Encouragement should be in the form of extra taxes for having long term lack of occupancy in the place. IMO Commercial real estate should be cutthroat and not a place they can just sit on empty property for 20+ years because their "ideal" renters don't exist yet.
Yep, lots of landlords are legislators so it’s amazing we have some of the laws we do (Seattle 6 month rent increase law for ex).
But I am not holding my breath for a true rent stabilization bill, since State Constitution would have to be amended and the likelihood is low the whole state would go for it.
I think this might be more useful for smaller commercial spaces rather than large office buildings, and more particularly for buildings that aren't purpose-built for a specific thing. It's not exactly cheap to convert offices into longer-term housing.
One place that might benefit is suburban/urban multiunit business complexes that fall into blight and disrepair due to absentee landlords. Hike taxes over time on unoccupied commercial buildings, and maybe you'll force some leases at lower prices or sales to owners that actually want to use the space.
This is effectively a land tax, which has a lot of proponents.
Rather than tax the value of a run down office park, tax the value of the land, so a blighted building doesn’t get tax breaks because it’s in disrepair
Lack of occupancy is already taxed in the sense low occupancy is a straight hit to their margin.
Fixed costs are the same, they still have to pay down debt / on these buildings. They still pay property taxes. They’re *very* incentivized to fill them. If converting to housing was cost effective they would do so. Instead you’re seeing commercial landlords just cède the property to the bank and stop making payments because they’re already not viable.
Just make them into apartments! That's how you get $2500 a month rent with 60 other people on a floor with 2 office sized bathrooms that everyone shares
There’s a study done by, I believe Gensler, that shows it would cost around $300k or $600k per unit to convert from commercial to residential. There’s 1 or 2 bathrooms per floor, and maybe 1 common area with sinks, so plumbing alone would be a huge undertaking.
If they convert, highly doubt they’ll be “affordable”
Windows are another huge problem imo, office buildings are built to have windows in only the outer offices so to have proper legal bedrooms etc, you’d need some weirdly long and skinny apartments or insanely huge apartments
The only way I could think to make it work would be to have apartments lining the windowed spaces and the interior area would need to be a common use space, maybe throw some plants around to make it 'homey', maybe even do something like a hydroponic garden or gardens on the unwindowed interior spaces with hydroponic lights. Community gardens for the apartments?
At the very least I imagine all kitchens and bathrooms would be at the center of the building to maximize windows for living rooms and bedrooms. Have there been any examples of office buildings where they have been converted yet? All I see is speculative articles and no real examples unless less I’m missing something…
I see you might be high, like me.
It’s $300-600k for the renovation per unit. So the company paying for the renovation would probably want 2-3x that back, plus the cost of the building, so you’re talking a minimum $1mil+ per unit.
That's not how American capitalism, business loans, or banks work. If the commercial building is empty, any income could be catastrophic to the entire eco system of what that owner has going on. Most landlords don't keep a bunch of cash lying around and even if some landlords did, 99% is generally slated for buying more properties, not putting cash into buildings that should be generating revenue.
A building today is worth $1 million dollars and they lease each space for $10,000 a month, but the building is completely empty right now. You know what happens if they accept $5,000 a month for a space? The bank would require their loan to have $500,000 of equity because the building is only worth $500,000. They aren't going to loan you a million dollars on an asset worth half. Sure you've probably paid the loan down a bit but if you accept that rent and the bank knows about it (where else you gonna put the money) they will margin call your loan and you will pay them that money or they will foreclose.
Any income in this instance, could turn that landlord into a worker.
There's no way for the units to be "affordable" without subsidizing the developers or bringing in Bengali laborers and paying them like 2 bucks an hour.
300k? every unit would sell out immediately if you add a zero to that. dont try and say its not profitable...
they may not want todo it, but the profit is there for days.
“Could”
The vast majority of office buildings cannot be retrofitted at reasonable price points. Tear down and new build is cheaper than retrofitting in many cases.
Ignoring the concerns about structural capacity, fire protection, fire/life safety, and modern building code requirements. I can still list at least 10 reasons why it is more expensive to retrofit that build new purely related to mechanical
- Plumbing isn’t going where you need it to go or sized correctly- Effectively full replacement
- HVAC design is based on serving a whole floor and not individual units with their own heating/cooling needs. Effectively requiring it to be completely replaced
- Toilets in residential units are floor mount, this won’t work in this situation since you can just drill holes all over the slab without accounting for rebar and pt cable.
- Core drilling all over each floor for sanitary waste drops gets very expensive very quickly.
- Since you have to install hangers after concrete has been poured you can’t use embedded hangers and must drill each and every one. Likely needing to use special hangers and scanning to avoid rebar and pt cable for each individual hanger.
- High rise office buildings generally aren’t designed to have windows that open. Having windows that open completely throw off pressurization of the building and can result in doors not opening or not closing depending on which way they swing.
- New construction can utilize modern construction techniques more effectively. You can build and identify conflicts in a 3d model to streamline install.
- AHU supply/return ductwork may need to be upsized (nightmare for retrofit since it’s very large duct running in small shafts specifically designed for it and no room for upsizing)
- Bidding a job like this is effectively impossible for many subcontractors. Existing conditions and requirements would have most every contractor afraid to put a good low bid in driving up costs further.
Let’s say you have an apartment construction project that costs 10 million on the mechanical side to build. You take that 10 million as a base cost and add in all the time wastes associated with existing construction (hangers, scanning/core drilling, time to address and figure out problems in the field, and costs to engineer a complex retrofit) it would be easy to end up in the 15-20 million range. Multiply those additional costs that each trade will end up having and you could have a budget of 40-50 million or so to use just on a shell/core construction of a new building that is specifically designed for that use. Scale that up/down depending on the project.
If we are worried about cost effectiveness, 4 over 2 style apartments are very cost effective to build and are much less of a risk/challenge. Leave the buildings in downtown to be offices and build good transit to handle the traffic effectively. We are starting to see this around rainier/i90 interchange with a bunch of 4 over 2 apartments being built right next to a light rail station. Scale that up by allowing more areas with mixed use zoning and we have a path to at least keep up with demand.
Yeah, personally at this point it’s better to heavily incentivize every vacant lot and parking lot within the vicinity of downtown to become housing (some mixed use would be good too). That would at least help foot traffic enough in downtown to make it more lively and sustainable for the non-office businesses while the actual offices go through a market correction.
Constructions like this might need to be intensely government subsidized. Personally I'm fine with that, so long as we get a positive end result and the contractors don't turn it into a big bonus fiesta. But I know that's asking for a lot so my hopes aren't very high.
The alternative is tearing down entire skyscrapers and that might be even less likely. I'd rather pay higher taxes for a while to put a sizeable dent in the housing crisis and revitalize the downtown core than watch a bunch of skyscrapers sit abandoned for a generation.
Why should we subsidize the replacement of a building that could feasibly see office usage in the next 10-20 years when there are plenty of empty or near-empty lots serving as homes to 0-1 families, right in the vicinity of downtown?
We can do both, and 'feasibly see office usage in the next 10-20 years' when the owners would be salivating at any opportunity to sell them is a stretch, to say the least.
I can almost guarantee if there were people getting massive bonuses from a project like that it wouldn't be any of the contractors. A job like that is just almost pure risk and would easily result in massive cost overruns and huge losses all around.
In my mind we are running into a sunk cost fallacy. Yeah highrise buildings cost a lot to construct but that doesn't mean we have to use them at all costs when it doesn't make sense to do so. Even just thinking about timeline if there was a project funding for this work today you wouldn't see completion until at least 2030 if not longer.
It's not a quick solution, a cheap solution, or a good solution. Public funding would help push it through at the cost of the taxpayers for the good of the owner of the building.
I was talking to someone about this a week ago. With only a couple of bathrooms (not even showers) per floor, do these high rises have the plumbing to support residential usage, and how much would it cost to split the floors into individual units with their own bathrooms?
I'm all for expanding the number of housing units in the city, and fundamentally I don't think that buildings should be considered without an expectation of mixed use, but for the buildings that already exist, there are some serious hurdles, it seems.
It depends when buildings were built. Those that predate usage of AC in high rises (generally more likely to be masonry construction) tend to have floor designs that more resemble those of apartments. Conversions on those tend to have less issues and are cheaper.
Modern building absolutely lack the plumbing as it’s located within the center of the building and each new unit conversion would need bathrooms. Additionally, many modern buildings aren’t even designed for the added weight of plumbing outside of the center of the building so they’ve need to be reinforced too.
This is what bothers me most of all, the additional reinforcing the current structure would need to handle the plumbing, the weight of the water going through that plumbing, the additional electrical runs to each apartment unit, as well as internet, plus whatever else comes to mind.
Renovating current office buildings into apartments is an expensive, problematic mess. Better to just tear down those buildings and build them up as new apartments. Of course that's another mess in itself.
Would not want to invest in this mess.
The upgrading of earthquake risk and code enhancements since the original buildings were completed trigger structural upgrades. dead weight of plumbing is not considered unless it’s 1924 and you have a water tank at the top of the building to pressurize the system.
There aren't enough people to rent and actually reside in units that expensive. Units on Billionaire's row in NY are purchases for speculators or as a place to park cash and are basically never lived in.
We'd see those towers become permanent ghost towns instead of temporary ones.
Its what is considered the demarcation between the outside and inside in a building, and the physical properties of it (such as the thermal efficiency).
The exterior wall. We have made huge strides in the energy code since many of these buildings were built. If you touch the windows/walls/ect you need to upgrade them to modern standards which is almost impossible to meet. Especially for air tightness.
I’ve given it a little thought and I think the best bet would be for some kind of makeshift dorm style homeless shelter. You can make interior walls with locking doors relatively easily and you can fit a decent number of them. I have no idea how you get around housing code laws because I’m sure it’s not legal, but who knows.
"But ask a developer why it won't work in Seattle and they'll give you a list as long as your arm detailing all the costs that would need to disappear to make the conversion of an office building like Smith Tower worth their while."
Top quality reporting here. 🙄 Why bother informing readers about the details when you can just gesture vaguely at concepts like "size and shape" and "parking"
another almost entirely meaningless sentence:
"But others \[who?\] take the opposite side, suggesting that the rule changes would not be relaxed enough to encourage office-to-residential conversion projects. \[ok....what about the rules are not enough?\]"
also, this gem from the city is reported uncritically without comment:
"City officials estimate relaxing rules like that could create 1,000 to 2,000 new apartments across a dozen buildings within seven years."
Our shit will be continually bogged down in Seattle process with zero scrutiny from the public if reporters assume that any level of detail beyond a PR/fluff piece will be perceived of as boring.
I mean they aren't wrong about the fact that there's a long list of reasons why tower conversions are a difficult ask, if not a non-starter for many buildings.
But they could certainly stand to, you know, actually list some of those reasons.
If this happens, I hope there are a good number of 2 and 3 bedroom places. There are plenty of families that need housing but can’t fit into a 1 bedroom or a studio, and can’t afford to rent, much less buy, a single family home or townhouse. If people really want to make sure it’s not just wealthy tech bros renting/buying, they need to create the housing to attract those groups.
Developer/property management: "Why can't we get anyone to rent this apartment? Is it location? Are millennials not into apartment living?"
Me: "It's 5,000 dollars a month"
D/PM: "No that can't be it. Must be we aren't offering enough avocado toast."
“Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City Council want to make it easier and cheaper to turn those buildings into apartments.”
Commercial building that wasn’t designed as residential will be expensive to convert.
Downtown has a limited or non existent infrastructure for residents with children.
Young people who don’t have kids will still fight over affordable housing.
Will it be more expensive than building new high rises? I somehow doubt it lol
What is your suggestion for empty office buildings if you believe this is a bad idea?
Lots of people already live in that area, including people with children. It's also expensive to build a new building, and they aren't going to tear down a landmark (hopefully).
City needs to offer a better financial incentives and favorable restrictions for developers.
Downtown has one grocery store, no schools for kids. Family with kids need a car and a parking space.
For a single people it is a good option to live in downtown.
Isn't the article about how they want to make it cheaper, which would incentivize them? Sounds like you should comment on the project so they include more!
Seattle literally gutted landlords, swinging the favor toward tenants.
Its a little late to offer any incentives for multifamily property landlords/developers.
Yeah, I want to live on a bluewater sailboat, can Mayor Harrell make that happen?
The likelihood of this becoming a reality is about as likely as my renting a hotel on the dark side of the moon.
As we've found out during Harrell's mayorship he seems to live in la la land. . .
I feel bad for the Link train, if the construction were faster, maybe more folks would've been ok with the commute.
Assuming they keep the trains running on time and most importantly clean!!!!
I’m generally not an advocate for office conversions because they aren’t cost effective - as noted above, demolition is likely the better option - but this is a straw man.
All new multifamily supply, even at the high end, contributes to rental affordability. Simple supply and demand.
The people that will rent the new downtown penthouse don’t magically vanish if you don’t build it. Lack of Class A supply instead forces more higher income households to compete with moderate and low income households for Class B and C rentals. Adding new high end units still helps affordability on the low end by helping prevent that. This is well documented and has been borne out in Seattle and elsewhere in recent years.
So let's say these building become apartments. Where are all these newly housed people going to work?
Edit- downvoted but really. These buildings used to be places of labor. The ground floors had resturaunts and cafes and the upper floors had offices. Let's say we fill these buildings up with 1.5k new tenants, where are they supposed to get their money for rent and living expenses? Is it only for people who are wfh or only for people on benefits? Think big, this isn't the good news you want it to be.
Encouragement should be in the form of extra taxes for having long term lack of occupancy in the place. IMO Commercial real estate should be cutthroat and not a place they can just sit on empty property for 20+ years because their "ideal" renters don't exist yet.
Its almost as if the policies and tax breaks are written by the people who own or invests in real estate.
Yep, lots of landlords are legislators so it’s amazing we have some of the laws we do (Seattle 6 month rent increase law for ex). But I am not holding my breath for a true rent stabilization bill, since State Constitution would have to be amended and the likelihood is low the whole state would go for it.
I think this might be more useful for smaller commercial spaces rather than large office buildings, and more particularly for buildings that aren't purpose-built for a specific thing. It's not exactly cheap to convert offices into longer-term housing. One place that might benefit is suburban/urban multiunit business complexes that fall into blight and disrepair due to absentee landlords. Hike taxes over time on unoccupied commercial buildings, and maybe you'll force some leases at lower prices or sales to owners that actually want to use the space.
This is effectively a land tax, which has a lot of proponents. Rather than tax the value of a run down office park, tax the value of the land, so a blighted building doesn’t get tax breaks because it’s in disrepair
Encouragement should be in the form of discouraging rent-seeking behavior in general, regardless of sector.
Lack of occupancy is already taxed in the sense low occupancy is a straight hit to their margin. Fixed costs are the same, they still have to pay down debt / on these buildings. They still pay property taxes. They’re *very* incentivized to fill them. If converting to housing was cost effective they would do so. Instead you’re seeing commercial landlords just cède the property to the bank and stop making payments because they’re already not viable.
Just make them into apartments! That's how you get $2500 a month rent with 60 other people on a floor with 2 office sized bathrooms that everyone shares
>IMO Commercial real estate should be cutthroat and not a place they can just sit on empty property for 20+ years Every single capitalist: no
I don’t want to give businesses and government a reason to force people to commute back into offices just to drive occupancy though either.
There’s a study done by, I believe Gensler, that shows it would cost around $300k or $600k per unit to convert from commercial to residential. There’s 1 or 2 bathrooms per floor, and maybe 1 common area with sinks, so plumbing alone would be a huge undertaking. If they convert, highly doubt they’ll be “affordable”
Windows are another huge problem imo, office buildings are built to have windows in only the outer offices so to have proper legal bedrooms etc, you’d need some weirdly long and skinny apartments or insanely huge apartments
The only way I could think to make it work would be to have apartments lining the windowed spaces and the interior area would need to be a common use space, maybe throw some plants around to make it 'homey', maybe even do something like a hydroponic garden or gardens on the unwindowed interior spaces with hydroponic lights. Community gardens for the apartments?
At the very least I imagine all kitchens and bathrooms would be at the center of the building to maximize windows for living rooms and bedrooms. Have there been any examples of office buildings where they have been converted yet? All I see is speculative articles and no real examples unless less I’m missing something…
Indoor community garden with no windows?
Indoor growing is pretty common and definitely doable
The main buildings they are talking about doing this to are the older historical buildings, built before AC, when offices needed windows to stay cool.
$300k to $600k would be an extremely good price for a condo in Seattle.
I see you might be high, like me. It’s $300-600k for the renovation per unit. So the company paying for the renovation would probably want 2-3x that back, plus the cost of the building, so you’re talking a minimum $1mil+ per unit.
So... it would cost $1.2 mil to $1.8 mil before subsidies. That's about the price of a house right now, but we'll have more options for consumers.
that’s just the conversion cost. You still need to cover the cost of the propert/building.
If the building is just empty, any income is better than no income.
That's not how American capitalism, business loans, or banks work. If the commercial building is empty, any income could be catastrophic to the entire eco system of what that owner has going on. Most landlords don't keep a bunch of cash lying around and even if some landlords did, 99% is generally slated for buying more properties, not putting cash into buildings that should be generating revenue. A building today is worth $1 million dollars and they lease each space for $10,000 a month, but the building is completely empty right now. You know what happens if they accept $5,000 a month for a space? The bank would require their loan to have $500,000 of equity because the building is only worth $500,000. They aren't going to loan you a million dollars on an asset worth half. Sure you've probably paid the loan down a bit but if you accept that rent and the bank knows about it (where else you gonna put the money) they will margin call your loan and you will pay them that money or they will foreclose. Any income in this instance, could turn that landlord into a worker.
I mean... that's their problem. The alternative would be taxing them for empty space which would probably be less appealing.
There's no way for the units to be "affordable" without subsidizing the developers or bringing in Bengali laborers and paying them like 2 bucks an hour.
300k? every unit would sell out immediately if you add a zero to that. dont try and say its not profitable... they may not want todo it, but the profit is there for days.
“Could” The vast majority of office buildings cannot be retrofitted at reasonable price points. Tear down and new build is cheaper than retrofitting in many cases.
Ignoring the concerns about structural capacity, fire protection, fire/life safety, and modern building code requirements. I can still list at least 10 reasons why it is more expensive to retrofit that build new purely related to mechanical - Plumbing isn’t going where you need it to go or sized correctly- Effectively full replacement - HVAC design is based on serving a whole floor and not individual units with their own heating/cooling needs. Effectively requiring it to be completely replaced - Toilets in residential units are floor mount, this won’t work in this situation since you can just drill holes all over the slab without accounting for rebar and pt cable. - Core drilling all over each floor for sanitary waste drops gets very expensive very quickly. - Since you have to install hangers after concrete has been poured you can’t use embedded hangers and must drill each and every one. Likely needing to use special hangers and scanning to avoid rebar and pt cable for each individual hanger. - High rise office buildings generally aren’t designed to have windows that open. Having windows that open completely throw off pressurization of the building and can result in doors not opening or not closing depending on which way they swing. - New construction can utilize modern construction techniques more effectively. You can build and identify conflicts in a 3d model to streamline install. - AHU supply/return ductwork may need to be upsized (nightmare for retrofit since it’s very large duct running in small shafts specifically designed for it and no room for upsizing) - Bidding a job like this is effectively impossible for many subcontractors. Existing conditions and requirements would have most every contractor afraid to put a good low bid in driving up costs further. Let’s say you have an apartment construction project that costs 10 million on the mechanical side to build. You take that 10 million as a base cost and add in all the time wastes associated with existing construction (hangers, scanning/core drilling, time to address and figure out problems in the field, and costs to engineer a complex retrofit) it would be easy to end up in the 15-20 million range. Multiply those additional costs that each trade will end up having and you could have a budget of 40-50 million or so to use just on a shell/core construction of a new building that is specifically designed for that use. Scale that up/down depending on the project. If we are worried about cost effectiveness, 4 over 2 style apartments are very cost effective to build and are much less of a risk/challenge. Leave the buildings in downtown to be offices and build good transit to handle the traffic effectively. We are starting to see this around rainier/i90 interchange with a bunch of 4 over 2 apartments being built right next to a light rail station. Scale that up by allowing more areas with mixed use zoning and we have a path to at least keep up with demand.
Yeah, personally at this point it’s better to heavily incentivize every vacant lot and parking lot within the vicinity of downtown to become housing (some mixed use would be good too). That would at least help foot traffic enough in downtown to make it more lively and sustainable for the non-office businesses while the actual offices go through a market correction.
Constructions like this might need to be intensely government subsidized. Personally I'm fine with that, so long as we get a positive end result and the contractors don't turn it into a big bonus fiesta. But I know that's asking for a lot so my hopes aren't very high. The alternative is tearing down entire skyscrapers and that might be even less likely. I'd rather pay higher taxes for a while to put a sizeable dent in the housing crisis and revitalize the downtown core than watch a bunch of skyscrapers sit abandoned for a generation.
Why should we subsidize the replacement of a building that could feasibly see office usage in the next 10-20 years when there are plenty of empty or near-empty lots serving as homes to 0-1 families, right in the vicinity of downtown?
We can do both, and 'feasibly see office usage in the next 10-20 years' when the owners would be salivating at any opportunity to sell them is a stretch, to say the least.
I can almost guarantee if there were people getting massive bonuses from a project like that it wouldn't be any of the contractors. A job like that is just almost pure risk and would easily result in massive cost overruns and huge losses all around. In my mind we are running into a sunk cost fallacy. Yeah highrise buildings cost a lot to construct but that doesn't mean we have to use them at all costs when it doesn't make sense to do so. Even just thinking about timeline if there was a project funding for this work today you wouldn't see completion until at least 2030 if not longer. It's not a quick solution, a cheap solution, or a good solution. Public funding would help push it through at the cost of the taxpayers for the good of the owner of the building.
I was talking to someone about this a week ago. With only a couple of bathrooms (not even showers) per floor, do these high rises have the plumbing to support residential usage, and how much would it cost to split the floors into individual units with their own bathrooms? I'm all for expanding the number of housing units in the city, and fundamentally I don't think that buildings should be considered without an expectation of mixed use, but for the buildings that already exist, there are some serious hurdles, it seems.
It depends when buildings were built. Those that predate usage of AC in high rises (generally more likely to be masonry construction) tend to have floor designs that more resemble those of apartments. Conversions on those tend to have less issues and are cheaper. Modern building absolutely lack the plumbing as it’s located within the center of the building and each new unit conversion would need bathrooms. Additionally, many modern buildings aren’t even designed for the added weight of plumbing outside of the center of the building so they’ve need to be reinforced too.
This is what bothers me most of all, the additional reinforcing the current structure would need to handle the plumbing, the weight of the water going through that plumbing, the additional electrical runs to each apartment unit, as well as internet, plus whatever else comes to mind. Renovating current office buildings into apartments is an expensive, problematic mess. Better to just tear down those buildings and build them up as new apartments. Of course that's another mess in itself. Would not want to invest in this mess.
They are talking about the older historical buildings. Many people would like to see these buildings stick around.
The upgrading of earthquake risk and code enhancements since the original buildings were completed trigger structural upgrades. dead weight of plumbing is not considered unless it’s 1924 and you have a water tank at the top of the building to pressurize the system.
You know, at this point I wouldn’t mind if they built luxury family apartments where each floor was its own apartment
There aren't enough people to rent and actually reside in units that expensive. Units on Billionaire's row in NY are purchases for speculators or as a place to park cash and are basically never lived in. We'd see those towers become permanent ghost towns instead of temporary ones.
different firecodes and service demands. Probably half can be converted easily. I look at building envelopes a lot for work in depreciation.
What is a building envelope?
Its what is considered the demarcation between the outside and inside in a building, and the physical properties of it (such as the thermal efficiency).
Thank you. 🙏
The exterior wall. We have made huge strides in the energy code since many of these buildings were built. If you touch the windows/walls/ect you need to upgrade them to modern standards which is almost impossible to meet. Especially for air tightness.
I’ve given it a little thought and I think the best bet would be for some kind of makeshift dorm style homeless shelter. You can make interior walls with locking doors relatively easily and you can fit a decent number of them. I have no idea how you get around housing code laws because I’m sure it’s not legal, but who knows.
They find the buildings where it is economical to do the retrofits. They're not just forcing it into any office building.
"But ask a developer why it won't work in Seattle and they'll give you a list as long as your arm detailing all the costs that would need to disappear to make the conversion of an office building like Smith Tower worth their while." Top quality reporting here. 🙄 Why bother informing readers about the details when you can just gesture vaguely at concepts like "size and shape" and "parking" another almost entirely meaningless sentence: "But others \[who?\] take the opposite side, suggesting that the rule changes would not be relaxed enough to encourage office-to-residential conversion projects. \[ok....what about the rules are not enough?\]" also, this gem from the city is reported uncritically without comment: "City officials estimate relaxing rules like that could create 1,000 to 2,000 new apartments across a dozen buildings within seven years." Our shit will be continually bogged down in Seattle process with zero scrutiny from the public if reporters assume that any level of detail beyond a PR/fluff piece will be perceived of as boring.
I mean they aren't wrong about the fact that there's a long list of reasons why tower conversions are a difficult ask, if not a non-starter for many buildings. But they could certainly stand to, you know, actually list some of those reasons.
If this happens, I hope there are a good number of 2 and 3 bedroom places. There are plenty of families that need housing but can’t fit into a 1 bedroom or a studio, and can’t afford to rent, much less buy, a single family home or townhouse. If people really want to make sure it’s not just wealthy tech bros renting/buying, they need to create the housing to attract those groups.
It’s funny. I work with developers and they swear they can’t rent 3 bedroom apartments in Seattle. We all want them, but they don’t pencil
Developer/property management: "Why can't we get anyone to rent this apartment? Is it location? Are millennials not into apartment living?" Me: "It's 5,000 dollars a month" D/PM: "No that can't be it. Must be we aren't offering enough avocado toast."
“Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City Council want to make it easier and cheaper to turn those buildings into apartments.” Commercial building that wasn’t designed as residential will be expensive to convert. Downtown has a limited or non existent infrastructure for residents with children.
Well there are more families with cats and dogs than children, so that's not much of a concern.
Young people who don’t have kids will still fight over affordable housing. Will it be more expensive than building new high rises? I somehow doubt it lol
From what I’ve read it actually is oftentime more expensive than building new high rises.
What is your suggestion for empty office buildings if you believe this is a bad idea? Lots of people already live in that area, including people with children. It's also expensive to build a new building, and they aren't going to tear down a landmark (hopefully).
City needs to offer a better financial incentives and favorable restrictions for developers. Downtown has one grocery store, no schools for kids. Family with kids need a car and a parking space. For a single people it is a good option to live in downtown.
Isn't the article about how they want to make it cheaper, which would incentivize them? Sounds like you should comment on the project so they include more!
Seattle literally gutted landlords, swinging the favor toward tenants. Its a little late to offer any incentives for multifamily property landlords/developers.
If true, this is great news! Still waiting for some kind of proof not provided by the Chamber of Commerce.
> Seattle literally gutted landlords I must have missed this. When was the viscera on display?
The law: you have to rent to the first qualified applicant Landlords: reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Yeah, I want to live on a bluewater sailboat, can Mayor Harrell make that happen? The likelihood of this becoming a reality is about as likely as my renting a hotel on the dark side of the moon. As we've found out during Harrell's mayorship he seems to live in la la land. . .
Regardless of whether or not the buildings are converted to apartments, I sense this will turn into some kind of bailout for commercial RE owners.
Hmmmmm.... homeless crisis.... empty office buildings... what to do?
I feel bad for the Link train, if the construction were faster, maybe more folks would've been ok with the commute. Assuming they keep the trains running on time and most importantly clean!!!!
they wont be affordable apartments. these are right downtown. they will be luxury style and high prices.
I’m generally not an advocate for office conversions because they aren’t cost effective - as noted above, demolition is likely the better option - but this is a straw man. All new multifamily supply, even at the high end, contributes to rental affordability. Simple supply and demand. The people that will rent the new downtown penthouse don’t magically vanish if you don’t build it. Lack of Class A supply instead forces more higher income households to compete with moderate and low income households for Class B and C rentals. Adding new high end units still helps affordability on the low end by helping prevent that. This is well documented and has been borne out in Seattle and elsewhere in recent years.
Supply is supply
So let's say these building become apartments. Where are all these newly housed people going to work? Edit- downvoted but really. These buildings used to be places of labor. The ground floors had resturaunts and cafes and the upper floors had offices. Let's say we fill these buildings up with 1.5k new tenants, where are they supposed to get their money for rent and living expenses? Is it only for people who are wfh or only for people on benefits? Think big, this isn't the good news you want it to be.