oh i got the housing crisis figured out, just now i did it. old office buildings are now empty because of the rise in remote work, remade into apartments, greater supply depresses rents pretty quickly. With rents cheaper than monthly mortgage prices, eventually mortgages find a new equilibrium. done! ill take my nobel prize I'll economics now, thank you.
The big problem is that fire codes and esoteric safety requirements make it difficult to rehab most mid-rise buildings into housing. The fix would *seem* straightforward - just fix the regulations - but cities have been reluctant to give up on all that office space coming back, and on the safety aspects of the regs.
Oh another problem solved, homelessness. Vacant offices could be used for housing and services for the unhoused. The old AT&T building in downtown St. Louis was the largest building in the state, 6 million square feet, sat vacant for years, recently sold for like $5million. Like less than a dollar a square foot. City could have just bought some of that and had plenty of space left. Just boggles the mind.
oh i got the housing crisis figured out, just now i did it. old office buildings are now empty because of the rise in remote work, remade into apartments, greater supply depresses rents pretty quickly. With rents cheaper than monthly mortgage prices, eventually mortgages find a new equilibrium. done! ill take my nobel prize I'll economics now, thank you.
I mean, that's essentially what pundits have been chattering about since 2020, but we've gotten very little progress on it.
(https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/to-save-downtowns-we-need-to-embrace?r=e9tr3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
The big problem is that fire codes and esoteric safety requirements make it difficult to rehab most mid-rise buildings into housing. The fix would *seem* straightforward - just fix the regulations - but cities have been reluctant to give up on all that office space coming back, and on the safety aspects of the regs.
Oh another problem solved, homelessness. Vacant offices could be used for housing and services for the unhoused. The old AT&T building in downtown St. Louis was the largest building in the state, 6 million square feet, sat vacant for years, recently sold for like $5million. Like less than a dollar a square foot. City could have just bought some of that and had plenty of space left. Just boggles the mind.