Saying Large Office Floorplates Make Poor Multi-Family Conversions is a NIMBY-ist View to the Housing Crisis.
Scott Rechler, CEO of RXR Realty, owns nearly 100 properties in the New York City area. He is sharing the reality that he might ‘hand over the keys’ to a few of his older office buildings because they never recovered from the pandemic and the #WFH movement.
Soon after, armchair developers in the comments section quote either side of the argument:
- Convert it to multi-family!!!
or
- You can’t convert it to multi-family because:
- Units will have awkward sizes because of the deep floor plates!
- Zoning codes require proximity to windows!
- Wasted space in the core make it inefficient! and/or
- Older buildings mean old problems like mold, asbestos, and lead paint.
These are valid concerns, but if we are in the kind of housing emergency we say we are, a lot of these objections need to step aside like you would in any crisis and solve the problem
Dr. @Jenny Schuetz, a Senior Fellow at the @The Brookings Institution discusses the lack of diversity in the zoning and buildings codes that exist today compared to 30-50 years ago.
Everything is illegal!
Some for good reason.
But when did we eliminate the option for someone to live in a single bedroom with a communal kitchen and then require everyone have a kitchen and bath of their own?
If you’re living out of your car, for whatever reason – employment or mental health – you don’t have middle class preferences and worries about a nuclear family.
You just want a place to sleep, bathe, and eat.
This is especially true when the minimum wage has not kept up with the cost of living.
In 1956 the lowest US wage was 75 cents., the equivalent of $7.19 in June 2022 dollars. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25
Comedian George Carlin who delivered his famous “Saving the Planet” rant would be disappointed.
My armchair rant:
- Nationally – Make Section 8 vouchers an entitlement, fund it properly, and educate landlords/community stakeholders to remove the bad reputation it has.
- Locally – Return to more diverse zoning codes so you can build for the missing middle and the lowest of incomes, including those with special needs and farm workers.
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