The White House kicked off a multiagency push on Friday to help finance real-estate developers convert more office buildings in big cities emptied by the pandemic into affordable housing, taking aim at the nation’s housing crisis.
The initiative looks to harness an existing $35 billion in low-cost loans already available through the Transportation Department to fund housing developments near transit hubs, folding it into the Biden administration’s clean energy push.
It also opens up additional funding sources and tax incentives, offering a new guidebook to 20 different federal programs that can be tapped by developers and offers technical assistance in what can end up being tricky and expensive conversions.
A third peg of the program will see the federal government draw up a public list of buildings it owns that could be made available for sale to help bolster development.
“These downtowns and central business districts that we are taking about today often already designed and orientated around public transit,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a press briefing. “Our intention is to make the most of this opportunity to add more housing near transit in ways that not only reduces the cost of housing, but also often reduces the cost of transportation.”
I am not sure if this is the win people think it is. Those are going to need MASSIVE retrofits to be meaningfully habitable. There is a reason why hotels are often in “weird” shapes as opposed to giant rectangles. And a lot of that has to do with making sure every room has a window, there is proper insulation (sound and thermal) between rooms, etc. Contrast that with office buildings where you tend to have a huge cube farm in the middle of the floor or people will shank one another over windows.
Buildings with a big center atrium are well suited(-ish) to conversion, but have limited space as a result. And likely need significant work on the floors/ceilings.
As for messaging: The Democrats have always been horrible at that. Part of it is because a lot of it is “this is basic human decency?”. But mostly it is because Democrats are built around actually wanting something. I want UBI. You want student loan forgiveness. Sally wants basic human rights. Maybe we are both happy when Sally gets what she wants, but I resent that they are focusing on a stopgap measure with loan forgiveness and you resent that they are ignoring your personal needs with UBI experiments.
Contrast that with republicans where all a candidate has to do is fuck over a gay person or a woman and then EVERYONE cheers.
I am actually pretty optimistic on that front. Mostly because those buildings are already up to code for office workers and keeping hallways to the various fire exits is a “solved” problem. Also, after you get a dozen or two floors up, windows stop being particularly useful for survival and are more about quality of life.
What I DO expect are horror stories and likely a new “twitch meta” of playing the audio of people fucking in the next apartment over and the inevitable doxxing and shaming that goes along with that. Also HVAC hell as we already learned that a LOT of office buildings and facilities are calibrated for a specific type of occupancy and caused massive temperature swings during the lockdown portion of covid.
Oooh, maybe a story or twelve about how someone smoking weed on the other side of the building resulted in everyone’s PS7 getting destroyed by water. But I think California already requires sprinkler heads in apartments so that is not going to be unique to this?
I’ve had sprinklers in apartments. Usually they’re a bit smarter than office ones. They didn’t turn on through the whole building and only come on after the smoke detector has been going for a bit.
I think this all stems from the they go low, you go high b s. It’s almost like they believe that if you crow about your accomplishments or attempts at accomplishing something, you’re putting the party in a bad position because of optics.
No, you stuffy ancient peacocks! You get in the trenches and fight in the mud and hammer them with their faults and horrible policy. Because if you don’t there might not be a next time.
In another thread, the general response to the new speaker of the house being compromised by russia is “no shit?”
It has nothing to do with “going high”. It has to do with people being idiots. If the constant verbiage is “These republicans are actively trying to defund social security and the military. Here is evidence” the response will be “Fake news. Also, maybe we should defund social security because of lazy black people. And I hear they let mexicans in the military now too, so we should fire all the gays first”
Democrats generally actually care about what their politicians are doing (or not doing). republicans are a death cult who just care about whether their orange god approves.
Democrats absolutely don’t give a shit about what their politicians are doing. Both sides are mindlessly tribal and partisan and it’s infuriating. Yes I usually vote D because Rs are generally worse but holy shit you both suck so fucking bad and are ruining the country with your idiocy.
There were already multiple projects like this underway in my city, with several more buildings that would be good candidates for this kind of thing. We had lost a lot of office rentals before covid, and now with even more suburban people working from home, we have the double whammy of lost city income tax from the WFH people. We also have a housing crunch in my city, with a serious lack of available units in desirable areas driving up rents.
So, my city has a looming cash flow problem, an already established housing crisis, and shitloads of square footage of real estate in pri) me locations sitting empty. Seems like a ready-made solution to all of these things is available, right?
However, as you pointed out, converting these old office buildings can be trickier and more expensive. That’s where these programs come in. I suspect that the Biden admin has looked at all these factors in cities across the country and seen that giving an incentive to developers (who were already interested in such projects) to move forward.
Is it perfect? Hell no. I hate the idea of giving public funds to private developers just for them to be able to charge rents. I would also like at least some of these units be available for purchase as condos. That said, that’s the kind of system the US has for solutions to every problem: put taxpayer money in the hands of private middlemen so that they can take a profit.
