- 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.
- For a long time, the US had the money to build things, use them, let them slowly deteriorate, and then abandon them.
It was cheaper to simply let things fall into disrepair, and build shiny new buildings and developments further away from the city center. Rinse and repeat. This is why a lot of inner ring suburbs are filled with strip malls that can't maintain their parking lots, don't have the residential density to support nearby businesses, etc.
It's kind of an interesting development pattern that's been pervasive since the 1950s, and some towns and cities are trying to reverse it with infill.
- Look into US retail space per capita. It has far exceeded other nations for some time. Some retail store CEOs have directly discussed too much supply.
- I tried going out to shops again to buy things recently - its so much harder, more expensive and time consuming than having it arrive through my letterbox the next day.
- I've shifted in the opposite direction. It's hard to judge the quality or fit of items online, especially when major platforms have been easily gamed. "Anything goes" marketplaces shift the burden of choosing good products to the buyer, while showing duplicates of indistinguishable products at seemingly random price points. Shippers have become unreliable and returning things comes with a time cost.
- 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.
- Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats.
The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.
- It's not so much the owner's financial situation, but rather that it'd be cheaper to build new homes than to retrofit a ten floor+ building's plumbing.
You'd also have to install a bunch of showers, which could be a significant problem on its own.
And then there's the increased amount of sewage, which the building might not be able to handle - even the local sewers might not be equipped to handle the uh... Load a large commercial building would generate with 24/7 occupancy vs 8/5 occupancy.
The reason you don't see folks converting commercial spaces into residential isn't because it's not wildly profitable, but because building new purpose-built residential buildings would be cheaper than a conversion for anything other than one or two floors.
- Oh no, I live in a flat in a converted commercial building.
They have been going wild in the UK converting office space to residential.
- 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?
- unless you're an owner and control the means of production anywhere you live will be a slum in ~20 years
- Marketing
- Why is public housing in Vienna not slums?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Colleges call these dorms.
- They have a roof that isnt a motorway.
- The context I'm referencing here is victorian flophouses and HK bedspace apartments, not American homeless encampments.
- 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.
- It's easy to live in shareable spaces when you're young and unattached - it becomes a lot more difficult as you age and want to grow a family. I'm not sure I want the kind of life where I have to share a kitchen or a bathroom, spaces I consider very private, with people I'm not related to. Maybe this is a uniquely midwestern/American sentiment, I'm not sure. But I am confident that there are more people like me than there aren't. The picture of the American dream is familiar, it's a house with a car in the driveway. I feel that may just be who we are now, regardless of any way we used to be.
- Isn't it also the fact the almost no one wants to live like that? The expectations has changed and there's probably little demand for such type of housing.
- People rent bedrooms in single-family homes all the time. The only difference between that and dorm-style housing is the size of the building.
- Studio apartments seem like a better option. Also, from a property manager’s perspective, you generally want to minimize shared spaces because they’re a pain and annoying to deal with.
- I was responding to your argument that no one wants to live like that.
- Yes and there is fierce competition for that in many larger cities, with sky-high prices to rent out a room. But they can't be offered at scale commercially because you'll never get the permits, and the only reason why you can rent these is usually because they're either operating completely under the table or via some carveouts that let property owner rent to 1 or 2 persons.
The pent up demand for this is obvious to anyone who's tried to secure a room only to have a gazillion people competing with them to pay $1000+ to rent an oversized closet to sleep in.
- When the choice is between $3000/mo for a proper apartment and $2000 for a flophouse room some people will take the flophouse. Right now the only choice we offer those priced out is a painfully long commute (with has its own time and car expenses that reduce the savings).
- Sounds like a job for people who don't have one, and a roof for people without.
- Having lived in some midwestern cities with a bunch of extra "not easily converted" warehouses, I've seen lots of "illegal" art collective operations where they just put all the extra plumbing on the ground floor where it is easily retrofitted (you can even raise the floor with a false bottom for plumbing if no other option) and then everyone shares a big kitchen, then the upper floors where retro fitting is more difficult are for habitation. Maybe the HVAC unit is undersized or something, or some other safety factors are substandard due to these people not having the money to improve it further, who gives a shit it is better and safer than living on the streets.
Obviously since it's illegal these aren't advertised but they're quite prevalent, and issues are rare enough that now decade past muh Ghost Ship Warehouse is the constant drum being beat by the brain dead building code worshippers who actually bought the line of bullshit that having people homeless and freezing and shitting in the streets was actually a 'written in blood' advantage.
- Widespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.
- I literally just built a house for ~$60k a couple years ago. A burned out trailer even in a rural shithole with no jobs in my state is about $100k+. An actual functional house, $250k+. This is counter-intuitive but it makes sense in context of the recent COVID 0 real interest mania.
Meanwhile all the shithole land with no "dwelling" on it was never eligible for mortgages so people weren't able to bid it up to oblivion on debt that they locked in with 30 year mortgages so you get weird results like the cost of vacant land is way cheaper than the same piece of land with a house that can really only be bulldozed (latter would be cheaper in most times in history). End result is I built an entire house on property cheaper than a burned out uninhabitable trailer. Building on unmortgagable land is a way to bypass the fact houses are all locked up in 30 year loans at negative real interest rates.
End result is it's far cheaper to build a house than buy even a shitty burned out one because to do the latter you have to buy someone out of their money printing machine of a negative real rate loan, which obviously they are only willing to do for a king's ransom.
------ re: location ---------
I won't share my address but if you are looking to do this yourself: look up fishing canneries in Alaska, most of them are close enough to cheap plots you could do this on, often even without permits or property tax. These canneries are also usually desperate for workers and pay a livable wage to those with refrigeration technology certifications.
- I'd like to see what kind of house you built for 60k. My assumption is its some small maybe 300 sqft box with no sewer you spent many hours yourself building. Not something something most people would do and while cheap in dollars certainly isn't affordable if you are putting a lot of work into it.
- It's basically looks like a glorified rectangular shed but it does have sewage, electric, water, and hvac. Not very impressive but every single person I've had over who's lived in an apartment has expressed interest in learning how to do the same over paying rent out the ass for a similarly sized uninspiring shit-box and ending up with no equity.
The only people that have been over that have been unimpressed are people already living in an actual house, but that's not really the target audience for this kind of thing.
---- re: below [my account is throttled] ------
I speculated on an old well share that turned out to be good, so got a well for basically nothing. If you don't have such luck you can haul water.
I use septic, which in some counties (mine) no requirement you be licensed to build. It can be built with only a shovel and some pipes and concrete if you are on an extreme budget, although helps a lot more if you can get ahold of an excavator.
- Is it well water and a septic system, or is it serviced?
- show us where this is. give me a google map coordinate.
and then show me where the jobs are.
- If I understood you correctly, land that has no building on it is not eligible for a mortgage, and is therefore cheaper to buy? With the downside that you have to pay cash, because you can't get a mortgage either?
- Yes the land value is so insanely cheaper on un-mortgagable properties in my state, it's off the charts.
I have developed land in my county so I'm familiar with the costs to develop, buy land, place utilities etc. (I did not become a land developer on purpose, only because I realized this absolutely crazy arbitrage)
It would cost you about $200-$250k to buy a rural small acreage land with a manufactured home on it. If you pay cash for the land and drop the exact same manufactured home on it, it would only cost you about $150k, and you would get a brand new house instead of a "used" one.
There is huge pent up demand for someone to just buy a huge swath of small acreage properties and just drop the cheapest manufactured home you could on it as the non-luxury starter home market is currently not being met. You could pretty much double your money. I'm not sure why this isn't being done en masse although a few private actors seem to be doing it and making a killing.
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- 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.
- AI was already supposed to have replaced all of us.
- 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.
- The lower-friction result is that the offices become huge apartment buildings with reverse-commutes to the suburbs, hoping the "stuff to walk to" survives. There are issues with that too, like plumbing and windows.
- most of those issues will be very expensive or insurmountable for most high-rises -- a non-starter
you're basically rebuilding from scratch at that point.
58 points by blinding-streak 6 hours ago | 43 comments