The reason for high cost of living in cities was that’s where the offices were…
Now we don’t need offices. So convert them to apartments to lower housing costs in the short term, and telework means people won’t move to cities as much in the long term.
This is actually a good idea…
But the White House initiative will make more than $35 billion available from existing federal programs in the form of grants and low-interest loans to encourage developers to convert offices into residential.
Developers will do this anyway if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?
The developers are doing fine, it’s the average American that’s struggling, stop funneling money to the people who already have a shit ton of it, trickle down doesn’t fucking work
It’s the real estate developers that are in a pinch for building unneeded office buildings and the business that own too many of them. It’s the reason that bosses are bitching about in person work.
But also to a point, it will take a significant amount of work to convert office space to residential. Just utilities alone will be an adventure, and you’d better hope the building was set up with decent truck lines down the core of the structure to begin with. It’s not like “hey let’s throw up some walls, boom, apartments.” You need adequate power distribution, and water/sewer connections to each apartment to fulfill each unit having it’s own kitchen and bathroom. Commercial spaces are generally build to accommodate different usage.
The President has also proposed a $10 billion down payment assistance program that would ensure first-time homebuyers whose parents do not own a home can access homeownership alongside a $100 million down payment assistance pilot to expand homeownership opportunities for first-generation and/or low wealth first-time homebuyers.
I don’t think what they are doing is as strong as you imply.
“Sorry your parents have a home they got in 1996 for basically nothing”
That is a major assumption there is generational wealth. ESPECIALLY with trans/gay people being family-less in many situations. The down payment could easily be collected via estate tax to where everyone had the option of it but the wealthy paid more in. It can also completely ignore a lack of generational wealth like parents so wealthy they only rent multi million dollar apartments in Manhattan.
Just like with Covid and the PPE loans, they coulda given the money directly to the people but this is capitalism and the money has to go to your neo-feudal lord now before you can have any of it. Just wait for that trickle down. Trickle down from your boss, from your landlord, from your parents… your need for a place to live can wait.
I’m happy for those people who will benefit. But try being a kid of parents who have the mindset of “FU I got mine”. I’m not on favorable terms with my parents and won’t see a penny until they’ve passed, if they decide to give me anything at all.
It’s an odd requirement that should’ve been workshopped a little more.
Developers will do this anyway if the offices are empty, why not use that money for a government program to guarantee down payments of first time home buyers?
Because that doesn't do anything but provide guaranteed cash to existing property owners at the expense of people trying to stop renting. Until the supply side issue is addressed, homeownership will continue to be out of reach for most. The best case here would be to convert these buildings into condos or whatever the local word for apartments you own instead of rent is, but just rentals us a good second choice.
Refitting office space to make it liveable is actually super expensive. Commercial spaces don’t have the electric, plumbing, or insulation typically required or expected by residents. It can be cheaper to gut or even tear down the building in order to add the necessary MEP and framing, which is why you see developers are still building new rather than converting old commercial spaces. The money will encourage redevelopment which is far less wasteful and combats sprawl.
That said, I agree with you that you could make the money available to buyers instead of developers, but developers are the ones paying the bribesdonating to campaigns.
Then those millionaire (from the examples in the link, billionaire) developers can let their building sit empty…
This is America, where a single cancer diagnosis can bankrupt a family for generations. If we were a civilized country, sure, bail everyone out.
But I don’t have sympathy for them when normal people are in such a tight spot.
Like if you’re a cardiologist and you’re helping someone you saw sprain their ankle, you’d be an idiot to keep helping them when there’s five people having heart attacks in the same room.
I’m with you, but you’re kidding yourself if you think the billionaire is going to suffer. They have leveraged the value with banks, and would skip on down the road with their fortunes while the banks that make mortgage loans have to shore up their books at the expense of common folks. Homebuyers, small businesses, and taxapyers will be expected to cover the losses.
I’m mostly speaking from personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt. But there’s a lot of developers writing articles based on their experiences.
There are people developing solutions to this one of which is essentially building panels that house all the equipment and hookups and installing them at location. This is the mobile home industry trying to adapt.
SIP panels aren’t going to increase the main stack capacity. Commercial buildings just don’t have the capacity for all of the sinks and toilets being used at once. It’s a neat idea, and a low voltage lighting system could save a ton of energy, but you still need to gut the building and add critical MEP infrastructure.
I’m going to choose to agree with you since you seem to know what your talking about. It sounds like what you’re saying is they are built differently and it’s found to take a lot of work to being them up to mass living condition.
These conversions are already possible. It’s a big financial decision because you basically have to gut it, but it’s not hard work. (No you don’t have to demolish the whole building like the other guy says). Each building will be different so you can’t make a generic blueprint.
The Mortgage Insurance Premium (FHA) and Annual Guarantee Fee (USDA) make either costly in the long run. You get to skip the down payment, but the added cost of mortgage insurance (irrespective of how it's labeled) hurts lower income borrowers. Both are costly, and neither are necessary. The property is the collateral. The lender loses future revenue and is inconvenienced if the borrower defaults, but they obviously do well enough overall to shoulder that burden.
Developers don’t want to touch this. The amount of work it would take to turn an office building into an apartment building is more than you likely realise. Building code for the two are very different so fully gutting the building is first on the list. The amount of plumbing that would have to be added and so on. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I think it’s a great idea, but to get it done you have to make it profitable or the government will have to step up and hire engineers and contractors and operate the building after, which is of course comunism, and so will never happen. Full aside from the political issues, it just makes more sense to knock down the office building and build a whole new one that is actually designed for residential use. Too little too late no matter what happens with the office buildings. It should never have been allowed, from the start, for corporate entities to buy up housing at all. Not apartment buildings, not single family homes. That has to be fixed first.
Dude, yes it’s a lot of work to gut it, no it doesn’t make more sense to knock it down. You gut it. It’s not that hard. You basically have a free shell, foundations and parking and all.
Which is why all incentives for empty buildings should be eliminated. And if you move, convert or remove the old building instead of leaving an abandoned eyesore
The point of a down payment is if you default (don’t pay) your mortgage immediately, the bank keeps it, like they keep everything you pay before you default.
So if the government guarantees it, that means instead of putting (easy numbers) 10k down on a 100k house and having a mortgage for 90k, the government “co signs” and if you default in the first X years, they have to pay the 10k. But since you didn’t pay the 10k, your mortgage is still for 100k
When rent is more than a mortgage payment, this allows people to buy a house without spending years saving up a down payment
I lived in a building thay was mixed residential/office space in Buenos Aires. It was really good, during the week you saw movement in and out so it felt alive, ar night and weekends was pretty empty and calm, and you could throw parties without bothering the neighbors.
Mixed use buildings for actually quite common in much of the world and can work quite well. See what you do though is you put them on the market for anybody to rent, and not force people to live in your company housing.
If you go into any major city you’re going to run into mixed use buildings.
One floor should be reserved for running around barefoot on broken glass while bad guys chase after you to keep you from interfering with their elaborate heist.
Yes please. Let’s give corporations a reason to convert their office buildings into apartments so we can all go back to WFH. Plus, the more housing we have in the city the cheaper it gets.
I’m hopeful that a lot of these will turn into condos so people can get into ownership instead of renting.
Fuck yes. As a libertarian it bothers me that I can’t make my home in any space I can own.
I understand not building rendering plants next to houses. Some zoning is okay. But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
And, lo and behold, Chinese immigrants tend to be successful. They work hard, ignore the rules trying to hold them down, and as a result kick ass and make the world a better place.
Those of us born here tend to be too naive and trusting to break the rules, and we complain about how the system is designed to hold us down.
Except people think the economy is that system that’s been designed to hold us down. No, it’s the law. Law can be useful and helpful but the way we use it is harmful. And it’s the part that is actually designed. Like, we literally have committees dedicated to designing the law.
TOS can be kinda shit, and negotiated contracts in general can be lopsided and unfair, but that is mitigated by competition. A person must select between a handful of cell carriers, which sucks that it’s not more, but nobody’s choosing governments, at least not without dedicating like 10 years of their life to the process of switching.
Thank god we have a federated system in the US, because that allows people to shop around for governments to a quite limited degree.
Anyway. I have high praise for immigrants who are willing to break the rules. I think it’s a sign of maturity to be at least capable of breaking the rules, and I think it’s telling that the set of people who arrived here through a harrowing journey, as opposed to just being born, are the same set of people who give the finger to stupid laws.
Libertarians: Always finding the rarest of occurrences to continue their dismantling of government and the systems that gave them everything they have. lmao
Ubiquitous government meddling (in the form of, among other things, rules like “no more than one dwelling per half acre”) in the real estate market has resulted in this housing crisis we all face. People are dying of stress related illnesses and self inflicted gunshot wounds, and the survivors are dealing with enormous amounts of anxiety and hopelessness, because rents keep rising and rising,
Supply is artificially, heavily suppressed and people wonder why prices skyrocket.
Everyone attributes it to “landlord greed” but provider greed is regulated by market competition when supply is allowed to follow market forces.
A person having to spend $1500/mo just to sleep when they’re trying to run a business, when they’re perfectly willing to crash on a couch in their office, means the threshold for going into business for oneself is artificially raised.
I could rant about other markets too but there’s plenty of government-created horror to be found in real estate alone.
Also the notion that the government “gave them everything they have” is ridiculous. The government gave us the Drug War and a nuclear-armed Israel. Other governments gave us The Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, the Trail of Tears, and other unimaginably horrific acts of human savagery.
Humans’ ability to negotiate and make deals to trade resources and cooperate on projects — willingly — is what gave us what we have today.
I have a counter-point that I’d like to hear your thoughts on: at least to some degree, it seems like part of the housing crisis is caused by private equity firms not being restricted from buying up property, artificially reducing the supply of housing that can be purchased by then renting it out, which artificially increases the cost of housing and making it less accessible. More of the population then has less wealth, while smaller portions of the population end up with more wealth, again making homeownership farther out of reach.
Yeah, that’s the proximal cause. A small cartel gains control of the limited supply, allowing them to set higher prices.
This happens all the time. The thing is, free markets have a solution for that. It’s a negative feedback loop that goes like:
Party A buys up all the Xes, then raises their price by 100%
Parties B, C, and D, who weren’t interested in making and selling Xes before, suddenly see a profit in it now that the prices are higher
Instead of putting their resources into producing Y, they switch to producing X, chasing that profit
With more parties entering that market, supply increases
This nullifies A’s ability to control the supply
The problem I’m talking about in our housing market is that step 3 is blocked. Despite other companies or individuals wanting to get in on this gravy train, by building their own housing to start producing profit, they can’t because there are laws prohibiting them from doing so.
Now, it’s not impossible to do new construction. But it is far more expensive than it naturally would be.
Like, let’s say a certain area is highly sought after. Let’s say there’s 1000 people who’d like to live there. But there are only 100 units (houses, apartments). Some billionaire buys all 100 units, and now controls the supply of housing. For each apartment they have ten candidates willing to outbid one another. They get to crank those prices up like mad.
The solution in a free market would be that a different billionaire (or maybe a lowly millionaire, or a coop composed of twenty fifty-thousandaires), or a big corporation, or whoever, decides they’re gonna build 500 more apartments.
Now you’ve got 600 apartments for those 1000 who want to live there, and you don’t have quite the same power to ask ridiculously high prices.
But the way our housing market works, it’s either extremely costly (like you need an environmental impact statement and you don’t know how it will turn out and if it turns out against your favor you can’t proceed, losing everyone you’ve invested so far), or zoning says “you can’t do more than ten dwellings per block here” and instead of 500 new units you can only build 50, or it’s just straight-up impossible to get permission to build.
That’s what I mean by an artificially-constrained supply.
The real ideal is for those 1000 people who want to live there, you’ve got 1100 housing units, and now the landlords are in competition with one another to attract tenants. 100 units are vacant and that is a source of negotiating power for the tenants.
But because we’re so stuck seeing that would-be investment — that would expand the supply — in terms of rich people getting richer, (and for many other reasons) we block that new construction and keep supply limited, which is to the benefit of the people who control that supply, and to the detriment to both (a) the people who would like to come in as alternate suppliers, and (b) to the people who need to use that supply.
I mean, even if we don’t want to think about incentives or negotiation, if we only want to focus on physical events in the world you can see, if there’s a housing problem the solution is to build more housing, and laws against building more housing are a problem.
It’s artificially limited, but I don’t think the number of housing units is necessarily how the limitation is imposed. You see, landlords aren’t actually interested in tenants, they’re interested in property values going up. Why? Because land and housing are legally considered capital, the value of which they can leverage for loans. That results in what we see happening in NYC and many other places, where apartments and retail spaces can lie vacant for years because the rent demanded by the owner is absurd, but to ask for less rent would lower the building’s valuation. It’s also why we have far more empty housing units than homeless people in this country, about 27 empty units for each homeless person. If these landlords were honestly participating in the market, or if housing wasn’t considered capital, housing prices never would have gotten this high - and I suspect the same is true of the number of homeless.
The hyper-wealthy basically gave themselves a cheat code decades ago and have been abusing it to the detriment of markets and regular people ever since. We have a government body, the FTC, that’s supposed to put a stop to this kind of market abuse, but the last time it really did its job at all was when it broke up Ma Bell forty years ago. For far too long it’s been content to let corporations that are already far too big and have far too much influence over the market continue buying up their competitors or colluding to inflate bubbles.
By giving corporations and foreign investors the ability to buy up all they want, create scarcity, and tyrn the country into a high rent environment…you know, LIKE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
Yes. There have been rent controls and outside investor restrictions. Lots of restrictions were lifted after the 2008 crisis, turning the housing industry iver to banks and private equity firms. And while you might be prone to saying that zoning restrictions caused urban sprawl, it should be noted that developers and real estate corporations wrote those laws and not a government serving the people. Today I learned from my Canadian friends that foreign investors are not allowed to buy Canadian properties. Meanwhile US is selling to anyone with the money no matter where they’re from.
No it isnt. That makes no sense, and housing shouldnt be an investment scheme anyway. Their values cannot rise indefinitely. That’s the root of our housing problem right now.
What economic reality makes housing affordable when used as a corporate investment scheme? What percentage of framing or roofing is provided by foreign-held stock portfolio? I can see we’re gonna yell past each other as you refuse to recognize what the housing shortage actually is. I lived in a country that built houses just fine and met the demand just fine until Reagan deregulated finance and manufacturing. Your concepts will find no purchase here, as they are a proven failure.
Landlords being allowed to permanently take rentals off the market (by pretending to do construction work on them forever) to artificially reduce supply and drive up prices is a major problem. This practice used to be blocked by inspection laws that were removed.
But there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be able to run a 7-Eleven and sleep on a cot in the back if I so choose.
Why can’t you? I don’t believe that there is any law saying you need to have a home in a residential zoned area (anti-homeless laws say that you cannot use public space as a home).
As far as I know, zoning laws just say that you cannot sell or rent out a property in a commercial district as residential. That is a false advertising/minimum allowable quality law, much like you cannot sell the meat of an a diseased animal. Commercial areas likely don’t have the infrastructure (schools, utilities, safety) for people to live in.
Wait why can’t you do this? People definitely live in their gas stations / offices / whatever. It’s just not zoned for that, meaning it wasn’t made for that purpose, it’ll be suboptimal. But like, I don’t think the cops are out to look for your sleeping bag.
There are 16,000,000 empty homes and 500,000 homeless. Office buildings aren’t going to be solving any real problem other than the people who own the building being shit out of luck
More supply is more supply. It’ll probably drive rent down a bit, assuming the plan works. This makes little difference to unemployed homeless people and does nothing to address the fact that many wealthy people see homes as a tool to secure their capital, but it’s not nothing. Hopefully it will help some people who are on the brink be a bit more secure in their housing.
The corporate landlords will just buy them up and let them sit empty the way they have done with at least 4 highrises that I can think of off the top of my head in downtown San Diego. Sure they have rented some of them, but the majority of those buildings sit empty.
Please don’t provide this stat without context. It just promotes cynicism and despair. Reality is complex, and our solutions are going to have to be complex.
Many of these vacant homes are nowhere near major homeless populations. But office buildings often are.
I like how this is finally acknowledging WFH as something that is here to stay but I’m not sure I understand the connection with the housing crisis. From the article:
New York’s famous Flatiron Building will soon be converted from empty offices into luxury residences
Luxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis. But maybe I’m wrong and there will also be developers converting less prestigious office space into affordable housing…
The other thing I don’t get is this: I don’t know Manhattan but I did work in some (I assume) similar business hubs in the middle of overpriced cities and I wonder: are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer? I mean if they were given the chance to WFH from anywhere would they still choose Manhattan? Honest question and maybe the answer is yes, because of the restaurants, culture, good schools or whatever… I would personally make different life choices if I could work completely remote, though.
They use the flatiron building because it’s very famous but essentially a nuisance at this point having been vacant for iirc over a decade because of a lawsuit.
Ed: since 2019 but that’s quite awhile for the most famous like 2sq miles in America. (Which is also weird but we’ll talk about that another time.)
Ah thanks for the context, I didn’t know! But doesn’t my point essentially stills stand?
As more people work from home and more Flatiron-like buildings struggle to find businesses looking for offices, developers might find “ex prestigious office to luxury apartments” a more appealing conversion than “ex Walmart to affordable housing”.
Also, my understanding of the housing crisis is that people can’t find an affordable place to live close enough to where they work. In my country there are plenty of small towns that used to be very pretty places to live, that have very affordable housing and that are turning into ghost towns because all the jobs are concentrated in a few big cities.
If you take away the offices, less people are going to need to live in New York, San Francisco or London. Plenty of people might still choose to, of course, but there should be less competition to rent the last bed space in a filthy apartment at ludicrous prices. Or to buy a small flat in a converted former office.
Some people choose a location for the amount of things to do. Like the bigger cities offer more bars, fairs, gyms, and other niche stuff. Meet ups are also a bit easier. This could change as people move out of bigger cities.
uxury apartments in premium locations is the first thing I would think of too if I were a developer, but their target buyers don’t sound like the sort of people who currently suffer from the housing crisis.
It’ll have a domino effect, more apartments in Manhattan means less people in Brooklyn, Queens, etc. meaning prices go down in the latter boroughs. I live in Jersey City across the Hudson from Manhattan and a large part of the residents here are just people who can’t afford to live in Manhattan.
are many people going to want to live in expensive converted office spaces if they don’t work near there any longer?
Yes, I used to live in a converted office building in Newark NJ (not far from Manhattan) and really loved it. And yes people will always want to live in NYC and especially Manhattan. Many people, myself included simply prefer living in cities. I’ve also looked for apartments in Manhattan and it’s completely different than anywhere else.
All high rise office buildings should be incentivized to have residential space. Let’s try and fix the housing issues and reduce cars/traffic at the same time.
The incentive is already there, it’s just prohibited because of zoning and building codes many places. All the government has to do to fix this is stop getting in the way.
I worked in a few skyscraper type offices and they are pretty awesome. The view was always crazy and there were always good food options nearby right in the middle of the city. You could make a nice house in there. Just need the bathroom and kitchen to be near the center of the building. You could probably fit 4 nice size units on each floor of my old building. But they would want to make a ton of tiny overpriced ones instead so they will say there isn’t enough plumbing lol.
There are sometimes some strange issues with office construction.
There might be no plumbing in the locations people will want for toilets and baths and kitchens in the individual suites away from the core of the building. Same goes for retrofitted laundry facilities.
HVAC systems (in the US anyways) are often centrallized and might need a lot of retrofitting to make it work like a condo/apartment.
Kitchen ventilation
Windows might not open, can’t get to a fresh air source
Aside from that stuff, the issue of empty office buildings while we are experiencing unsustainable housing markets is begging for a solution to address the demand.
There will probably be a handy sum to be earned for construction companies who get efficient at conversions.
I wonder if it would be possible to require all future construction to be designed in a way that it could easily be switched between commercial/residential. Like each floor of an office building has to have plumbing roughed it to support x number of toilets/showers on each floor, stuff like that.
It’s not that there might not be plumbing, it’s that there is zero plumbing in most office buildings aside from one clustered section for floor where there’s 5 to 10 toilets for each gender.
On top of that, you have completely different mechanical systems. An office building for instance may have one single mechanical system for the entire building, whereas an apartment would need separate mechanical systems for each individual apartment.
Then you have the kitchens, bedrooms and interior partition walls that are vastly different than an office building, plus the requirements for exterior windows which precludes larger office buildings with deeper floor plates from being converted at all without demolishing the interior portion of the building. Curtain wall systems that may or may not be compatible between an office and residential building (non-operating windows)… Not to mention the stair and elevator systems are probably not going to work either.
So in the end you’re probably looking at gutting the building down to the structure and removing every piece of the building including the outer envelope, roof, all of the electrical plumbing and mechanical systems… In the end it may or may not be cheaper just to build a new building from the ground up.
Source: am architect. And yes, I have done conversions like this in the past.
Also offices don’t require that all the rooms have access to natural light the way residential buildings do. That’s why office towers can be thicc blocks while apartment buildings often need to be U-shaped.
How about instead of giving money to private companies in the hopes that they build housing you give that money to people so they can afford to live in all the housing that already exists.
Why do libs always make this shit more complicated than it needs to be
Because both just give money to crappy landlords, but with exta steps. Why not just tax the hell out of anyone who owns a building that's empty for longer than reasonable, maybe with an extension if you can prove you're redeveloping an office into housing.
According the the last census there are 15.1 million houses and apartments sitting empty in the US, roughly 29 properties for every one unhoused person in America.
When I looked it said 13.9 million. But how many of those are habitable? Does that number include Airbnbs? Properties stuck in probate or the foreclosure process? How many of them are in senior communities that don’t allow younger people or families? The census data doesn’t specify any of that.
Sure there is. An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.
Pass nationwide legislation that restricts owning housing for commercial purposes beyond a certain threshold, and put rent controls in place pegged to 20% of the median income per town/city. You’d eliminate 95% of homelessness before the ink was dry, massively increase homeownership rates, and be the most popular politician of an era.
It’s not even an ebil communist plot, and it’d still be more effective than giving even more money to private developers on a pinky promise they’ll build something people can afford, just trust them this time.
An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.
If they are renting it out at exorbitant prices, then it’s not empty. If it’s empty, then they get zero money. You’re saying it’s both, which makes no sense. Interest rates and property taxes are both high right now. It costs investors money to hold empty property without renting it out. They don’t have to wait for people to pay inflated prices. The demand is already there.
I’m all for more regulation, especially for developers and investors. Stiupulate that at least 50% of all new housing built be affordable. Give incentives to rehab old condemned properties. And stop letting AI algorithms determine rental prices.
If the average Joe now has more money from the government, wouldn’t that drive the property prices up? Polish govt has a program where a mortgage is guaranteed to have 2% interest rate, while in reality the govt pays the difference between the 2% and the actual bank’s interest rate, and that just made the prices of housing increase.
The only way not to give money to already rich developers is to have the govt build houses on its own to compete with the developers themselves, which is I assume unthinkable in the US. That would literally be communism
Biden wants to give money to wealthy landlords so they can build luxury apartments using our tax dollars, so they can rent them out and increase their wealth.
Watching the Biden admin is wild. At one minute he’ll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine and Palestine, but the next he’ll be funding the NLRB and addressing the housing crisis in a way that improves walk-ability.
It’s like, he has two settings: “actually useful moderate” and “KILLKILLKILLKILL”
Unfortunately, this makes him the best US president since carter
US politicians only disagree (a little bit) on domestic policy, on foreign policy they’re all in lock-step. that used to feel like a truism, but it’s been proven very true.
I don’t know who you are personally, and you may not realise it, but you’re parroting Russian propaganda. The only one here escalating is Russia when they kept bullying Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. The West have been chastised for letting Putin get away with Crimean annexation, instead of further sanction. Many countries have also thought a charm offensive might satiate Putin, essentially appeasing. But history has shown, appeasement never works because an egomaniac will never be satisfied. Putin thought that he’d get away with it again when he invaded the entirety of Ukraine, but didn’t realise it’s the red line for the West, and the Ukrainians put up a stiff fight.
Or you can listen to U.S. Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin retired after 20 years of service, including eight years as an armor officer with four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and 12 years working as a modeling and simulations officer in NATO and U.S. Army concept development and experimentation. This included a tour with the U.S. Army Sustainment Battle Lab, where he led the experimentation scenario team.
Do elaborate on what it is you’re confused by. Russian strategy has been destruction of Ukrainian army through attrition. Being a much bigger country with a big industrial base, this is the most sensible strategy for Russia.
Russia spent around 9 months making sophisticated layered defences over the past year while massively expanding the army. Ukraine was then forced to use human wave tactics to attack these defences by their western partners to try and show visible territory gains for continued support. This offensive failed miserably resulting in the loss of large portions of the equipment the west managed to cobble together, as well as trained and experienced soldiers. Russia actually ended up gaining more ground during this offensive than Ukraine did.
Now, Ukraine is out of weapons and manpower, and Russia is starting an offensive of their own having recruited over 300k new troops who have been trained and equipped during this time.
On the other hand, western powers are now admitting that they’re not able to keep up with the rate of use ammunition, and Ukraine is now actively drafting women in to the military. Furthermore, many western economies are going into a recession, while Russian economy is showing growth and increase in military production.
On top of all that, we’re now seeing the war in Palestine unfold which necessarily means that Ukraine will get even less support from the west.
Seems to me that this is precisely what U.S. Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin predicted would happen in his article that’s linked above.
Russian strategy has been destruction of Ukrainian army through attrition.
Their strategy was a lightning fast toppling of the government within a week with little to no resistance, such as they saw in Crimea.
Russia is also facing dire manpower issues. With too much drafting from Moscow, Putin’s power is in danger. In fact, Ukraine is betting on these manpower shortages to attrit down to the point where the line becomes untenable. See here: youtu.be/lebWSl49R0cyoutu.be/CqmQPev1Gvg
Gasa is certainly an issue, but with higher artillery production, linked bills, and diverted media attention, it has upsides for Ukraine too. youtu.be/tg7aw3T3nzg
Their strategy was a lightning fast toppling of the government within a week with little to no resistance, such as they saw in Crimea.
Nowhere has Russia said anything of the sort, but you must know something nobody else does apparently. Russia certainly did get Ukraine to negotiate early on, but the west forced Ukraine to break off these negotiations bringing us to where we are today.
Russia is also facing dire manpower issues.
It’s absolutely incredible that people still believe this stuff after a year and a half of it being proven wrong. You must be one of those geniuses who thinks China’s about to collapse as well.
Gasa is certainly an issue, but with higher artillery production, linked bills, and diverted media attention, it has upsides for Ukraine too.
It’s incredible what people end up believing when they just guzzle propaganda on youtube.
In any case, there’s absolutely no point arguing with you since it’s pretty clear that you live in a fantasy world. By next year even people such as yourself will have to start grappling with what’s happening in the real world though.
You take their words at face value? It’s from their actions and game theory of the situation. youtu.be/pBwT-5z9R5A
Did you watch the vid?
Did you watch the vid? It’s a game theory and international relations teacher talking about their area of expertise. I’m guessing anything that disagrees with Russia though is propaganda for you.
You take their words at face value? It’s from their actions and game theory of the situation.
They’ve stated their objectives pretty clearly. Why would I take words of some random youtube troll over the official position?
It’s a game theory and international relations teacher talking about their area of expertise. I’m guessing anything that disagrees with Russia though is propaganda for you.
The narrative this game theory and international relations teacher is feeding you is at odds with the reality we observe. The fact is that plenty of western experts such as Mearsheimer clearly explain what’s happening, and their claims have actually been supported by what’s observed …substack.com/…/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukra…
Indeed. Whether the attack is a good thing or a bad thing depends on the casualty and material ratio vs the objectives taken. Which a game theory approach is much better for analyzing than just saying that Russia or Ukraine is gaining ground.
I never made the argument about gaining ground anywhere. What I said was that Russia’s strategy is to grind down Ukrainian army through attrition. The game theory approach for analyzing this needs to account for the fact that Russia has a vastly larger population and massive industrial capacity that Russia inherited from USSR that the west is admitting is not able to match right now.
Also, every credible source such as BBC and Mediazona show that Russian casualties peaked before Ukrainian offensive started and have been falling since. On the other hand, Ukrainian casualties have been catastrophic even by western admissions.
Again, there is no point continuing this since clearly we aren’t going to convince one another of anything. We will simply see who is right when the war ends.
Mearsheimer’s article isn’t talking about territory, and the article from the Spanish paper is talking about the fact that Ukrainian army is in an operational crisis right now. Did you actually read either one?
Did you watch the vid?
I watched part of it. Pretty much everything he says has been proven wrong since the video was made a year ago. The fact that you keep referring to the vid that made a bunch of wrong predictions is fascinating to me.
For example, Stoltenberg has publicly admitted now what the actual cause of the war was:
He also flat out lies claiming that nazis in Ukraine don’t have support of political power when nazis are literally in Ukrainian government military. Top Ukrainian officials including Zaluzhny have Bandera portraits in their offices. Azov nazi battalion is officially part of the military in Ukraine. Western media can’t even find soldiers to interview who aren’t covered in nazi tattoos and paraphernalia. The fact that he ignores all of that shows that he is an intellectually fraudulent individual.
He predicted that Ukraine capturing Crimea was a plausible outcome. We now know that it was not.
The idea that Russia was motivated by Ukrainian resources doesn’t really stand to scrutiny either. Russia has massive untapped resources in the east, and it would be far easier to develop those than to go to war with NATO.
The reasoning he gives for the first strike advantage is directly contradicted by the quote from Stolenberg above. It makes it clear that Russia was in fact concerned about NATO expansion, and decided to take preemptive action to halt it after NATO refused to agree to stop expansion.
Once you bother reading the article I linked, you’ll see that the whole 3-1 attacker advantage he talks about is not applicable in practice because both sides end up going on attack and defence. And as we just saw with the Ukrainian offensive disaster, attacks for Ukraine are far more costly due to lack of artillery numbers and air power.
He frames it as a territorial conflict, which again, as Stoltenberg explains, it is not.
The whole Kiev offensive narrative has been debunked many times already. The idea that Russia was trying to take Kiev with 100k troops is nonsensical given that they dedicated 40k troops to Mariupol which is a city that’s an order of magnitude smaller. What the 100k troops were actually doing was pinning Ukrainian forces around Kiev while Russia consolidated their position in the east.
He claimed that sanctions would cause problems for Russian economy. Yet, the exact opposite is the case. European economies are in a crisis while Russian economy is growing faster than anyone expected.
Pretty much every single argument he’s made was shown to be false. If you’re still basing your understanding of the war on a deeply flawed analysis from a year ago, I can see why you have such a skewed understanding of what’s happening.
The manpower situation favors Russia in every way. First of all, 80% of the casualties come from artillery fire and Russia fires around ten times more artillery than Ukraine. This means that Ukraine is taking far more casualties than Russia in this war. This is reflected in Ukraine now having expanded its conscription to older men and even women. This wouldn’t be needed if Ukraine wasn’t running out of manpower. On the other hand, Russia isn’t doing conscription or mobilization right now, and they raised around 300k volunteers over the past year.
Russian casualties corroborated by publicly available data as of 20 October stand at 34,857. We can also see how the casualties are steadily dropping since March
On the other hand, even western media admits that Ukrainian casualties stand at over 100k now. Again, given that Russia has a much bigger population, it’s pretty clear that this is a catastrophic situation for Ukraine. It’s also important to keep in mind that the trained and motivated troops Ukraine loses cannot be easily replaced. You can’t just throw somebody into training for a few weeks and expect them to be an effective fighting force that’s going to take on a seasoned and experienced army.
Even western media openly admits this, but you keep on coping there buddy. The only clown here is the one who thinks that a country with a population of over 140 million couldn’t recruit 300k people into military service. You know the same way people in US “volunteer” into military service because they don’t have any better options in life.
“publicly” doesn´t mean reliable, especially if it comes from “official” sources on either side.
Certainly more reliable than some dufus on youtube pulling numbers out of his ass. Anybody who is not a certified clown understands that.
also, highly encourage you to watch this 25 min video explaining the state of things by one of the most preeminent experts on the subject www.youtube.com/watch?v=62FCVJycwSA
Russia has more manpower but at the expense of pulling out troops from another theatre, which in turn would diminish Russian influence there, that’s already the case with Central Asia and Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russian businesses is already short-staffed. Even if Russian wins, it is will be a Pyrrhic victory. Future generations of Russians will pay for the financial and human costs. Russia could even be beholden to China, who is keeping Kremlin afloat right now.
Russian propagandists have said so many things before that turned out to be the opposite. We will conquer Ukraine in three days, Russia will win, we have more manpower blah blah. One year and a half later? Who made more progress since the Russians were pushed back? I guess the true fascists are the ones who invaded and killed Ukrainians along the way.
China could only be a good thing.
At least you and I both agree Putin needs to be toppled.
But is this tacit admission of Russia is going to lose anyhow?
The only people who said that Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine in three days are western propagandists. There isn’t single statement from Russia saying anything remotely like that.
Who made more progress since the Russians were pushed back?
Russia literally gained more territory during Ukraine’s offensive than Ukraine did.
At least you and I both agree Putin needs to be toppled.
Who do you think would replace Putin exactly. Putin is a moderate in Russia. You think Medvedev or Karyrov are gonna be more restrained? You’re just utterly clueless.
But is this tacit admission of Russia is going to lose anyhow?
Please don’t put words in my mouth. Only an utter imbecile would look at what’s happening and think that Russia is going to lose.
You admit to wanting Russia to become beholden to China. The only way for that to happen is Russia losing the war in Ukraine, or Russia having lost so much finances covering it. So, you do admit that Russia will lose or it becomes too costly that Russia will become China’s subservient.
Da klon? Every post you make, acting like a clown and are pretending not to know things, will fund your dacha? Da? 🤡 Remember though, Ukraine gained more territories in three months than Russia has with failed offensives in Adiivka and north Donetsk. Not even your comrades will deny that despite your pretending ignorance that Putin thinks he will conquer Ukraine in three days. But keep talking, I will help you fund your dacha.
You tell me tovaricsh if you are pretending not to know and stupid. But then again, propagandists are paid too deep and filthy like animals to tell the truth.
Russians are interesting lot, even both Russian communists and neo-Nazis are imperialists and genociders who support Putin, despite the lack of ideological commonalities. The only common denominator is being ultranationalists. It just confirms anyone’s observations that Russians are nationalists first, and whatever second.
Don’t worry, keep talking mud. I am helping you fund your dacha somewhere in Siberia when Russia collapse again for the second time in thirty years so you could stay nice and safe there.
You said there was a quote from Putin, and I’m waiting for you to show me that quote. Since we both know this quote doesn’t exist, that makes you a liar and the fact that you continue trolling here makes an idiot.
Also, hilarious that a Canadian would bleat about genocide. Canada is the home of genocide and continues to commit genocide against the native population last I checked.
Finally, I’m a Canadian living in Canada, but good to see you expose yourself a racist scumbag that you are here.
Seems like Russia is still stuck in the 19rh century to think imperialism and genocide is still normalised then?
Sure you are a Canadian, tovarisch. Keep posting and spewing bs. I will help you buy a dacha eventually. For every nonsense you spout, you get paid a cent. Da?
By the way, you never answered the question. Have you spoken to those imprisoned during the Soviet Union? Or will you keep lying that there were never any arbitrary arrests?
You’re a curious specimen. How’s it going there in St Petersburg without Prigozhin?
Lol, spoken like a true Krembot with the whataboutism! Oh you crack me up. I’m asking you non-playable character with repeating script. You keep lying that mass arrests never happened in the Soviet Union. Have you spoken to the former detainees? I’m not denying that the genocide of Native Americans, you’re the one denying that there was no arbitrary arrests and promoting genocide of Ukrainians. Have you spoken to former detainees? I’m not even Canadian nor live there, you’re the one who claims to be one.
Tell, me what it’s it like being a genocidal settler in Canada Ukraine who steals land from the native people and then systematically eradicates them. Tell me what it’s like being a propagandist despite falling value of ruble? See, I am helping you buy a dacha by keeping you engaged. Many Russians never had it so good, am I right? All the blood money from killing and promoting the genocide of Ukrainians lets buy you Audi and pick up truck for your mommy and daddy in a Siberian village? Da tovarisch?
Have you spoken to former detainees in the Soviet Union? Putin commemorated the former gulag inmates you know? So you can’t deny that mass arrest never existed. Scramble now for whatever script you’ll be given comrade on how to respond to that.
I see you’ve got nothing new to say, but you really are bothered because every time you respond with a word salad. Imagine living in a nation that’s built on the genocide of the native population, that operated concentration camps for kids into the 80s, and that currently continues to occupy unceded native land, and brutally repress native population, and bleat about USSR. What an utter hypocritical imbecile you are. What a complete and utter piece of human garbage Canada managed to produce. The most hilarious part is that you don’t even realize what you are.
I don’t live in a settler country. Did one of your agents forget who you are speaking to? Trolling multiple people at the same time?
Imagine being paid to spout word salad, dodge questions, and promote the dehumanisation and genocide of neighbours, all in the name of Putin and a country who is going to lose and be a puppet of China.
What a human garbage Kremlin has produced. I hope you realise what you are-- a genocide denier and a misinformation whore paid a cent per post. How do you sleep at night knowing you are brainwashing people and twisting history and the future of society? Have you spoken to former detainees of USSR? How would your handlers spin Putin admitting the crimes of your country with its gulag?
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