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.