I think Denver (I live here) is an example of our horrible zoning. We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work.
This is one of the main principles of BAD design, where you create an entire area around close to a single use (offices). That creates a very fragile city. This "single use" zoning that the US proliferated makes us really fragile to changes like working from home vs in-office work.
Another point is that cities are rather hostile for families. We create cities so they need to be fled as soon as people have kids. We have streets entirely of concrete and 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. If we want cities to be more resilient we need to rethink them. We need streets that have greenspace as a fundamental part of the infrastructure. We need permeable surfaces.
I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park. There were tons of families with kids playing in the park, people riding bikes for transportation along the park bike paths, adults playing ping pong on outdoor tables together. It was wonderful. It made me rethink what a city can look like.
Denver needs to take notes. We don't need a single use city and a light rail system that only goes into that city. We made an incredibly fragile city. We can build better cities.
jmward01 6 minutes ago [-]
Everything is part of an ecosystem, even office buildings. Nature shows us that a healthy ecosystem, one that survives shocks, is a diverse ecosystem. Diverse ecosystems find niches faster and niches grow over time to turn into major driving forces. They absorb shocks as new things enter since not all parts react the same or on the same timeline. Diversity is key to long term health. This is why monopolies are bad, this is why we should be looking for every kind of diversity we can in every problem. I have gotten to the point that when I see large scale problems I start looking for where the diversity is low and that is almost always the issue. Politics bad? Maybe if we had more than two choices things would be better. Housing bad? Maybe if we had more mixed use things would be better. Energy segment issues? Look at how fast the energy segment is improving now that renewables have finally been added to the ecosystem and we have more choices. Etc, etc etc.
mixmastamyk 11 minutes ago [-]
Yup. Every time I hear someone complaining online about a lack of parking I think, this person has never been to Europe, or even Washington, DC.
If you’ve never seen anything but stroads and power lines, I guess it makes sense.
browningstreet 7 minutes ago [-]
> I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park
That's a favorite running spot of mine when I'm in Berlin. It's also along a great bus line, close to gyms, a technology museum, a bio market, Victoria Park and not far from Tempelhof. But that little park shines on its own. And the cars parked along the road are down a half level so you don't feel surrounded by parked cars.
That's a pet peeve of mine in America, and especially the American west. We put outdoor seating for cafes and restaurants along busy streets or busy parking lots. Which downgrades the outdoor experience and supports the car priority mindset.
bigstrat2003 8 minutes ago [-]
I also live in Denver. The biggest problem with downtown isn't zoning (though that may be a part), it's the homeless people. Who's going to want to go hang out on 16th when there's a dude asking you for money on every street corner? I don't know what the solution is, but it seems clear to me that revitalizing downtown starts with removing the "I'm going to have to deal with vagrants" factor.
coderc 4 minutes ago [-]
When I worked off of 16th street, years ago, many of those homeless people had jobs with the Denver VOICE, selling newspapers. I even bought a few. Are they still around?
Glyptodon 22 minutes ago [-]
Denver does have some neighborhoods that almost are good in some of the respects you mention, or at least I remember some development that seemed similar in the vicinity of the Millennium Bridge - it's just insanely expensive (and I'm remembering pre-pandemic times).
renewiltord 18 minutes ago [-]
What size of home would you be willing to raise your children in? The average 3 br is 1000 sq. ft. in Berlin.
citrin_ru 2 minutes ago [-]
A typical 3 bedroom flat/house in the UK has similar area. IMHO in terms of house sizes the US (with large houses) is an outlier, not Berlin.
estearum 14 minutes ago [-]
Square footage matters less than configuration.
fwip 10 minutes ago [-]
I grew up (as the oldest of 5 siblings) in a split-level home about 1200 sqft. It was fine, we just shared bedrooms. Based only on anecdotal evidence, we grew up closer than other families I knew where each kid has their own bed and bathroom.
renewiltord 7 minutes ago [-]
So did I. But I think the median American acts to not raise their child like that.
armenarmen 5 minutes ago [-]
Downtown Denver also kind of just sucks. A couple good restaurants sure, but 16th street mall (recently rebranded as “16th St. The Denver Way”) is comparable to City Center in SF.
Whenever friends move here I say “don’t live downtown” and inevitably they do and they hate it.
AnimalMuppet 16 minutes ago [-]
They've got a graph of vacancy rates going back to 2023. But I'm wondering about longer term. Does anyone have data going back to, say, the 1980s?
(Why the 1980s? Because I go back that far. I have some sense of what the business cycle was doing during those times. I'd like to know if this is really historically unusual, or just a blip, possibly a COVID-related one.)
elnatro 46 minutes ago [-]
Well but is the demand for office space in Denver so high?
liquidise 4 minutes ago [-]
Lived in Denver for the last 15 years and own a company. You couldnt pay me to have office space in Denver simply by virtue of i'd rather spend commuting time doing something more fun. This applies to just about everyone i know here as well. Many come to Denver for the outdoors and the activities, commutes cut into that time.
lux-lux-lux 14 minutes ago [-]
It would be higher if the rents dropped, but despite the massive oversupply that doesn’t seem to be happening.
‘Just build more’ YIMBY types should take note of this, though I’m afraid I don’t know what the solution is.
zeroonetwothree 12 minutes ago [-]
Our evidence from a wide range of cities is that those that build more housing have lower rent growth. Actual decreases are unusual though.
mixmastamyk 5 minutes ago [-]
Inflationary policy continues to exist, also it is rare to have a true overabundance of housing. But places like Detroit show prices can go down in the right conditions.
rbanffy 50 minutes ago [-]
Looks like there is an opportunity to convert a lot of that into residential space.
shagie 45 minutes ago [-]
Not necessarily. Things like "where do pipes run" so can get tricky along with code requirements for access.
Great article with diagrams and overlays. Good share.
37 minutes ago [-]
toomuchtodo 35 minutes ago [-]
While converting it is not economical, class c office space (which is least desirable) demand is probably gone in this market due to lackluster demand for office space; the value of the building will get zeroed out by the market, at which point it can trade hands, be demo'd, and new residential can go up in its place.
You can think of class c office space, broadly speaking, as oil wells that have very little life left, and get bought up by folks who intend to extract the cashflow until they dump the externality on the public government and taxpayers (like abandoned shopping malls).
A recent example in St Louis is the AT&T office tower [1] [2].
[1] One of St. Louis’ tallest office towers, empty for years, sells for less than 2% of its peak price - https://www.costar.com/article/642008108/one-of-st-louis-tal... - April 10th, 2024 ("Goldman Group buys 44-story former AT&T office tower for $3.6 Million")
I read something at some point that it's more expensive to convert these into residential buildings than it is to literally demolish and rebuild.
I'm not entirely sure how that math works out, or why, because one would think it couldn't be that complicated. Maybe someone here knows more about this.
mullen 40 minutes ago [-]
The plumbing systems in commercial buildings are not big enough to handle residents usage. Residents use more water and the outbound sewage systems need to be larger.
mothballed 35 minutes ago [-]
There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office.
History favors the bold, and code inspectors blabbering about "written in blood" don't see all the homeless people they kill via reduced access to housing.
I've seen plenty of artist collectives that manage it; on paper they are office/industrial but actually everyone lives there. Every once in awhile one burns down but the mortality rate isn't as high as living on the streets which is ultimately what happens to those on the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid when the ones higher up push the ones under them down a rung to snag housing.
boelboel 5 minutes ago [-]
Artists are a shrinking population, I wonder if having most of the top floors (20 out of 30) converted to extremely large luxury apartments (5000sqft+) and only 'adding capacity'to plumbing and what not for the lower 10 floors, which would house smaller units, would be economically viable. Although actual luxury market requires high ceiling so probably wouldn't work out.
I'm sure many many people have thought of all sort of solutions as the value for finding some sort of solution is extremely high.
vel0city 31 minutes ago [-]
For a lot of the office buildings I've been in, there aren't that many toilets per floor. Its also different when you've got some toilets that are often unused compared to people running laundry, cooking, bathing, etc. Very different demands on the plumbing system.
You also then had everything pretty much isolated to two rooms for an entire floor meanwhile now every unit is going to have a separate kitchen, a bathroom (or two, or three), a laundry room, etc.
And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
someuser54541 16 minutes ago [-]
Ok, but some extra plumbing (and whatever sorts of engineering studies referred to) and electrical work surely can't as expensive as demolishing and rebuilding a whole building.
These seem like extremely solve-able problems.
bethekidyouwant 7 minutes ago [-]
Now watch the video to find out why you’re wrong
helterskelter 28 minutes ago [-]
This is an issue that got brought up in Portland, OR during Covid IIRC. The city was looking at buying up vacant offices and converting them to living space but it just didn't make any sense financially and the city concluded it was cheaper to demolish and rebuild than convert.
paularmstrong 41 minutes ago [-]
I assume it's because they would need to re-wire electrical and retrofit plumbing on a massive scale to accommodate kitchens and bathrooms for separate units. They end up needing to gut the entire building and cut through floors and ceilings without damaging any structural and load-bearing parts. It doesn't sound easy nor cheap.
vel0city 32 minutes ago [-]
Another thing about a lot of commercial buildings is the floorplate size and layout. Office buildings often don't care if there's a lot of interior spaces without any windows, but people need outside light. So if you've got a massive floorplate it can be kind of a pain chopping it up into good sized units that meet the demand of the residential market in the area. This definitely varies from building to building though.
There's also a lot of work that probably needs to go in to the ventilation and fire code changes. An office building isn't designed for people having ovens and stoves. It also often just assumes its OK to have less isolation between units for the ventilation, or previously entire floors were considered to be one space ventilation-wise but now you might be trying to split it into 2-3 units that require separation. This separation can also complicate things like AC and heat.
The ventilation issue comes up a good bit with a lot of these poorly done conversions. You end up with units that just don't get nearly enough airflow, and all the windows are sealed so its not like one can just open the window to get more air.
justinhj 29 minutes ago [-]
Historically we did this with suddenly unused industrial buildings in cities. Liverpool and London's Dockland warehouses, New Yorks lofts in lower Manhattan.
When it is suggested today modern planners and developers say it can't be done. What changed?
zdragnar 15 minutes ago [-]
Industrial buildings tend to be much easier to renovate, because they're filled with big open spaces.
Commercial office buildings are optimized for seating space, so you get a lot more interior walls already built and often shorter ceilings then industrial spaces. That's a lot more renovation to add in all the necessary plumbing for showers and toilets and often laundry in every unit.
New building codes mean that everything has to be done right to today's standards, not yesteryear's, so it becomes cheaper to demolish and rebuild than retrofit, especially if the building has a lot of interior space that doesn't have access to exterior walls for mandated windows.
nickdothutton 26 minutes ago [-]
Regulations. I have some small experience with this, although I'm not a professional developer. The regulations for residential properties, whether built for purpose or converted, make this very difficult (and therefore costly) in the UK and I presume other countries.
renewiltord 20 minutes ago [-]
Denver is an interesting place. The Democratic Socialists of America managed to lobby to protect a golf course to prevent housing from going in there. Sort of an inversion from what you’d expect.
Well it is already open as a park, but yes they are spending a lot of money to make it nicer I guess.
asdff 4 minutes ago [-]
There is so much buildable land in denver it makes no sense to start burning the furniture to keep the place warm
samschooler 12 minutes ago [-]
That whole situation was bad. I don't think anyone is happy with that situation. A developer was going to give us (some) affordable housing, and a "free" park. Instead now we're paying 70 million for the same park.
renewiltord 8 minutes ago [-]
In a POSIWID sense, American socialism’s purpose is to prevent affordable housing and create parks. Indistinguishable from what rich neighbors of a plot of land would like, coincidentally.
lux-lux-lux 10 minutes ago [-]
That ‘golf course’ was unused land protected by a conservation easement. There were other options for housing development.
bethekidyouwant 5 minutes ago [-]
Why not the conserve the land outside of cities where people want to live?
Rendered at 18:07:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This is one of the main principles of BAD design, where you create an entire area around close to a single use (offices). That creates a very fragile city. This "single use" zoning that the US proliferated makes us really fragile to changes like working from home vs in-office work.
Another point is that cities are rather hostile for families. We create cities so they need to be fled as soon as people have kids. We have streets entirely of concrete and 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. If we want cities to be more resilient we need to rethink them. We need streets that have greenspace as a fundamental part of the infrastructure. We need permeable surfaces.
I went to Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin and stayed in a multi-family unit right along the park. There were tons of families with kids playing in the park, people riding bikes for transportation along the park bike paths, adults playing ping pong on outdoor tables together. It was wonderful. It made me rethink what a city can look like.
Denver needs to take notes. We don't need a single use city and a light rail system that only goes into that city. We made an incredibly fragile city. We can build better cities.
If you’ve never seen anything but stroads and power lines, I guess it makes sense.
That's a favorite running spot of mine when I'm in Berlin. It's also along a great bus line, close to gyms, a technology museum, a bio market, Victoria Park and not far from Tempelhof. But that little park shines on its own. And the cars parked along the road are down a half level so you don't feel surrounded by parked cars.
That's a pet peeve of mine in America, and especially the American west. We put outdoor seating for cafes and restaurants along busy streets or busy parking lots. Which downgrades the outdoor experience and supports the car priority mindset.
Whenever friends move here I say “don’t live downtown” and inevitably they do and they hate it.
(Why the 1980s? Because I go back that far. I have some sense of what the business cycle was doing during those times. I'd like to know if this is really historically unusual, or just a blip, possibly a COVID-related one.)
‘Just build more’ YIMBY types should take note of this, though I’m afraid I don’t know what the solution is.
There's a NYT article on the challenges about this from a few years ago: So You Want to Turn an Office Building Into a Home? -- Here’s How to Solve a 25-Story Rubik’s Cube https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
You can think of class c office space, broadly speaking, as oil wells that have very little life left, and get bought up by folks who intend to extract the cashflow until they dump the externality on the public government and taxpayers (like abandoned shopping malls).
A recent example in St Louis is the AT&T office tower [1] [2].
[1] One of St. Louis’ tallest office towers, empty for years, sells for less than 2% of its peak price - https://www.costar.com/article/642008108/one-of-st-louis-tal... - April 10th, 2024 ("Goldman Group buys 44-story former AT&T office tower for $3.6 Million")
[2] St. Louis office vacancy hits all-time high [21.2%] as major companies downsize their footprints - https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2026/01/15/office-v... - January 16th, 2026
(conversions when the economics pencil out, haircuts for investors when they don't and more investment is needed to wholesale replace a structure)
US office vacancy rates chart supposedly pulled from Moody's: https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1p8mhmq/us_office_v...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkLcD3PKyk
https://www.boston.gov/news/officials-celebrate-first-100-un...
I'm not entirely sure how that math works out, or why, because one would think it couldn't be that complicated. Maybe someone here knows more about this.
History favors the bold, and code inspectors blabbering about "written in blood" don't see all the homeless people they kill via reduced access to housing.
I've seen plenty of artist collectives that manage it; on paper they are office/industrial but actually everyone lives there. Every once in awhile one burns down but the mortality rate isn't as high as living on the streets which is ultimately what happens to those on the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid when the ones higher up push the ones under them down a rung to snag housing.
I'm sure many many people have thought of all sort of solutions as the value for finding some sort of solution is extremely high.
You also then had everything pretty much isolated to two rooms for an entire floor meanwhile now every unit is going to have a separate kitchen, a bathroom (or two, or three), a laundry room, etc.
And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
These seem like extremely solve-able problems.
There's also a lot of work that probably needs to go in to the ventilation and fire code changes. An office building isn't designed for people having ovens and stoves. It also often just assumes its OK to have less isolation between units for the ventilation, or previously entire floors were considered to be one space ventilation-wise but now you might be trying to split it into 2-3 units that require separation. This separation can also complicate things like AC and heat.
The ventilation issue comes up a good bit with a lot of these poorly done conversions. You end up with units that just don't get nearly enough airflow, and all the windows are sealed so its not like one can just open the window to get more air.
When it is suggested today modern planners and developers say it can't be done. What changed?
Commercial office buildings are optimized for seating space, so you get a lot more interior walls already built and often shorter ceilings then industrial spaces. That's a lot more renovation to add in all the necessary plumbing for showers and toilets and often laundry in every unit.
New building codes mean that everything has to be done right to today's standards, not yesteryear's, so it becomes cheaper to demolish and rebuild than retrofit, especially if the building has a lot of interior space that doesn't have access to exterior walls for mandated windows.