Probably...
But giving the billionaires that own them 100s of millions of dollars to renovate them into high priced condos for other wealthy people isn't going to help.
It's just funneling taxpayer money to people who don't need it, that money will be better spent given to the people who need it to pay for housing.
That is a good point but I wonder if the increased supply will impact overall prices. There is a lot of used space. I have seen % of free space but not what that means in terms of how many homes this could be turned into. Love to know if we converted all free space how big of impact it may or may not have. I suspect pretty big.
Generally speaking: Not without severe quality of life impacts... and dismantling of what few laws we have around that.
Think of the last hotel you saw versus the last office building. Feel free to go check out google maps if you need to.
Back? Cool. You know how the hotel is a weird shape? Maybe it is a narrow rectangle. Maybe you are pretty gosh darned certain it is actually a swastika from above. Whatever. And you know how that office building is a big ass fat rectangle, or even a square?
Yeah. There are severe implications of that. Hotels tend to be "long and narrow" because... you need to make sure every unit has a window. Whereas offices can either have a lot of windowless rooms or a centralized cube farm (or, if you are in a fancy company, an atrium).
Which is the problem. Plumbing can be rerouted. Even drop ceilings can be removed/resolved. HVAC can be rebalanced. But significant portions of those office buildings are just not habitable.
And a lot of those "you need a window" are mostly based in fire safety laws that were learned at great cost to human life. But they also very much contribute to quality of life.
And this is also why a lot of the retrofitted buildings on the east coast tend to be more "luxury condos". You sell someone a quarter of a floor and they deal with the hvac issues. Which will help but... not that much.
You're not wrong about the windows. You're not wrong about the luxury premium that is leveraged with these bigger spaces. Too. But I think you underestimate the potential of doing so. Around here, factories and the like are constantly remodeled into residential units, and they sell like hot cakes. They did so too even before when the housing crisis got to its current point.
Just to check: Your response was that safety and quality of life should be sacrificed because they sell well? I mean, you're right and that is going to be the end result but I would think we could at least acknowledge that is "bad"
Not really... I mean, take my office for example... We took up an entire floor of a building, but only had 2 bathrooms, 2 sinks, no showers, no bathtubs, 1 dishwasher, 1 full size fridge and 1 mini fridge.
Technically the space could be carved up into 6 or so apartments, but it would have to be completely re-worked.
And that doesn't take into account things like having to remove the false ceiling. Can't have someone breaking into your space because they climbed over a wall.
