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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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the place I work has tried RTO policies several times now - with very limited success. well over 90% of all white collar jobs can be done from wherever you can get internet so your VPN software will function. the customer facing part of the business has to be there 100% of the time, they dont have a choice, that's how the business model is designed. I go in a few days a week but honestly dont ever actually need to be there. maybe 2 days a month, tops, is my presence absolutely required.
the really interesting bit, which the article didnt touch on (not much of an article to begin with) is that there is a commercial real-estate bubble. the big buildings in the downtown business district/cores of most cities, that real-estate isnt worth much if there's no one renting the space. businesses that used to rent the space no longer need to because all of their employees work from home now. the people who invested in those big buildings are not seeing a return on their investments - and they are unhappy. that is, imho, a big driver behind the RTO movement.
And those people are largely of the same class as the corporate executives and shareholders pushing RTO policies which ties a nice little bow on top of the whole situation. Rich people are losing money when employees work from home and so WFH has to go.
Given the housing crisis, it only makes sense to convert that real estate into residential units.
Those two are not as related as they at first seem.
For one, the plumbing required is different, as in literally offices don't tend to have bathrooms with toilets and showers inside every office space. Also the lighting would be cut off for all the inside units. Communal bathrooms and no windows works for work but not as good for home.
For another, a lot of the varying housing crises (there are multiple types) relate to affordability bc of being bought up by corporate interests. Another type relates to weird zoning laws of what types of homes are allowed to be built in certain areas - and for these at least, there's nothing stopping good homes from being made except again profits.
So it's not impossible, but there are challenges. Mainly, how can already rich people find a way to make even moar monay? Oh yeah and something something the poors get whatever too.
It's not as hard as it seems because of the way commercial buildings are built, the real ceiling is much higher than it looks and the visible ceiling can easily be removed then it's just a matter of piercing some concrete, in the end your drains are mostly in your downstairs neighbor's ceiling instead of being inside the limits of your unit. It's super easy to run electricity and ventilation, framing is metal instead of wood (no moisture issue with concrete, no risk of splitting when using a ramset on the parts fixed to the floor), sheetrock for the ceiling is screwed to metal joists that hang from the metal frames the current ceiling tracks are hanging from...
I used to live in a building like that and the only time it was "problematic" when renovating the whole thing was when I had to change the bath drain as during the original construction they had repoured concrete around it to seal the floor after installing the bath.
Yeah these buildings are made to have things routed under and over the floors. I keep hearing people saying plumbing is a giant problem, and it rings hollow to me, extra bathrooms are installed in homes all the time, literally just run the pipes, but seems no one wants to.
Unfortunately only like 10% of them are viable for conversion. Office buildings and residential buildings have very different needs and it’s expensive as fuck to add all the extra shit needed for residences.
I would love to see an actual study proving it's possible for only 10% of them because I've lived in a building built like an office one and I've done renovations in it and there's very little that's different from a residential building with concrete floors once everything's been stripped down.
It's even more expensive as fuck to build a residential building of the size of those office buildings as well and once converted is guaranteed income forever, no pandemic stops people from living in it and there's always people willing to rent, contrary to businesses that can change their policies or simply go bankrupt.
I come with receipts: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/converting-vacant-office-buildings-into-apartments-60-minutes/
An economist...
Get me an engineer's or architect's opinion and then I will give it some credibility.
I mean, you’re welcome to provide a source refuting mine from an engineer or an architect. I provided my source, where’s yours?
That's what I'm saying, your source is from someone in a field unrelated to the one responsible to make the modifications, that's like if you just gave me a quote by a geographer as a source for something related to computer science. The responsibility of finding a credible source for your number is still on you.
Buildings cost money. The whole point is that it isn’t economically viable to convert most buildings. My source is perfectly validly for the number I quoted. And if you need further convincing, watch the 60 minutes interview with the same guy. Not going to argue further with someone who clearly is arguing in bad faith.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31530/w31530.pdf
There, I bothered finding the actual source, not just a number reported in an article
When you look at it you realize that it's for NYC only, that they consider that current high occupancy means that a building can't be converted, that they base it on current laws in place (which would change if the government wanted it to happen), they they automatically eliminate tons of buildings based on them being too recent or too small...
Also, they're studying the financial feasibility and assume a whole lot of things (their own words), they're not studying the physical feasibility which is what I was talking about. We're talking about housing people, ROI isn't the important part to homeless people or those who would love to live closer to their workplace but can't afford it.
So in NYC there's 10 to 15% of buildings that are FINANCIALLY viable conversions for a return on investment they consider acceptable. You can now stop saying only 10% of buildings can be converted as that's not what they were trying to determine.
Not bad for someone arguing in bad faith huh? Or is arguing using unrelated studies is a way of arguing in bad faith on your part? 🤔
No building will be renovated if it isn’t financially viable. I never said you can’t convert any building with infinite money. The 10-15% number is the actual relevant one for getting the conversions done in reality, not the fantasy world you seem to be living in.
They will be if it's a governmental project, they won't be if it's handled by the private sector (as in, none of them will be, zero, niet, nada) and a large scale project like that shouldn't be handled by the private sector as the goal is to create affordable living spaces.
Those residential units will be worthless too if all the offices close. Why live in the big city and pay huge rents if you work remote? Just move to a cheap area and buy a nice house.
Those huge rents exist because demand exceeds supply (amongst other reasons). People want to live in walkable neighborhoods and not suburbs where you have to drive everywhere to survive.
You can have walkable neighbourhoods without living downtown in a big city. Small villages are the original way to have walkable lifestyles. It’s how everyone lived centuries ago. There’s still plenty of those around, they just get overlooked.
Suburbs exist mainly for the purpose of commuting into the city for work. If people stopped doing that then they could leave the suburbs.
A lot of people do, but more people should think this way than do think this way
It's more like it's often not a consideration, because the option doesn't really exist. And when it does, you pay an obscene markup.
Bingo, it's not that there's a lack of people that want to live downtown, it's that there's not enough space to accommodate everyone so it's not financially realistic to most people who want to.
The suburbs thing usually becomes something people want while they have kids at home.
There's plenty of space, it's used incredibly poorly due to free parking, zoning regulations, and running highways through cities. The financial component is simply there aren't enough of these spaces and they aren't dense enough (and they could stand to include a lot more public and social housing, but people oppose it because they don't want "those" people in their neighborhoods).
That's not to say that reforming suburbs to make them more livable wouldn't be a part of the solution too.
Yeah so exactly what I'm saying, there's not enough space (in which people can live was implied) available to meet the demand at the moment. There could be, there isn't.
Sadly a lot of rural areas have little to no Internet connectivity in the US because ISPs have been taking money meant for rural Internet and pocketing the money. Additionally, the internet in smaller towns can be spotty. It's part of the reason why starlink was so hyped up when it was first announced. It's also part of the reason why people who are allowed to work from home sometimes find it difficult to find cheaper places to live (another one being rural bigotry, though if you're cis, straight, white and capable of pretending to be Christian, that shouldn't be much of an issue). The cheaper the area, the worse the internet usually is.
yeah. not always the case but yeah, generally the sticks have shit internet.
Many people want to live downtown to be close to the action and with people living there 24/7 it would bring actual life to the area and would allow businesses to thrive instead of having restaurants and stores that close mid afternoon.
They're bringing a few people back for 8h/day two days a week when they could bring a lot of people back for 24h/day seven days a week. What's more logical from a business perspective?
This means over 90% of all white collar jobs can be outsourced/globalized. Just a matter of time unless there really is a meaningful reason to stay in the US and pay US wages.
yeah, my last job was offshored to India. from what my ex-coworkers told me, problems I could fix in a few minutes would take the new group weeks to do - and that was 6+ months after I got let go. maybe they got better but I seriously doubt it. just because a job is capable of being outsourced it doesnt necessarily mean that it'll happen.
I had the same thing happen. Job got outsourced, quality tanked but they continued to outsource more departments. Like six months later they were trying to rehire everyone. Fuck that noise.
And just because quality goes down the drain when outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t happen unfortunately.
After all, Boeing made a ton of money by just firing their best maintenance engineers.
Right. A big company can remain solvent for a very long time while absolutely undermining and destroying all of the things they were once great at.
My company outsourced some functions a few years ago and had hired Americans back within 2 years. Outsourcing is real but it's also a terrible idea for anything with a high degree of accountability and knowledge. Currently there is an office/opco in Mexico (but the previous outsourcing was India) and if they need to hire but don't have the budget for an American they'll transfer someone to our team. But I know the Mexican office is held to decently high standards and everyone they've transferred to is speaka English well, and are on at approximately the same time as us since we're all on the same continent. I like the Mexicans I work with but would like to see more Americans hired, but this is so much better than the alternative lol