... And then they came for WFH

[herzlos]

Just think, the whole office space thing could be solved by converting the empty units into housing, and you'd also get to solve a lot of the housing crisis as well.

Empty units become profitable again, people are present at the units to deter crime, they spend money locally whilst reducing emissions and so on. It's so great it'd be shot down as communism.

Of course I get that a lot of office spaces aren't directly suitable for housing (usually complaints about ventilation and heat since a lot of offices have a lot of glass that doesn't open).

[Haighus]

I currently live in a block of flats converted from an office. It is perfectly livable, with the exception that the tenant management company and the landlord are utterly terrible.

Everything has been built cheaply though, our shower basin split after a few months.

[Peregrine]

Feb 12, 2024 3:33:31 GMT -5 herzlos said:

Just think, the whole office space thing could be solved by converting the empty units into housing, and you'd also get to solve a lot of the housing crisis as well.

Unfortunately not. The layouts don't work and it's not just heating efficiency. There are two major problems:

1) Plumbing: office buildings have a central bathroom or two on each floor, residential buildings need plumbing connections for each occupant and have a much higher total capacity required.

2) Fire safety. Offices have an open floor plan, nobody asleep, and no issues with getting people to central fire exits. Apartments with their own locked exterior doors and bedrooms where people may be asleep until it's too late to escape through hallways. Fire codes require two egress routes from each bedroom and that's very hard to do on anything but a single-story building.

The end result is that by the time you've ripped out and replaced all of the interior walls, run plumbing and electrical to each apartment, provided new windows for the bedrooms, etc, you've spent most of the cost of a new apartment building on something that is still awkward at best. In most cases the only financially viable solution is to tear down the office building and build a new apartment building on the land.

(Which we still should be doing, offices are wasted land and should be destroyed.)

[Haighus]

I don't think plumbing is a huge issue. Offices have a much higher number of occupants than the same space for flats. The former office carpark outside my flat is 3 times the size it now needs to be, and that is with many tenants having 2 vehicles. Sure, people in flats are more likely to be having showers, doing the dishes, running a washing machine etc, but there are so many fewer of them to begin with.

As an example, in my 2 bedroom flat, you could easily fit 12 office workers.

Re. fire safety. Again, massively reduced numbers of occupants make this fairly straightforward for most buildings. This building has two stairwells leading to doors and a central corridor connecting them. That is entirely adequate for fire safety in conjunction with fire doors. There are only 24 flats in a 3 floor former office block.

[herzlos]

There would definitely be work required but I don't think it'd be that bad. Most more modern office buildings have false floors and ceilings giving you plenty of access to run internal plumbing. You may need to upgrade the pipe to the outside world to meet the new capacity.

I'm not sure the fire requirements would be vastly different compared to an apartment block of a similar size; you'd still likely have a central stairwell and elevators, and potentially a fire escape stair well. You may need to add additional flame retardant material between the floors and sub-units, but that's going to be nowhere near the same effort as flattening the building and adding apartments.

I'm also assuming some kind of hybrid model; there's no reason a 6 story office building couldn't have the bottom 2-3 floors remaining as office space, whilst the top 3-4 become accommodation. I know it's not allowed by most US zoning laws but the mixed use is fairly common in Europe at least. You'd rarely if ever have clashing issues - residents would mostly be in and noisy when the offices were closed, and visa versa.


Admittedly I'm talking more about office blocks in city centres here where at least in Europe they are virtually indistinguishable from residential buildings like Canary Wharf

It wouldn't work the same way for huge sprawling businesses park buildings, like car manufacturer design centres.

[Haighus]

US zoning laws are definitely a huge issue but, er, US zoning laws are a huge issue in general

[Haighus]

To illustrate the point re. density of humans in office complexes vs residential areas, the City of London* has 513000 commuters in a weekday. That is a daytime population density of 454000/square mile. Only the densest residential districts approach that kind of population density. Those people won't be doing laundry etc, but they still produce waste. So the plumbing capacity has to be substantial to accommodate all the toileting done by those office workers.

Plumbing in-flows would most likely need to be upgraded, to be fair, but I doubt sewers do under most office buildings.


*Not to be confused with London city.

[herzlos]

Feb 12, 2024 5:11:42 GMT -5 Haighus said:

US zoning laws are definitely a huge issue but, er, US zoning laws are a huge issue in general

They definitely hold you back from lots of improvements to infrastructure, transport and quality of life.

[Peregrine]

Feb 12, 2024 4:53:18 GMT -5 Haighus said:

I don't think plumbing is a huge issue. Offices have a much higher number of occupants than the same space for flats. The former office carpark outside my flat is 3 times the size it now needs to be, and that is with many tenants having 2 vehicles. Sure, people in flats are more likely to be having showers, doing the dishes, running a washing machine etc, but there are so many fewer of them to begin with.

It's not just the gallons per hour, it's the location of pipes. Office buildings are designed to have all of the plumbing in a single central location, a residential building needs a separate set of pipes running to each apartment. Nobody wants to live in an apartment where the bathroom is separate from the rest of the apartment because all of the plumbing is in one corner of the building. And yeah, it's possible to make those changes but it's a bunch of money being spent.

Re. fire safety. Again, massively reduced numbers of occupants make this fairly straightforward for most buildings. This building has two stairwells leading to doors and a central corridor connecting them. That is entirely adequate for fire safety in conjunction with fire doors. There are only 24 flats in a 3 floor former office block.

Again, it's location not numbers. In my state (which is pretty similar to most places in the US) a bedroom requires two routes to exit the building and having two stairwells reached by exiting a single door from the bedroom only counts as one route. Because of the risk that you don't wake up immediately you need an entirely separate exit from the room that can be used even if the entire primary route is blocked. In most cases this means being able to open an exterior window and get out, something that requires a lot of extra money to add to an office building.

This doesn't apply the same way to an office building regardless of how many people are in it because the evacuation standards are different. It's assumed that in an office building everyone is awake and so an evacuation will begin promptly when a fire starts, before exits can be blocked. This means it's ok if you have two stairwells that both require using the same hallway or same door out of a room.

[Peregrine]

Feb 12, 2024 5:01:27 GMT -5 herzlos said:

There would definitely be work required but I don't think it'd be that bad. Most more modern office buildings have false floors and ceilings giving you plenty of access to run internal plumbing. You may need to upgrade the pipe to the outside world to meet the new capacity.

Maybe, maybe not. Pipe needs a certain minimum slope to keep things flowing properly. There's space in the false ceiling but is there enough vertical space to accommodate that minimum slope across the entire length of the building?

but that's going to be nowhere near the same effort as flattening the building and adding apartments.

You might be surprised. The shell of a building is a fairly small percentage of the material and labor costs of a building, most of the cost is in the fixtures/wiring installation/inspections/etc. If you're replacing everything inside the shell you probably aren't saving a lot of money and do you really want to spend 80% of the cost of a proper apartment building on an awkward converted office building?

[Haighus]

Feb 12, 2024 5:58:24 GMT -5 Peregrine said:

Feb 12, 2024 4:53:18 GMT -5 Haighus said:

I don't think plumbing is a huge issue. Offices have a much higher number of occupants than the same space for flats. The former office carpark outside my flat is 3 times the size it now needs to be, and that is with many tenants having 2 vehicles. Sure, people in flats are more likely to be having showers, doing the dishes, running a washing machine etc, but there are so many fewer of them to begin with.

It's not just the gallons per hour, it's the location of pipes. Office buildings are designed to have all of the plumbing in a single central location, a residential building needs a separate set of pipes running to each apartment. Nobody wants to live in an apartment where the bathroom is separate from the rest of the apartment because all of the plumbing is in one corner of the building. And yeah, it's possible to make those changes but it's a bunch of money being spent.

Re. fire safety. Again, massively reduced numbers of occupants make this fairly straightforward for most buildings. This building has two stairwells leading to doors and a central corridor connecting them. That is entirely adequate for fire safety in conjunction with fire doors. There are only 24 flats in a 3 floor former office block.

Again, it's location not numbers. In my state (which is pretty similar to most places in the US) a bedroom requires two routes to exit the building and having two stairwells reached by exiting a single door from the bedroom only counts as one route. Because of the risk that you don't wake up immediately you need an entirely separate exit from the room that can be used even if the entire primary route is blocked. In most cases this means being able to open an exterior window and get out, something that requires a lot of extra money to add to an office building.

This doesn't apply the same way to an office building regardless of how many people are in it because the evacuation standards are different. It's assumed that in an office building everyone is awake and so an evacuation will begin promptly when a fire starts, before exits can be blocked. This means it's ok if you have two stairwells that both require using the same hallway or same door out of a room.

That is fair, although a lot of this comes down to local regulations.

US fire regulations on points of egress, for example, are probably unnecessary if everything else is made to code and proper fire-resistant walls and doors are in place. If the exit is blocked, sheltering in place until rescued is usually a valid approach to fire safety with doors rated to at least 30 minutes and walls to at least an hour. Things are somewhat different on high-rises where getting a ladder to the window is hard, but otherwise it is a reasonable approach. It can come unstuck if no one is regulating the bad actors *cough*Grenfell*cough* but that is true of any regulation.

I work in hospitals which have to take this approach due to the difficulty of moving inpatients, so stay and shelter is the default unless the fire is in your compartment or adjacent.

The plumbing issue is probably bigger for large office blocks, small-to-medium ones will likely require less complex plumbing solutions.

I think regulations are also relevant for renovation vs tear down and rebuild. If you can get permission to do the former but not the latter, then the former may be a more attractive way of maintaining the asset than an empty office even if it costs more than rebuilding from scratch. It is definitely more environmentally friendly to convert buildings, on the whole, so local authorities should be pushing for conversions where possible. Of course, really hot real estate markets make enough money from empty buildings to offset all of this, so further punitive measures are needed to discourage that practice.

[herzlos]

Demolition of a tall building is a nightmare when it's beside other tall buildings. Though if it's a business park building it's likely to be better to flatten it and start again. Running a few hundred feet of pipe in an empty cavity is going to be a lot cheaper than starting from scratch.
I assume in most existing apartment buildings all of the plumbing, electric, gas etc is all coming into the building from a single point, so the same issues will apply except that the existing furniture is all set to be in the center.
A quick google tells me that a 1-in-110 is the maximum drop for plumbing to work, which means a drop of 1ft for 110ft horizontal. Assuming the false floor/ceiling only gives you 2ft of working space, that'd mean the apartment plumbing would need to be over 200ft from the main pipes before causing a problem. I don't think many office buildings are that far from the central column to the outer walls, and traditionally bathrooms are found towards the entrance side of the apartments so we're potentially talking about much shorter distances than that.

And that's only for water *out*. Water in is pressurized so doesn't have the same drop requirements.




Do apartments in the US require a bedroom to have 2 exit routes? Because I've never seen an apartment building where the apartment has a second exit. Is that why a lot of NYC buildings have the fire stairs on the outside? Because that'd be fairly easy to retrofit.


So I don't think that it's that big a problem to overcome. A traditional square office building with central elevator/utilities access just means having a foyer/corridor around it with apartments between there and the walls. Pretty much the same as any bespoke residential block. You may end up with some slightly wacky apartment layouts to avoid support columns etc but that's not going to be any worse than an old building.

[easye]

A huge problem in the US is it is always easier to build new than to renovate an existing space. That is why we either tear everything down or sprawl outwards instead.

[pacific]

In the UK at least a whole conversation needs to be had about use of urban spaces. The current taxation and business rates for shops, as well as the fact that they cannot compete with online shopping, has made the highstreet retail business model almost impossible - with the end result that all but the most salubrious town centres now have lots of empty shops and are looking destitute. And there are only so many coffee shops that urban centres can support.

Similarly there is absolutely tons of empty commercial property following Covid and changes to working practices (although I think this was starting to over-stretch even beforehand). The logical thing to do would be to repurpose those spaces towards apartments and other properties and make use of brown-belt spaces (as happened when a lot of industrial/production-type businesses closed in the UK in the 70s and 80s). But sadly because so many of the Tory party have invested wealth in commercial properties, they don't want their portfolios to devalue and so they would rather lots of 'back to the office' type initiatives, as happened with Rees-Mogg and the Civil Service, who *just so happens* to have millions of £ invested in some of those commercial properties. The work-life balance, impact on the environment and everything else be damned.

As a side note, and unfortunately for businesses, as was shown when Mogg himself laid down to rest in the House of Commons during one debate, layabouts who aren't going to work are just as likely to do that in their office space as they would be to do it at home.

[Haighus]

Feb 13, 2024 9:38:30 GMT -5 pacific said:

In the UK at least a whole conversation needs to be had about use of urban spaces. The current taxation and business rates for shops, as well as the fact that they cannot compete with online shopping, has made the highstreet retail business model almost impossible - with the end result that all but the most salubrious town centres now have lots of empty shops and are looking destitute. And there are only so many coffee shops that urban centres can support.

I have been persuaded this is not a problem with online shopping, although the internet has made survival more challenging for brick-and-mortar stores. It appears to be much more of an issue with wealth inequality. If you go to a wealthy area, their highstreet is probably at least ok, if not thriving. Whereas places that are really struggling have a line of shutters punctuated by predatory stores like vape shops and betting shops.

I went to the Manchester recently- the high street in Alderley Edge is doing a hell of a lot better than Oldham and I don't think that is just because footballers don't look for a good deal.

Likewise, high streets are doing much better on the continent in places with less inequality.