A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off (opens in new tab)

You don't even have to listen to the meeting, just take a look around. Here's one at Carson City[]. Notice something about the demographics? None of those people look like young family in need of their first home or condo. It's people old enough that already have a place, bought during the days while the getting was still good, and are looking to secure their property values. Maybe a few of them had bad luck or had a nasty divorce and lost their house and have no real estate now, but that's unlikely to be the majority of them.

There's almost no overlap between people on and with the means and time to go to planning and zoning meanings and the people who have the greatest marginal utility lowering the bar to owning a business or a home.

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Why did it fund sprawl? Why didn't anyone choose to develop density on existing sites? We built that stuff just fine from 1870 through the 1940s. What changed? Surely it wasn't the proliferation of government regulation of the development process (and the financials thereof) that caused developers to optimize for greenfield sprawl crap that could most cheaply check the boxes, get the cheap money, get the approvals, be compliant, etc, etc.

It was harder for you to quote that and ask me, than to figure it out on your own, so I'm going to pass.

What, you don’t like buying product from md5(u_int64(rand))?

I literally just built a house for ~$60k a couple years ago. A burned out trailer even in a rural shithole with no jobs in my state is about $100k+. An actual functional house, $250k+. This is counter-intuitive but it makes sense in context of the recent COVID 0 real interest mania.

Meanwhile all the shithole land with no "dwelling" on it was never eligible for mortgages so people weren't able to bid it up to oblivion on debt that they locked in with 30 year mortgages so you get weird results like the cost of vacant land is way cheaper than the same piece of land with a house that can really only be bulldozed (latter would be cheaper in most times in history). End result is I built an entire house on property cheaper than a burned out uninhabitable trailer. Building on unmortgagable land is a way to bypass the fact houses are all locked up in 30 year loans at negative real interest rates.

End result is it's far cheaper to build a house than buy even a shitty burned out one because to do the latter you have to buy someone out of their money printing machine of a negative real rate loan, which obviously they are only willing to do for a king's ransom.

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I won't share my address but if you are looking to do this yourself: look up fishing canneries in Alaska, most of them are close enough to cheap plots you could do this on, often even without permits or property tax. These canneries are also usually desperate for workers and pay a livable wage to those with refrigeration technology certifications.

This is not true. Building all types of housing increases the supply of affordable housing.

Build a new luxury apartment, and someone moves from a mid tier apartment into it, and someone moves from an affordable apartment into that, and so on.

Price is a function of constrained supply. The type of supply is not important to increase the numbers.

Yeah, that is big one. Perhaps we need to rethink housing. Shared restrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. Keep the same restrooms on every floor. A gym with individual showers and a food court on specific floors.

Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing that provides the same return. Once the current owners have gone out of business it'll be profitable to turn them into flats.

The arguments against conversion assume you care about the current owner's financial situation.

Sounds like a job for people who don't have one, and a roof for people without.

Weren't the feds buying these to convert into very dense ICE detention housing?

So they can support high density human habitation according to the Feds, but not normal housing according to who?

> Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted

I still haven't seen numbers that show this is a physics problem versus zoning problem. Worst case, make some things (e.g. washers and dryers, maybe even showers) communal.

Having lived in some midwestern cities with a bunch of extra "not easily converted" warehouses, I've seen lots of "illegal" art collective operations where they just put all the extra plumbing on the ground floor where it is easily retrofitted (you can even raise the floor with a false bottom for plumbing if no other option) and then everyone shares a big kitchen, then the upper floors where retro fitting is more difficult are for habitation. Maybe the HVAC unit is undersized or something, or some other safety factors are substandard due to these people not having the money to improve it further, who gives a shit it is better and safer than living on the streets.

Obviously since it's illegal these aren't advertised but they're quite prevalent, and issues are rare enough that now decade past muh Ghost Ship Warehouse is the constant drum being beat by the brain dead building code worshippers who actually bought the line of bullshit that having people homeless and freezing and shitting in the streets was actually a 'written in blood' advantage.

most of those issues will be very expensive or insurmountable for most high-rises -- a non-starter

you're basically rebuilding from scratch at that point.