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Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

In retrospect it looks like wishful thinking, but for a while I held out hope that the transition to white collar remote work during COVID would be permanent so all that empty office space could be converted into residential. Might have gone a long way towards addressing inflation and the housing crisis, but I guess we'll never know what could have been.

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I think a lot of people had this thought in passing. But

- a lot of space that was empty was still under long term commercial leases

- there was less demand to live in some of the cities that had a glut of office space, and especially those neighborhoods

- would a lot of office buildings even make good residential buildings? I don't think this could be a fast or cheap conversion in most cases

In Seattle there is plenty of office space that was previously residential. Seems likely that this happens everywhere. I'm sure changing it back wouldn't be too bad.

The problem is that all the commercial real estate has clauses that you can tack missing rent onto the end of the contract but lower rent adjusts the basis so you have to cough up cash.

This means that it is almost always better to have an empty space than an occupied one that you lowered the rent on--I've seen quite a bit of commercial real estate unoccupied for going on 5+ years now.

This merry-go-round will continue until everything crashes simultaneously.

In my market there is an absolute glut of condo and apartment new housing, with more coming on the market because the lead time is so long. It's single family residential in the burbs that has seen the huge increase and commercial conversions don't address this.

WeWork could rebrand to WeHome.

Converting a high rise office building to residential is possible but expensive. Usually you have to gut the interior and completely rebuild. Water, sewer, and gas may need to be reconfigured and upgraded.

> so all that empty office space could be converted into residential

What would be the point? The residential demand is only there because that's where the offices are.

Cities are more than just offices and work centers.

Yes, they're also a bunch of support services for the offices and work centers.

But the support has no reason to exist without the offices. The offices are the cause, and everything else is the effect.

The chicken or the egg? Without people nearby, you’ll have no offices/jobs. Without jobs, you’ll have no people is your argument. I prefer the former cause and effect as more plausible mainly due to simple financial returns. Who is going justify from a financial returns perspective building an office where there are few people? Nowadays offices are even less impactful with technology and a worldwide, scattered workforce facilitating working in homes and/or smaller satellite offices. Large, central office hubs are in big trouble.

> The chicken or the egg? Without people nearby, you’ll have no offices/jobs.

No, that's wrong. Cities develop for painfully obvious reasons. There are two:

1. The government needs an administrative or military hub and constructs a city to be that hub. This is only moderately sensitive to location, but it involves offices being designated to exist in a particular location and a city growing to support them. Note that there are many, many historical examples of this in which the city came into existence by government decree; it was not necessary for anyone to be living there beforehand. Offices were necessary, and sufficient.

2. Work needs to be done in a particular location. Sea trade happens at a port (and San Francisco is just such a city, though the port is now dead); river trade happens along a river; mining happens at a mineral deposit. This case also involves offices coming into existence and a city growing to support them. But unlike the first case, it's pretty sensitive to location; the hub that supports a port needs to be coastal.

Without the offices, there is no reason for a city to exist at all. Some industries may die and be replaced by other industries that take advantage of the local concentration of people in an existing city. But if every industry dies, which is what eliminating the offices means, the city will die too.

The people that need to be at the harbor do not need offices … they are working on the docks or on the ships.

The people at the mineral deposits do not need offices either … they are working in the mines or operating equipment.

The vast majority of people that need offices for work can work almost anywhere.

That's largely true for the mineral deposits, but not at all for the harbors. Harbors necessarily host warehouses, tax assessors, harbormasters, lighthouses, repair services... and all of those require offices on site (though the lighthouse is capable of containing its own office).

(Offices are of course required at a mine too, but a comparatively tiny number of them.)

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