The research firm’s top property economist likens the decline in office demand to what malls have experienced over the last six years—and sees a similar outcome.
There is a captive market for residential real estate, and a glut of commercial properties…
Everyone MUST live in a home while offices and other commercial spaces are a “nice to have” - so the businesses and individuals with extra capital have gobbled up the residential property to further push us into the “own nothing and be happy” economy.
I like the idea of transforming the old commercial properties to condos, but there’s a ton of issues with retrofitting - which is the result of zoning and differences in building codes. Then there’s the zoning issues themselves.
So… as usual… we are beholden to politicians doing the right thing for their constituents, and not their donors. These commercial properties are going to sit idle, and decay until it becomes a “true” crisis (buildings collapsing, mass squatting causing major health and safety issues) - causing untold costs to fix them to accrue in the meantime.
It’ll never happen, but my grandiose solution is to deliberately crash the housing market via legislation limiting ownership of single family homes. This would boost the “velocity” of cash (lowering inflation), allows taxpayers to own (solves housing crisis), and would renew interest in the commerical real estate.
Mass squatting. Hmm. That’s an interesting idea. I wonder if local governments will turn a blind eye, sort.of how they did in Brooklyn warehouses that rented out space to artists (which the artists used as live work spaces, unofficially).
Some of these offices are extremely small and don’t have bathrooms (there was an article in Curbed IIRC about psychiatrist offices that were empty because most patients are now doing Zoom sessions). But they would make good SROs (they just need to retrofit the bathrooms to have showers). They are about the size of a studio.
I worked for an engineering company that had “secret” projects. So when you were assigned to a secret project, you’d move all your desk stuff into that project area where everyone coming and going had to enter a security code to get through the door. But the size of projects would vary over the weeks. I remember one Friday I finished my work on a secret project along with several other people in the desks and drafting tables near me. The next Monday, we found that our desks were in the same place, but they’d moved the wall; so we were outside the project area - or actually we had been absorbed into a different project area with a different door code. So in those big buildings, there may be small offices, but they are easily reconfigured.
I wonder if squatting in high-rise office space might give rise to sort of communal life - something more social than single-family units of today. It will be an interesting social experiment
I think it’s less likely they’ll turn a blind eye these days. Oakland was similar but there was a massive crackdown on artists wherehouse spaces after the GhostShip fire (36 people lost their lives) .
If y’all haven’t seen Louis Rossmann’s video on this topic, it’s a good and simplified explanation of why this is happening.
Great. Now do residential real estate!
Start converting offices to cheap housing and we can fix both.
This isn’t surprising given the enormous social shift to working from home. I’m just surprised how slowly corporate valuations are sliding. I think we’re going to see some major moves soon as leases and mortgages come up for renewal.
Hopefully many offices will be converted into permanent living spaces instead of temporary ones.
While coverting offices to living spaces would be good for cities, there’s no lack of living spaces.
There’s just a glut of dragons hoarding them.
No idea if this is a common turn of phrase or your invention, but I love the “dragon” reference. People get so upset when I tell them we should “eat the rich”, but not even Gaston is against killing dragons that are hoarding the village’s wealth and killing our children!
People get so upset when I tell them we should “eat the rich”
And then they vote for genocidal fascists without feeling the slightest pang of conscience. Honest libertarian pacifists, they ain’t.
