd, and move on.

> Where in NY are these stores closing? 4 different pharmacies that have closed down since the pandemic just on my path to work, including two a stone's throw from the NY stock exchange. https://maps.app.goo.gl/fJcHCgjVacP5pEuHA https://maps.app.goo.gl/kmDXnjHruMCvS2CA6

I suspect it's not all shrinkage though. I imagine continued trends where we buy more and more things via online retailers like Amazon and the growth of online/by mail pharmacies has contributed too. CVS/Duane Reade are still opening new locations too, so it can't be all that bad.

Not the main thing I've been arguing, per-se but the fact that the national guard is being deployed into places like the subway seems to bolster the notion that NY isn't doing well.

https://abc7ny.com/subway-crime-nyc-statistics-assault/14381...

"According to the NYPD, there were 570 reports of felony assault on trains or in stations in 2023, that's the highest number in more than 20 years and a 53% jump from pre-pandemic levels."

January crime was up 50% compared to 2023 - and yes, that's a 2 year snapshot. Statistics is the game of picking the two points and saying "SEE! I'M RIGHT!"

but the main points is that violent crime is up.

The main point of my comments is more general crime - its hard to say crime is down when recent decisions to raise the bar to charge people has literally made fewer things crimes so "crime is down" can be true from a "statistically reported" perspective while actual numbers are up.

Look at California that raised the level of misdemeanor to $950... so felonies are down? Gee... I wonder why? Even though objectively more crime is happening, less is getting reported because people won't waste their time on "misdemeanors" that won't get charged by soft on crime DA. Crimes down? True... but also a lie.

Crime is running rampant as criminality is now, for all intents, legal if you're under a threshold. (or, if you're of the right demographics to "atone for past injustice")

I certainly agree there might be spin, but then why choose theft?

The progressive D.A.'s and A.G.'s, who own this project of mass downward departure from normal sentencing, do not expect things to change overnight by taking pressure off (mainly) the poor and the young.

But in 5-10 years if crime is worse and society more stratified, their project can be called a failure.

I said to the clerk "that's a 99-2003 GMC Sierra in case you want to tell them when you call it in"

And he replied "oh we don't even call the police.. they won't do anything"

I was so angry I called corporate on the way home. Corporate told me "oh yes that's right, that's our policy. We have insurance for that!"

I said "that's great you have insurance, but I'd like my police department and newspaper to know my town is going to hell..."

The DA's resources are limited (unless all the Republican critics want to pay more taxes!). Arrest is enough of a deterrent for minor crimes.

It has nothing to do with deterring crimes or crime rates, it is just politics.

You are saying, effectively, that we know that smoke always comes from fire simply because when you light a fire, you see smoke.

You can't argue that policing deters crime simply because when there is policing, crimes are prosecuted. That makes a lot of bad assumptions about the nature of crime itself that I don't think a single criminologist would follow you on.

Why couldn't you? Defund the police = less prosecutions, less policing = more criminals...

Why wouldn't someone argue easily proven points that more police = more safety (Yes, some corruption does exist but it's not like that corruption goes away when the police do.)

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when...

"...from that perspective, investing in more police officers to save lives provides a pretty good bang for the buck. Adding more police, they find, also reduces other serious crimes, like robbery, rape, and aggravated assault."

I don't see why this necessarily follows. Unless, e.g., the only reason you are not killing your neighbor is because your pretty sure you will be prosecuted for it.

To view the whole world as just itching to commit crimes as soon as they can get away with it is just already buying into the presuppositions of policing the original gp was interrogating.

Like its fine I guess if you want to have this pseudo-Hobbesian outlook to it all, but you can't pretend its something logical/rational. Because it simply isn't!

The police where I live are transparently useless. Someone tried to steal my car at bart. Even my auto insurance didn't bother asking for a police report while paying out $3k for a repair to the door. Everyone involved understands it's an utter waste of time and not a thing will happen.

For at least n=1, no crime happened.

Well, I don’t know. What should be done about this? I guess I thought my report might be tabulated, that perhaps a pawn shop or two might be called. My wife and I were living financial-aid-reimbursement-check to MGIB check to work-study check at the time. We got the one of the cheapest car stereos we could find, but it still hurt. We had just gotten it installed literally that day, and the next morning it was gone.

I’m sorry to have wasted your time, officer. There’s probably a kid with a one-hitter that you could arrest on your way back to the station.

What does explain it is what explains many other things that don't match facts, about the economy, vaccines, climate change, election legitimacy, Obama's birthplace, etc. Whatever the conservative message machine focuses on, generally a large portion of the population believes.

S&F has been "unconstitutional" for over a decade - and that's not counting Defund The Police shenannery, open border policies and stuff like "bail reform".

IE: Illegal immigrants attacking police and getting released without bail.

Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".

Think of an old brick building with several stories and a window per floor vs a new steel + concrete building with windows spanning multiple floors.

The "older" builder like the converted one in the parent post has small windows, allowing easy subdivisions. Newer buildings have windows spanning multiple floors and need to be retrofitted and on a skyscraper that comes at a huge cost.

The bigger ticket item is the plumbing and ventilation, and to some extent the electrical. Ventilation is needed around the cooking area and washrooms, adding that to a building not purposed for this is challenging (where does the "contaminated" air go out?).

It's often cheaper to bomb down the building and start over than doing a conversion on a new highrise. You'll see this often where they gut the entire structure and floors, keep a few walls/supporting structure, and build new.

consider a detective office in a movie from like the '50s. the office is small, primary illumination is from large, openable windows, maybe there's a front section for a secretary. that happens to be pretty more or less around the ideal size for an apartment as well, though for more bedrooms you probably need to merge adjacent offices.

now consider the office block from Office Space. it's extremely large and dark in the middle. it is so large that there is no way you could possibly get natural light into the middle easily. in Office Space that's kind of the point, the darkness and required artificial lighting makes it super depressing and a dystopian commentary on the modern economy. who would want to live in an interior like that?

Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.

This seems off. If you consult this map and chart [0] Paris seems to do something very similar to NYC with regard to density. There's the city of Paris proper (75 on the map) which has a slightly higher population than Manhattan but a much lower density (52k/sq mi in Paris vs 74k). Then as soon as you get out of that 40 sq mi (about the size of the Bronx) into the the petite couronne density drops to well below that of any one of the five boroughs besides Staten Island.

So, yeah, if you take an area the size of a single NYC borough in the Paris region that's drawn specifically around the densest population zone then it has a higher density than NYC taken as a whole. But if you compare most-dense-zone to most-dense-zone then NYC is denser by a fairly wide margin, and if you compare areas that are of a similar size rather than only including the City of Paris proper then NYC wins again.

It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris

I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC, so comparisons between NYC boroughs (which are each almost as big as the city of Paris) and Paris' surrounding departments are clearly favorable for NYC.

If you compare cities of similar size, i.e. Paris with Los Angeles (which is still bigger, both city and metro area), then the european capital is significantly ahead in density (and I did not cherry pick Los Angeles specifically, it's the same for Chicago, Houston, etc.), and the difference is very significant: Even the core of those US cities (excepting NYC) is less dense than the 3 inner Parisian suburb departments (!!).

Isn't that just another way of saying that they drew the city boundaries differently than they did in NYC? If you extend the boundaries out to the 814 km^2 of Greater Paris, that gives it a fairly similar population to NYC (7m compared to 8.8m) with a very similar area (814 km^2 to 778 km^2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris

The 'secret' of European downtowns is that they are not uninhabited.

is that a euphemism? DC used to lead the nation in murder rate for decades -- the DC basketball team used to be the Washington Bullets, which stopped being ironic and funny after a couple years. There are still DC neighborhoods where the police won't send cops without 3+ cars of backup.

DC has gotten much better but is still like #12 or #13 in the US, and it's bad areas are still very bad. The rest of the Fed-Gov areas in the city are locked down hard, but no one lives there, and nearby areas Georgetown or Tenleytown are expensive. Source: from the area, went to AU, had to do background investigations on dudes in SE DC.

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.

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.

This is unlike the office towers mentioned in the article, which don’t really lend themselves naturally to being apartments.

It's changing though I'm seeing 40 story (luxury) apartment complexes go up all over Dutch cities.

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...

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.

They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.

Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.

One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West, where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and in their remuneration levels.

> That means facilities are spotless

I can assure you no stations are remotely spotless. In fact I'm surprised some of them aren't considered fire hazards. Ueno, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Akihabara, all have extremely messy areas. Newer stations appear clean but that's only because they're new AFAICT. Just commenting because I don't want people to ge the wrong impression. They might be cleaner than SF, NYC, Paris on average but they're not as clean as Stockholm or Singapore

But I agree with you that the others are a mess. Shibuya and Ueno look like half the stations are falling apart, and Shinjuku is some kind of non-euclidean labyrinth, every time I go there, I get lost. If there is even a fire there, the death toll is going to be immense.

In Japan, at major train stations I find the bathrooms reasonably clean and good to use. In New York, it smells of poop and pee because the odds are that someone probably publicly urinated, or some pipe somewhere in the subway tunnel is leaking sewage.

That said, the bathrooms between JR Shinjuku and Marunouchi-line used to smell pretty rancid. I haven't used them recently though.

MTA in New York City has about 70k employees.

That’s the objective reality, in most of the USA.

The only way they’ll attract people that aren’t forced to use it, for financial reasons, is to remove the piss and puke from the floor, the stains of the same composition from the seats (although rock hard plastic is getting popular to compensate), and prevent, not remove, the guy with obvious drug and mental health issues, and now has his dick out, from boarding.

If you want something to be attractive for the general population, it has to, literally, be attractive, or at least not repulsive. Otherwise, the shorter commutes and clean interior that personal transport gives is the obvious choice, as it currently, measurably, is.

But, that can’t happen, because anything nice will be destroyed/vandalized, because anyone can board. The goal of not discriminating against anything or anyone is a choice that society has made (probably the correct one) that makes public transport literal shit.

I don’t miss the few times I used it, then noped back into my car.

You of course need a plan for the poor but that should be a minority.

So by not paying your ticket/subscription, you only had to hope for not seeing controllers who could fine you.

A few years ago, they said that too many people were not actually paying for usage, so they decided to put physical restrictions (fare gates?).

Journalists decided to investigate and they did the math. Basically they came up with something like : once you take everything into account (building and maintaining physical machines for buying fares and controlling access, managing everything around billing, enforcing fares with human controllers...), on every euro spent by a user, more than 60% went to the costs related to the fare system itself. Less than 40% was actual money that the company could use to improve the UX.

And obviously, the overall UX decreased because they also raised the fares. So we're paying more, there's still lots of bad people in the stations/subway, but now we have to go through a metal gate to prove that we have paid the fare and do the same to exit PT. Which, obviously, creates virtual congestion at peak hours, because the human flow is slowed and the width to pass is much narrower than it used to be.

Meanwhile, in another city, they went the other way : free PT. I have yet to hear of some regular users seeing it as the decrease in UX.

A lot of public transit where I live (Mumbai) is subsidized, which means its not profitable to run the way it is run.

That was a very popular decision at the time (help mobility of the poor), but it ends up with massive underdevelopment as the needs expand. There’s no money for private companies to invest in the infra and it waits on election cycles to push investment.

I feel that if it was actually profitable to build new trains / metros / etc it would have happened much quicker.

I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

KC is an underrated city, and a surprising tech area. Getting Google Fiber first definitely helped. It is commonly called Silicon Prairie.

It's possible some cities handled it better than others, but still worth pointing out.

Architecture and city planning takes time to catch up to this new society.

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

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.

There are probably more opportunities after the initial redevelopment for smaller scale additions.

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?

The DC area is doing a pretty good job with conversions. A lot of these midrise buildings are a good fit for this. Although the very broad midrise buildings are a poor fit.

But I wonder if we could challenge the conventional wisdom on conversions of deeper buildings. Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space?

If you can buy the building cheap enough, conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window.

I once toured a building that had been converted from an old warehouse to residential. Huge floorplate. They had built the condo units around the edges, created a hallway, and then the inside was divided up into "storage" spaces. Each condo owned the space directly across the hallway. They were very large, and people had transformed them into offices, arcades, workshops, playrooms, theaters, etc. You could do just about anything you wanted with the space, and because it wasn't "living space" you didn't have to worry so much about noise and the property taxes were lower than they otherwise would have been.

You can't sell it for a price that includes that space as "living space" either. Which goes back to the point - if you can buy the building cheap enough, you can make anything work.

Maybe, but you can't throw out the building codes. A warehouse, certainly, can be retrofit. But office towers? Almost certainly not.

Elevators are not sized for residential; electrical service not sized for residential loads (dishwasher/dryer/microwaves/ovens); HVAC not sized for residential heat loads (same as above); metering requirements means the existing electrical rooms are not large enough (they are never large enough); plumbing and sewer are not sized for residential.

It goes on and on. Even if you got the building for free, you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again. It's not entirely clear whether it is or is not.

It can be done if you make huge, expansive apartments, which has to be read as "really expensive". There aren't that many really rich people who can drop 5 figures per month for an apartment.

Building codes and practices are different for commercial and residential for good reasons.

Dishwashers are negligible; microwaves are a souped-up gaming PC and run a lot less; ovens and dryers are more of a concern, but as with HVAC, I'd like proof that an office's draw (with all its attendant equipment) is more than the what you'd have with a dozen (tops) condos. Plumbing and sewer are the only legitimate concerns I've seen yet. And yet: will, way.

>you'd still want to run the numbers to see if it's still cheaper to demolish and build again

These numbers never include externalities like the carbon and refuse footprint of demolishing and rebuilding. How many million metric tons of steel and concrete do we need to dispose of if this becomes a de-facto national policy?

Also, the lighting is probably 277V in an office. This precludes any owner-installed fixtures, the super has to do all of that. Moving it to 120V means more transformers, for which there isn't room without sacrificing rentable space.

HVAC, assuming CW/HW to VAV boxes, has the pumps sized for the number. Which may be less or more in residential, depending. It also precludes (or at least makes very difficult) the ability to meter HVAC usage per apartment.

The point isn't that is is impossible. It's just expensive. That expense has to be borne by somebody.

Tearing down good buildings and building new is wasteful and causes more pollution then repurposing. These for profit corporations externalized these costs upon us repressing.

Planning for those who plan to use planned obsolescence to generate a profit.

Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.

In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.

What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.

Living in an apartment (assuming adequate noise isolation) is actually great otherwise.

Unless they specifically tear it down during redevelopment (why would they?), there should be plenty of air circulation.

Conventional wisdom is that there won't be too many windows available to throw conventional wisdom out of :-)

(Cue arguments on how dystopian this is. But hey, if the daylight simulator was to-spec, it wouldn't be the worst of things.)

It was spectacular.

In St Louis, the largest building in the state, which is 1.4M square feet and 44 stories, recently sold for $3.5M. It sat empty for several years despite being offered basically for free. The new owners have not announced plans for it.

It's a pretty pure test of your claim. I guess we'll see what happens.

I've forgotten of that place for years. Truly magical. Thank you for the memory. I almost shake recalling it.

It’s a beautiful building, with roomy communal spaces and vintage timber all over. I probably would have bought there if I weren’t too noise sensitive for timber floors.

I just think there is so much space that you can use in a residential setting without natural light. Your movie room. Your bedroom if you feel like not following The Law as to where they're allowed to be. All your 3D printers and other maker activities. If it's space that nobody wants, I'd personally buy it at a discount if it were offered to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Garry_Hoy

> While giving a tour of the Toronto-Dominion Centre to a group of articling students, he attempted to demonstrate the strength of the structure's window glass by slamming himself into a window. He had apparently performed this stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced harmlessly off the glass. After one attempt which saw the glass hold up, Hoy tried once more. In this instance, the force of Hoy slamming into the window removed the window from its frame, causing the entire intact window and Hoy to fall from the building.

Pulling oneself up onto something by one's fingertips takes a lot of strength. Should have tried that beforehand. (It looks easy in the movies, but those stunt people are very fit.)

In a system like this, if the AHU stops for any reason, the whole floor is effected. Since chillers and associated equipment are very expensive, I would imagine the maintenance fees would be uncomfortable. (get it? Sorry.)

(In NYC, we all agreed to believe that there is no such thing as residential air conditioning that is not in the form of a window unit, however.)

We don't generally design safety regulations around "should" and averages, but instead when edge cases happen, as the magnitude of the outcome is very important to take into consideration. I'm not sure what you're trying to express with your comment.

1: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-persons-d_691.html

The problem is not that every window needs to open, it's that some windows need to open. In the building codes I've seen in the past for residential homes, that was expressed as a percentage of square feet of the room or entire building.

So, are you saying there are plenty of tall condos where no windows in a specific dwelling open, or that they have some windows that don't open? If they have no windows that don't open, do you mind mentioning where, as I'd be interested in what the solution was to the problem of needing to allow for passive ventilation.

The residential stories have casement windows, within the curtain wall, that can swing up to 4 inches (100 mm) outward. In addition, some condominium units have motorized windows at least seven feet (2.1 m) above the floor.[1]

The condominiums start on the 32nd floor, according to the same article.

If building can't easily be retrofitted to allow openable windows, then I would assume they either can't be used for residential or they could try to get some sort of exemption if they can prove it's safe. I'm mostly going off what I know about building codes and what I've read previously on the topic when it's posted and it's delved into what the actual problems are in converting to residential.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Tower

When we were looking for a new house we toured one that had a bit of remodeling done. What was done was the back patio was enclosed to turn it into a room. The detail was that there was an existing bedroom that had a window onto the patio.

The solution, which I have to assume passed code, was simply to retain the bedroom window, even though it did not lead to the outdoors. So this house had an interior window.

The risk tradeoffs we disallow are ones where you need to be 1σ+ to be making the tradeoff because the crucial functionality there we provide is legibility in the marketplace.

Yeah, if it doesn't meet the legal definition of a bedroom, it can't be listed as one. That's partially why there are so few interior rooms - lower property value vs if it was a bedroom (but mainly consumer demand for windows).

Most able bodied adults can break drwall between the studs. It’s not a particularly strong material.

But the long handle makes it difficult to swing in a melee, and slow to swing, and once the swing starts it will be very hard to change its arc. Hence, your target can easily sidestep it. I suppose it would be good against plate armor, but not many villains wear plate armor these days. You also have to be careful with a fire axe to not chop your foot if you miss. I don't think I've ever seen a war axe/hatchet/tomahawk anywhere near that size.

For self-defense in close quarters, a baseball bat is ideal.

P.S. I am no martial arts expert.

Wielding a baseball bat, you have to constantly worry about the opponent's getting his hands on the bat and wrestling it away from you: a screwdriver is better.

Eh, not really. That's still a lot of unbalanced mass and potentially excessive length. There's a reason batons and other strike weapons aren't made like bats.

The second best is something that you've extensively practiced with, and designed for the purpose.

What if every other floor were removed, so all the apartments had loft ceilings? Then light could penetrate from the upper windows deeper into the core of the building. You could even have rooms (like bathrooms or home offices) with lower ceilings and skylights.

If you swapped the orientation of the removed rectangle on each floor, it would look rather like a Jenga tower with the middle block pushed out on each level.

In any case, the central problem (but maybe required step) of all these kinds of solutions is going to be losing 50% or so of the potential floorspace.

So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76IHpt6q9ME

An un or under-rented building has some potential value based on various hand-wavy factors. Things may get better next year and you've only lost a year's of potential revenue. You may be able to hand the burning bag of dog crap to some star-eyed dreamer.

Taking out a loan, applying for permits, etc, locks in the loss. You get to tell your bank the asset they've got for collateral is worth a lot less, but hey you've got a plan that involves chopping the building apart so there are big holes in it so you can rent it to residents instead of commercial leases.

Hey it's a brand new market and a wonderful opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

Loft apartments were originally created from business spaces. In the beginning, they were low cost because of some undesirable properties but have slowly become an extremely in-demand style (huge windows and tons of light being major selling points). Why was it possible to convert industrial space into living space 50 years ago but today it is not possible?

Cheap lofts were peak re-urbanization, but now they are some of the most in demand housing because of the large space and natural lighting.

Office cubicle farms around a services core are made up of small volumes and poor access.

The 'zoning' here is more building by building rather than neighborhood based.

But I mean the same kind of administrative issue holds back conversions here. Most Office buildings here would be ideal. They're not that big because here it's illegal to offer office space without plenty of daylight.

And you’d mainly be missing the yards.

Most of these office buildings they’re talking about should just be knocked down and new purpose-built multi-use buildings built in their place.

Methinks people buying right before COVID at rock bottom interest rates has clouded the judgement of many. This is not a sure fire road to success right now, I can tell you that much.

Such is the dreaded once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe like COVID and the money printing scam that happened after that that destroyed so much value in money. But others that got in before me at historically low interest and reasonable asset prices just tell me I need to buck up and work harder. I bet you they would be shitting bricks if they were in my shoes. It's like a nightmare I haven't been able to wake up from. :(

The job market isn't as competitive as the Bay Area, but if you can remote work and/or get a local non-tech job making a livable wage (there's so many lifted trucks out here, these guys make money), it almost doesn't matter what you do for work, it pays the bills and you can spend time with family after that. You have a house, you have a car, you have a family, maybe you even have a camper like many others around you, and you go camping at the lake every month in the summer! Truly, rural living can actually be an idyllic paradise if you do it right!

The government will give you a bunch of free money to leverage an investment in real estate. This isn't true of other investments.

And yet... I wish we could. I know it's not a great investment monetarily, but there are the fringe benefits, like being able to make the place my own or knowing that I'm not going to have to relocate the kids in a couple of years with a few months' notice because the landlord decides he wants the unit back.

Having a shared space where there are enough families around that there will be 10 kids guaranteed on the playground is nicer in a lot of ways than having 3 kids try to decide whose spacious yard is the gathering spot today.

I grew up in various times in a rural place with all sorts of animals where it was just me and my brother for miles and I also grew up later in a city where there were so many kids we would self-organize into all sorts of games and sports.

Personally, the rural place was great and the urban place was great, but the suburban place has neither adventure nor abundance of playmates. Hundreds of nearby families is the absolute dream!

Alternatively sacrificing the central core of the buildings to act as light tunnel might work. Or give the deeper units over to utilities, communal areas, etc

A good architect could transform these buildings into pleasant and useful spaces. It just requires a willingness to try. Check out the youtube channel like @nevertoosmall or @kirstendirksen - I'm sure there are many others that explore topics like this.

Yout get a self-contained flat, but kitchens etc. will be tiny, and then on top there are shared spaces like co-working facilities, lounges, cinemas, gyms, and staff arranging social events etc.

I'd imagine former office buildings could work well for many of the amenities for projects like that.

[1] https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/lifestyle/coliving_london/1...

Additionally, unless everyone is going to be sharing communal showers/toilets/kitchens, none of the existing utilities are run to where they would be needed for multiple residential units. Having your own bathroom and kitchen is essentially a requirement for non-marginal US housing.

Keep in mind, commercial office space construction is already more expensive (by almost an order of magnitude per sq ft) than residential, and high rise construction is more expensive than normal commercial construction.

So unless there are massive defaults and write downs/some kind of ‘great depression’ type situation, it would be doing a lot of expensive work to convert an already more expensive building to be competing in a space where everyone else did things cheaper from the beginning. Not a great formula for economic viability.

Not impossible, but the level of economic dislocation necessary to have it make sense is mind boggling.

Additional leftover interior space can be used for amenities like a gym or lounge. It's not the world's most efficient use of space, but it's an efficient use of the existing space that doesn't require tearing down a building.

Maybe a bit like the industrial lot to condo process that happened in NYC and other places awhile ago?

It’ll be weird, but folks will adapt.

I’m not sure why folks wouldn’t just build in the ‘burbs (and work remotely) in most cases though?

...they could be used as home-offices perhaps?

If one of the mega-big buildings would be converted to studios, meaning they could 'slice' 20-30 studios per floor, keep one floor for gym/dry cleaners/etc. they would be making a (financial) killing.

The question is why, and what's wrong with marginal housing (sounds like a great way to reduce homelessness)

The numbers show that Americans order delivery and eat at restaurants more (and cook less) than they have in recent history.

It's intriguing because while flipping and renovating kitchens to have more space - stoves, ovens, and refrigerators is on the rise, fewer families actively use the space over the last decade. (The same can be said for colleges moving from dorms to apartment style housing)

This especially applies to marginal households, but also significantly to upper middle class -> upper class and dense housing.

That's not to say it's healthy for our diets.

But the answer is because sometimes you do need a kitchen, even if it’s to boil some water or whatever or reheat takeout, or because your Mom is visiting and wants to make something. Sharing a kitchen is often a nightmare if you can’t control who else is sharing it - constant fights over dirty dishes being one example. They often get tied up exactly when you want to use them too.

And having your own bathroom (the two are highly correlated as both require ‘wet walls’, and custom plumbing) is great when you want some privacy, are sick, etc. or have some safety concerns.

It can get even more gross and disturbing to share those when you can’t control who you’re sharing with. It’s a common friction point to share a bathroom even with room mates. A lot of people (especially women) flat out avoid public bathrooms due to safety and ‘ick’ concerns.

Imagine if the only toilet you could use if you woke up at 2am and needed to pee was a public toilet.

There is nothing wrong per-se with marginal housing, except they tend to attract ‘marginal people’ that bring with them trouble that others don’t want to deal with if they can avoid it. It does help with homelessness and the like - but it tends to self filter into dangerous territory, because who is going to want to stay at a place where homeless people stay unless they are homeless themselves?

Sharing them is always a step down in experience. It is always cheaper though, as the kitchen and the bathroom are usually the two highest maintenance and ‘most expensive’ rooms.

Most folks stuck in those situations move out ASAP - think dorm rooms and barracks. Or homeless shelters.

Singapore is extremely far along in the ‘eat out at restaurants’ side (it used to be, most Singaporeans ate out at least a couple meals a day), and even they have kitchens and private bathrooms in all the subsidized flats.

This is addressed in TFA. There was one building the profiled architect designed where they spent the $$ to turn the elevator core into a courtyard. He was able to add back the "lost" square footage as additional floors, which made the project profitable enough to build out.

Plumbing work is not cheap.

And yet, results in a shitty experience that residential users just won't accept...

(And yeah, it's shitty for commercial users too.)

There's something very wrong with the entire thing.

It’s common to run wiring in conduit, use hung ceiling (with space for running lots of extra services), construct the framing out of steel and concrete (instead of wood and stucco), and electrical and HVAC demands are dramatically higher. Networking needs to be more reliable and easier to manage at scale. Electrical needs are often orders of magnitude higher. Everything from locks, to outlets, to flooring needs to be sturdier to handle the increased traffic and wear.

Even a dentists office or hair dresser will need to mount heavy chairs sturdily, pull lots of extra power, and have to worry about weird chemicals or x-rays and the like hurting other tenants.

Additionally, they’re zoned to have access to high volume transit and/or parking.

It’s not a surprise why commercial is more expensive. It’s made for a different use case.

It still is only going to be ‘good enough’ most of the time. And by ‘good enough’, that means tenants pay. Anything else is usually ‘lipstick on a pig’ as it were.

The problem is that the current owners of these buildings, as well as their creditors, made plans based on these buildings being expensive urban space. The same is true of city governments, which often have budgets dependent on city center commercial space paying a lot of property taxes. It will take years, and likely lawsuits and ownership changes, for people to accept that prices for these buildings are unlikely to recover.

I feel like this whole effort is not a technical problem but a cultural and financial issue. I don’t think the problem is whether it can be done, but whether the tax structure is in place to encourage it.

It's actually at end the of the day a legal problem. Building codes and fire regulations are very strict on what you can and cannot do, and most 'good' ideas people come up with to solve these problems end up being against the building codes. Without changing the building codes it doesn't matter how clever your technical solution is.

I signed that "right" away with the county recorder, it was no problem. Been able to do that for 2 decades in my county. Turns out when people build what they like you get weird shit but little to none of the "but muh codes" fire hysteria came true.

Meanwhile California morons building with regulatory checks out the wazoo get ate up in wildfires. It's like watching actual insane people.

But if you've read anything about disastrous fires throughout history, the reasoning for modern fire codes is rather apparent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nightclub_fires

The deadliest structure fires in history pretty much have one thing in common: people couldn't get out. There's something to be said for a homeowner who builds their own death trap, but it's a good thing that large commercial properties have to jump through hoops to ensure they don't create a death trap for hundreds of others, just to save a few bucks.

Wildfires are something else entirely -- forests are not man made and their creation is not subject to laws. You wouldn't argue that laws against murder are silly just because you could be attacked by a wild animal, would you? We regulate buildings because people build them.

Most forests today kind of are, in as much that the way a forest is 'designed' is down to a whole collection of active choices made by the forest owners to intervene or not intervene in different ways. There are lots of things that one can do to mitigate the risks of forest fires, and doing or not doing those things is a choice they make.

The vast majority of trees are not planted by humans

The vast majority of trees close to large number of humans are however owned by someone who responsible for them and gets to decide if they grow up and become big trees or not.

Of course the building inspector sees the charred bodies he didn't prevent, but he doesn't see the frozen and exposed ones he created through his policies that handicap supply. The incentives of code and inspection are horribly perverse.

Having built my house the price and accessibility absolutely spirals out of control with code inspections. Remove this madness and let the masses do what I've done.

Our regulations often treat different structures in different places differently because they have different risks. That's okay. Your custom tiny home shouldn't be treated the same as an urban high rise.

There's a lot more to fire codes than just sprinklers and fire escapes. If you could ignore all fire codes (and related requirements) then it would definitely be possible to build both more and cheaper apartments than you can now. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, and they almost certainly wouldn't be nice places to live. But a lot of people would take unsafe, uncomfortable and affordable over safe, comfortable and completely unaffordable.

In the US windows are also a required means of egress from a bedroom in case of fire. Technically the requirement is two means of egress of any type, but in effect this means the door and the window, where someone can be rescued by a fire truck, escape onto a different path, etc.

1. He picks his buildings carefully. His projects are "market rate", so he has to work out the conversion cost, inventory yield, and rental rates to find good candidates.

2. He includes rooms without windows and labels them as storage, work-from-home offices, or something else that does not need a window to be legal. But (wink-wink) he fully expects that these will be counted as bedrooms by potential renters.

A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each.

One is the living space. It's a cabinet, or a bedroom, or a living room with a sofa. It ought to have windows, furniture, some space to walk in between. Could be several "rooms", even with doors.

Another is the bathroom space. Shower, toilet, bathtub, sink with mirror. Doesn't really need to have windows.

And the third, most interesting, is the storage space. Shelves. Places on the floor to put bulky items, like a big vacuum cleaner. Boxes - conveniently sized, maybe labeled. Places to hang clothes. Space to walk inside, so putting an item or finding and taking one is easy. This space doesn't need to have windows.

The storage space is rather big, because you're supposed to keep all the stuff which clutters the living space there. If the storage is overflowing, well, you really have a problems with too many things, but if not - it's very convenient to use as a buffer for something which becomes unused and inconvenient.

Maybe we can structure those deeper buildings in a similar manner, so that living spaces would have windows, and miscellaneous spaces would not and would use that "depth" for non-living purposes.

Your bathrooms and storage spaces in apartments have windows?

Definitely the classier (and older!) had windows.

Basketball courts, tennis courts, rock climbing walls, racket ball courts, workout rooms for 20-30 person adult classes with enough room for equipment like stationary bikes, and so on. Also shops, lots of small specialty shops like you’d find in a mixed use city with cheap real estate.

Plenty of opportunity to build third places into the inner column, outfitted with artificial skylights and ample plants to simulate outdoors.

Novel means changing the national fire code, which was written the way it was for a reason.

And there are techniques to transporting natural light indoors.

This thread's obsession with bedroom windows, egress out them from 20 stories up, and "code" is nuts. We are in a housing crisis that is destroying the economic viability of several generations.

You could also have ceiling to floor OLED displays, or just a large display that shows the current view of the outside.

I also don't understand why they can't basically put large corridors across the building in addition to light transfer, more common space than hallway to provide more light if the interior residents want it.

Fundamentally, people want a safe, affordable place to sleep, go to the bathroom, and eat. Windows and views just need to be a quick walk away.

I possibly spend less than .1% of my time at home looking out a window. My bedrooms generally have the windows completely covered to maximize my sleep.

At generic hotel-motel rooms I almost never open the curtains.

It's ridiculous this isn't simply put up to market economics.

Finally I have a great idea for internal areas: simply provide them as storage units. Cheap, no water, minimal electricity, still makes money, and its one of the things people complain about city living.

The bigger problem IMO is retrofitting a bunch of buildings that have been built with plumbing in only very select areas to have plumbing ubiquitously.

I’ve lived for a while in a former factory downtown in a city. Every single floor had a completely different layout. Bathrooms were not aligned above one another, room numbers varied widely, some rooms had a better view than others (read: wall in front of a window). But, it worked! The location was great, it was a perfectly fine apartment overall.

I’m unsure what convention needs to be challenged. Fitting rooms on a weird floor plan is totally doable.

R R R R R R R

R R O O O O O

R R O O O O O

R R O O O O O

R R R R R R R

C = communal space/corridors/elevators.

E = empty

R R R R R R R R

R C C C C C C R

R C E E E E C R

R C C C C C C R

R R R R R R R R

R R R R R R R R

R R R R R R R R

E E E E E E E E

R R R R R R R R

R R R R R R R R

If you make that central corridor wide enough the light will come in.

And regardless, convert these huge office spaces to huge apartments. If you get enough of those, the smaller residential apartments in the city will become cheaper.

These office buildings aren't making money. Who cares if you care out 3000 sq ft apartments out of it?

Here is another idea:

R R R R R R R R

R S S S S S S R

R S S S S S S R

R S S S S S S R

R R R R R R R R

You know what S is? Storage. Doesn't even have to be resident storage, it can be separately accessed/serviced elevators. Perfect for office space, since it involves no additional plumbing, and probably even less electricity, and about the same HVAC needs.

Imagine having your bedrooms in the front facing parts of a building for natural light and your office and workshops in the unlit parts. I _need_ a few garage worth of useless space for storage and work area with ventilation. Something that these buildings excel at providing.

Source: I have a friend that ran industrial plumber crews in NYC for 40 years.

We don't like to talk about pee and poop, but they are a really important consideration, in almost any human venture.

I wonder if you can have septic storage for excess flow, that then releases overnight when people aren't using it. Simply time shift the maximal flow periods and maximize the flow utilization of the existing stuff.

Maybe you can use pumps to force more liquid through the pipes faster.

Or you simply put in 80 instead of 150, and find other uses for the space.

And, you know, incentivize minimal use of water.

Yes, the wealthy can have apartments with windows around the outer parameter and the poor can live in the center with no natural sunlight.

There are probably safety reasons why every room must have natural light. How hard is it to make a sideways light tube?