This is one of the main principles of BAD design, where you create an entire area around close to a single use (offices). That creates a very fragile city. This "single use" zoning that the US proliferated makes us really fragile to changes like working from home vs in-office work.
Another point is that cities are rather hostile for families. We create cities so they need to be fled as soon as people have kids. We have streets entirely of concrete and 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. If we want cities to be more resilient we need to rethink them. We need streets that have greenspace as a fundamental part of the infrastructure. We need permeable surfaces.
I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park. There were tons of families with kids playing in the park, people riding bikes for transportation along the park bike paths, adults playing ping pong on outdoor tables together. It was wonderful. It made me rethink what a city can look like.
Denver needs to take notes. We don't need a single use city and a light rail system that only goes into that city. We made an incredibly fragile city. We can build better cities.
If you’ve never seen anything but stroads and power lines, I guess it makes sense.
That's a favorite running spot of mine when I'm in Berlin. It's also along a great bus line, close to gyms, a technology museum, a bio market, Victoria Park and not far from Tempelhof. But that little park shines on its own. And the cars parked along the road are down a half level so you don't feel surrounded by parked cars.
That's a pet peeve of mine in America, and especially the American west. We put outdoor seating for cafes and restaurants along busy streets or busy parking lots. Which downgrades the outdoor experience and supports the car priority mindset.
Of course this utopia would attract folks from other areas, so can’t be solved only locally. Needs national support.
I'd rather live in a somewhat 'noisy' vibrant neighborhood where I can walk to shops or restaurants than an absolutely dead residential cul-de-sac where I have to literally drive miles to the nearest amenity. If the noise bothers you at night, get a sound machine or install triple pane windows.
I understand having industrial separate from everything else, but commercial and residential should always be blended IMHO, and SFH zoning should not exist.
I would kill for reformed zoning standards like they have in Japan.
US norms are for much larger homes.
I don't think urban planners will ever admit or apologize for the damage they've done.
Also, I don't get how companies can make such a big song and dance about their climate commitments on the one hand while simultaneously insisting on RTO on the other. The greenest commute is one that never happens. If the tax code needs to change to give companies credit for their employees cutting out their commute, so be it.
Whenever friends move here I say “don’t live downtown” and inevitably they do and they hate it.
There's a NYT article on the challenges about this from a few years ago: So You Want to Turn an Office Building Into a Home? -- Here’s How to Solve a 25-Story Rubik’s Cube https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
You can think of class c office space, broadly speaking, as oil wells that have very little life left, and get bought up by folks who intend to extract the cashflow until they dump the externality on the public government and taxpayers (like abandoned shopping malls).
A recent example in St Louis is the AT&T office tower [1] [2].
[1] One of St. Louis’ tallest office towers, empty for years, sells for less than 2% of its peak price - https://www.costar.com/article/642008108/one-of-st-louis-tal... - April 10th, 2024 ("Goldman Group buys 44-story former AT&T office tower for $3.6 Million")
[2] St. Louis office vacancy hits all-time high [21.2%] as major companies downsize their footprints - https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2026/01/15/office-v... - January 16th, 2026
(conversions when the economics pencil out, haircuts for investors when they don't and more investment is needed to wholesale replace a structure)
US office vacancy rates chart supposedly pulled from Moody's: https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1p8mhmq/us_office_v...
https://www.boston.gov/news/officials-celebrate-first-100-un...
I'm not entirely sure how that math works out, or why, because one would think it couldn't be that complicated. Maybe someone here knows more about this.
History favors the bold, and code inspectors blabbering about "written in blood" don't see all the homeless people they kill via reduced access to housing.
I've seen plenty of artist collectives that manage it; on paper they are office/industrial but actually everyone lives there. Every once in awhile one burns down but the mortality rate isn't as high as living on the streets which is ultimately what happens to those on the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid when the ones higher up push the ones under them down a rung to snag housing.
I'm sure many many people have thought of all sort of solutions as the value for finding some sort of solution is extremely high.
I used to hit the rave scene a lot in Chicago so I came to find out these situations were extremely common in warehouse districts and work excellent. Consider a homeless person can shower and shit with 5 gallons of water and use the local laundromat to wash their clothes, and this is like luxury compared to that; even a single 3 inch drain pipe can handle 10+ gallons per minute and at the bare minimum any building with plumbing has one of those on each floor. It's really a total non-issue so long as the people living there are willing to break the law, it works beautifully compared to not having the additional housing units.
For reference -- before our well was connected and I hauled water-- we used about 60 gallons per week for an entire family and that was plenty enough to shower, cook, and flush the toilet all week. That would consume at most 6 minutes of drain pipe time in the absolute smallest pipe you would ever find servicing a floor of an office, with utilization at 0.05%.
You also then had everything pretty much isolated to two rooms for an entire floor meanwhile now every unit is going to have a separate kitchen, a bathroom (or two, or three), a laundry room, etc.
And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
These seem like extremely solve-able problems.
Demolishing the office building and building a residential building is more profitable often.
Yep, and that's fine. It's literally a tangible instance of 'creative destruction'. I see people arguing that oh, we have to RTO to save the current model and it seems so backwards to me.
There's also a lot of work that probably needs to go in to the ventilation and fire code changes. An office building isn't designed for people having ovens and stoves. It also often just assumes its OK to have less isolation between units for the ventilation, or previously entire floors were considered to be one space ventilation-wise but now you might be trying to split it into 2-3 units that require separation. This separation can also complicate things like AC and heat.
The ventilation issue comes up a good bit with a lot of these poorly done conversions. You end up with units that just don't get nearly enough airflow, and all the windows are sealed so its not like one can just open the window to get more air.
When it is suggested today modern planners and developers say it can't be done. What changed?
Commercial office buildings are optimized for seating space, so you get a lot more interior walls already built and often shorter ceilings then industrial spaces. That's a lot more renovation to add in all the necessary plumbing for showers and toilets and often laundry in every unit.
New building codes mean that everything has to be done right to today's standards, not yesteryear's, so it becomes cheaper to demolish and rebuild than retrofit, especially if the building has a lot of interior space that doesn't have access to exterior walls for mandated windows.
‘Just build more’ YIMBY types should take note of this, though I’m afraid I don’t know what the solution is.
Commercial leases have their own quirks and long timelines that encourage waiting on a better price. Perhaps a tax on vacant commercial units.
(Why the 1980s? Because I go back that far. I have some sense of what the business cycle was doing during those times. I'd like to know if this is really historically unusual, or just a blip, possibly a COVID-related one.)
Which proposition or conclusion above do you disagree with and why?
You're also making another implicit claim here that DSA chapters have never had any impact other than stopping affordable housing and creating parks, which I think would be difficult to defend. After a minute of Wikipedia research, I see that at least nine members of Congress were active DSA members during their tenure, and obviously had other accomplishments. For example, I see that DSA member Major Owens was in Congress for 24 years and was a significant factor in passing the ADA.