Agreed. And, after adjusting for local property prices and labor rates, they all end up with a fairly high cost per square foot by local standards.
Which in turn translates into housing only for the well-off to stonking rich. You can’t make an office building into a flophouse because even if each customer only took up 50 square feet, the kind of folks who rent space in a flophouse can’t pay what the rent would need to be.
And converting it into subsidized low cost housing just amounts to reinventing the failed high rise housing projects of the 1960s. And even that assumes there’s some government budget slack somewhere available to do the subsidizing. And the will to spend that slack on that versus the other thousand things a city government needs to fund.
Hard though it might be to convert an office to residences, it has to be even harder for warehouses or factories. But we still see a bunch of those conversions around here (Cleveland).
The new units are tax-abated for 15 years, because the city wants to encourage rich people to move in so that they’ll… wait, not so they’ll pay taxes, because the incentive we’re offering is tax abatement… Um, I’m sure there’s some reason they want it. Which results in rich folks moving in, staying for 15 years until the abatement runs out, then moving to the next tax-abated new construction. Which, in turn, results in most of this new housing being designed and built to last 15 years.
With houses and low-rise apartments, “built to last 15 years” usually means leaky roofs, peeling paint, and the like. But with skyscrapers…
Because that’s the culture that we’ve let flourish. This is just enshitification applied to a building, instead of a website or commercial product. “Make money now, consequences be damned, because by the time it collapses, we’ll be long gone, and rich” has infested everything.
Just the opposite. It is generally easier to convert warehouses and big open factories into housing than office buildings (assuming there is no environmental contamination). Building things like plumbing for every unit, cooktop vents, and appealing floor plans is easier when you’re not working around a bunch of existing walls and supports.
This is ridiculous. They are not being built to last only 15 years.
The sorts of warehouses and factories that were built between say 1890 & 1950 in urban areas and mostly from brick, tend to be small enough and few enough stories that there’s a decent amount of surface area. And they tend to have lots of window openings for natural light. Making it fairly easy to convert into a number of smaller apartments per floor. See also trendy “loft conversions” in every older city in the USA.
Conversely, the multi-acre 50 foot tall metal or tilt-up concrete wall sheds that constitute most of post 1960 suburban factory & warehouse construction are tough to convert. e.g. Imagine starting with a large Lowes or Home Depot or Wal*Mart and wanting to make that big box shell into housing. Worse yet for something 4x or 8x larger than those big box stores. Waay too much windowless interior, way too little perimeter.
Better to scrape it all off and start with fresh dirt. Perhaps you could build some number of smaller buildings atop the existing slab, but little else of the site could be used as is.
An awful lot of house flippers do the same kinds of things, just with single family homes or condo / townhouse units. Use the cheapest materials badly installed by unlicensed labor. Permits? We don’ need no steenkin’ permits! Shit’s gonna be looking shabby and falling apart fairly soon.
If there’s a corner that can be cut, it is being cut.
Single-house flippers are an entirely different thing. They will definitely cut corners and use cheap materials and fixtures. But high-rise conversions are not being done with a goal of 15 year lifetimes.
A well designed and well constructed building isn’t in imminent danger of collapse just because it is in structural failure. And I’ve not seen anything that makes me think that the I-40 bridge was in imminent danger. For reference, the Brooklyn Bridge is a cable-stayed bridge, designed to maintain the roadway even if all the cable stays fail.
I’ve seen descriptions of that I-40 bridge as “bow-tied” – but not by anyone who’d seen the original design drawings. I believe that failed box-girder is a stiffener, placed to prevent the roadbed twisting and swaying, and failed in the way that might be expected – tearing in torsion. Not failing in tension, as if they were being used to tie the two ends of the span together.
With those box girders gone, the failure mode would be “undrivable”, and only later would the roadway collapse, leaving the arch.
Like this building. The failure mode is “uninhabitable” and “unsafe”, not “imminent danger of collapse”.
Indeed. I had an artist friend years ago who lived in an apartment in a converted warehouse. It wasn’t meant to be luxurious, but it was clean and spacious, and some of the original features, like an interior wall made of old brick, were really quite attractive. And it was located in a part of downtown that had become quite fashionable. It would never have made Architectural DIgest without a lot of expensive upgrades, but it was probably three times the size of a typical one-bedroom apartment, and featured a big open-concept living space.
In the Times this morning (gift link here ) they showed the plans and pictures of the buckled columns to several experts. It looks like steel plates meant to reinforce the two buckled columns were missing, though they were clearly marked on the plans. The building survived first because the load above the floor with the problem was less than it would be if the building were occupied, and because other columns were reinforced and took the load.
Looks bad for the builder, MetroLoft.
I was thinking , yep the concrete pad would be a really good start ,the overall site ground clearance and leveling, plus the access road , drainage , car parking area , power , water , are all not nothing and significant things that need to be put in for any development so a good start.
But then the sewerage is probably way undersized as it would be for the employees of a Home Depot , not multiple homes and you would probably have to tear up the pad to redo the sewers lines to each unit and way upsize the outflow. So yeah that pads useless and water and power would probably be undersized as well. Plus the slab would likly be designed to support the existing structure and pillars and just shop floor loads every where else , so it may be not good enough for where walls and stuff needs to go for the replacement structures .
I knew a lot of NY developers were sleazy but jeez.
If they turned out to have just ignored plans specifically designed to avoid this sort of outcome, they’re not facing just lawsuits but criminal prosecution
I disagree with the above. When the FD got there they knew that columns had bent. Even a non-structural engineer understands that puts additional, untold stresses on other parts of the building’s framework at least until someone could do some calculations, & probably get a close look, which was potentially life-threatening. FDNY had some device that was able to measure that the building was still moving. Especially in NYC, where 25 years ago no one would have thought that a plane crashing into the upper floors would pancake an entire 110-story building the fact that they said it was in imminent danger of collapse early on meant they pulled everyone out of the collapse zone, including people in surrounding buildings. (rule of thumb is 1½ x the height of the building).