The AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.
Will never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements.
And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.
When I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.
Yeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.
Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms).
It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.
American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city.
An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent.
The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws eliminating them. Before the white flight to the suburbs, the attempt was to keep the poor out of cities where the rich lived by eliminating housing of this sort since the poor couldn’t afford single family housing.
This led to a proliferation of laws that required bathrooms and kitchens in every unit, etc.
The AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.
Will never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements.
And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.
When I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.
Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.
Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.
Yeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.
What will distinguish these structures from slums in 10 or 20 years?
Marketing
Except this goes against American individualism on every front. Americans really only fit one sort of mold in terms of what they want: single family home, owned outright (usually mortgaged though). You can extrapolate that out to cities as well: young urban professionals pine for polished condos or lofts with nice views and located in trendy neighborhoods, but their "unit" is still theirs totally, with no shared primary amenities (by that I mean kitchens and bathrooms, not features like pools or gyms).
It just so happens that America is luckily predisposed to this kind of living, with an abundance of space to accommodate lots of people in their own non-shared living spaces. The problem with that though is that you limit the opportunities for business, because space is cheap, so you have to implement regulations and zoning to create opportunities for moneymaking and before you know it you can't actually build housing anymore, despite the abundance of space sitting right there.
This is historically incomplete.
American cities were replete with dorm room style housing. These were especially popular with new migrants to the city.
An incredibly large percentage of apartments in cities like NYC are used as multi family housing with several housemates sharing them to save on rent.
The reality is that the reason such housing doesn’t exist/isn’t more widespread is because cities have passed laws eliminating them. Before the white flight to the suburbs, the attempt was to keep the poor out of cities where the rich lived by eliminating housing of this sort since the poor couldn’t afford single family housing.
This led to a proliferation of laws that required bathrooms and kitchens in every unit, etc.
Sounds like a job for people who don't have one, and a roof for people without.