There is a captive market for residential real estate, and a glut of commercial properties...
Everyone MUST live in a home while offices and other commercial spaces are a "nice to have" - so the businesses and individuals with extra capital have gobbled up the residential property to further push us into the "own nothing and be happy" economy.
I like the idea of transforming the old commercial properties to condos, but there's a ton of issues with retrofitting - which is the result of zoning and differences in building codes. Then there's the zoning issues themselves.
So.. as usual.. we are beholden to politicians doing the right thing for their constituents, and not their donors. These commercial properties are going to sit idle, and decay until it becomes a "true" crisis (buildings collapsing, mass squatting causing major health and safety issues) - causing untold costs to fix them to accrue in the meantime.
It'll never happen, but my grandiose solution is to deliberately crash the housing market via legislation limiting ownership of single family homes. This would boost the "velocity" of cash (lowering inflation), allows taxpayers to own (solves housing crisis), and would renew interest in the commerical real estate.
Mass squatting. Hmm. That's an interesting idea. I wonder if local governments will turn a blind eye, sort.of how they did in Brooklyn warehouses that rented out space to artists (which the artists used as live work spaces, unofficially).
Some of these offices are extremely small and don't have bathrooms (there was an article in Curbed IIRC about psychiatrist offices that were empty because most patients are now doing Zoom sessions). But they would make good SROs (they just need to retrofit the bathrooms to have showers). They are about the size of a studio.
Some countries have actually legalized squatting in certain situations (like if a building is long term empty) to put some fire under the landlord’s ass to either find a paying tenant or sell. And honestly I think it’s an inelegant but effective solution.
It’s not productive to have real estate units sitting empty in the middle of the city and we simply shouldn’t allow it.
I think it's less likely they'll turn a blind eye these days. Oakland was similar but there was a massive crackdown on artists wherehouse spaces after the GhostShip fire (36 people lost their lives) .
I worked for an engineering company that had "secret" projects. So when you were assigned to a secret project, you'd move all your desk stuff into that project area where everyone coming and going had to enter a security code to get through the door. But the size of projects would vary over the weeks. I remember one Friday I finished my work on a secret project along with several other people in the desks and drafting tables near me. The next Monday, we found that our desks were in the same place, but they'd moved the wall; so we were outside the project area - or actually we had been absorbed into a different project area with a different door code. So in those big buildings, there may be small offices, but they are easily reconfigured.
I wonder if squatting in high-rise office space might give rise to sort of communal life - something more social than single-family units of today. It will be an interesting social experiment
In my family, if a kid (such as myself, for example) tended to talk a lot, they'd say "he was vaccinated with a Victrola needle" (because, for the younger readers who are possibly ignorant of history, vaccines were originally applied by scratching the skin surface with a needle, and a Victrola was an early record player with an actual needle for converting the grooves into vibrations - so perhaps some of the capacity for endless automatic patter carried over with the vaccination)
One of the first places I lived when I moved out of my parents house was a converted hotel in a really old part of Los Angeles. My studio unit had a bathroom, but no kitchen. I lived off of microwave Trader Joe’s meals and stuff I could cook on a foreman grill. Cheaper units were basically just bedrooms that shared communal restrooms. We may be seeing more of this setup in the future.
Another techbro with an end of the world bunker fantasy. My version of actual events.
Techbro spends millions building a bunker on a private island. The bunker is built by local workers from a neighbouring island.
When shit goes south TB bugs out to the island to sit in luxury on his gold stash to wait out the chaos.
There is food and water to last him for decades.
All is good.
The end
PS. (version 1)
Two weeks after his arrival, he is killed in his sleep by a group of the workers who built the place (and know how the place works). They move their families in (the place can support a dozen people) and live there for years.
PS. (version 2)
Two weeks after his arrival, he is killed in his sleep by one of his security detail who decided that all the gold now was a better deal than some of the gold later.
PS. (version 3)
Two weeks after his arrival, shit starts to break. TB didn't realise that the people he hired to build the place had the same business ethics that he does. 80% of the budget was siphoned off. TB dies a slow horrible death after the water desalination plant breaks down.
No idea if this is a common turn of phrase or your invention, but I love the "dragon" reference. People get so upset when I tell them we should "eat the rich", but not even Gaston is against killing dragons that are hoarding the village's wealth and killing our children!
It is possible to retrofit but as u/dismalnow points out zoning is a big issue but there is also issue of economics. These building need to be sold at a steep discount for redevelopment to be economically viable. This requires that current owners book their losses and sell but they won't until they can't refinance, first wave is due 2024-2025. Many bagholders will have to face the music, let's see what they will do. I am sure smart developers are already stacking cash for deep value shopping. With that being said many Class B/C office towers are utter trash to a point where it is more economical to just level them. I don't know why local governments allowed them to be built...
meanwhile average folks can't afford modest homes. When I was young condos were cheap alternatives to free standing houses (ok except for luxury ones). Now they all claim to be luxury and I have no idea who manages to buy these things. Single family freee standing homes in an area you won't be shot is beyond anyone who works for a living.
parents buy them for children who help pay off the mortgage with their 100K job.
generational weatlh is a thing the popular media refuses to acknowledge. that is the reason most of these places get snapped up.
I live in Boston. Vast majority of people who even making 200K can't afford a home. So their parents give them a nice 250K or more gift, and boom suddenly that million dollar condo/home is affordable for the couple. these people also never had student loans or medical debt like the average person would. they also often inherit cars and other large ticket items from family, further reducing their cost of living.
my salary has gone up 50% in the past few years. but housing has gone up 100%. There is no 'getting ahead' in this market via salary alone. you need family money. i paid for my own education, and had loans and etc. I'll never own property unless i win the lottery or move to a rural bumfuck area.
hoo boy… see this is the problem with machine learning being called AI… we talk in technically minded spaces about what a computer program thinks and nobody stops to think by themselves if this is even a sensible thing to say. which it is just not. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It's "better" because it keeps the yoke of oppression on the staff, and pathological managers absolutely love that kind of control. Ditto the ability to supervise / micromanage / breathe down people's necks.
This manager may not yet have had as direct a revelation as to be able to put the above into words, but they know what they like.
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