Hacker News Reader

Comment by Octoth0rpe | Hacker News Reader

> due to the relative value of each use

I suspect that relative value may shift significantly once building owners accept that office workers _really really_ aren't coming back.

View on HN

Workers DONT WANT to come back. That's the reality. Check all the spreadsheets of recently laid off workers from the big tech. Vast majority of them would prefer remote/hybrid models.

However I expect companies will try to push people to go back to the cubicle.

Regardless of relative value, in most cases it is cheaper to just demolish and rebuild office space than gut + renovate. SROs/boarding house cases make a little more economic sense for these conversions but are more unpopular uses.

Really? Even tall towers? Seems shocking and I'd appreciate a source.

I mean, think about the layout of the average office space: hundreds of small rooms with big open spaces in the center and large, common bathrooms. The plumbing is the biggest problem to fix, because all of it is buried in walls and extremely difficult to retrofit for individual kitchen + bathrooms space.

I guess I'm no civil engineer/architect but I would have thought you could simply tear down all the interior bits and be left with the concrete and steel and just rebuild the layout and attach the plumbing/electrical to the main lines/conduits for those purposes? But yeah maybe the spec of an office floor of people shitting and cooking is a lot different than a floor of residential homes?

There's also different building code for residential vs commercial buildings. Things like fire suppression systems and stuff. Regardless, it's not that it isn't possible at all, it's that it's prohibitively expensive in a lot of cases.

I bet its because the zoning doesn’t allow for it more than anything. You save a ton per unit with not routing plumbing to each

Reply on news.ycombinator.com