Without regulation, it’ll make it worse. (31 minute YouTube video by Evan Edinger)
A: no.
Due to the way office buildings are configured, they’d need to be converted to some sort of communal living (think college dorms). It seems feasible in theory, but it would have a very limited audience and would be a difficult living situation for most people.
Converting to individual units would require extensive retrofits and renovations.
No: converting commercial space to residential is more expensive than building new residential
Which is why developers do it. To lose money.
Not to mention the like 12 empty houses per homeless person.
This bullshit is just some vulture capitalist’s foolproof scam to make a quick buck in a floundering corporate real estate market.
Fuck man, even the tiniest possible cruise cabins still have room for a stand up shower, toilet, and sink. And they fit a queen sized bed.
Knock down a wall or two and don’t make people share a communal bathroom like they’re recruits in basic training.
$850 a month for 150 square feet??? Utter insanity aside, how is that even remotely considered ‘deeply affordable’
Because these idiots are comparing it to the normal sized flats, that are more expensive due to the deficit they created.
once again, trying to shift the onus for a solution away from the 1% who caused and perpetuate the problem
Exactly. Not sure how slum lord flats are the solution here, when investment firms are sitting on millions of empty homes.
how slum lord flats are the solution here
they’re a solution for building owners who can’t find tenants to lease their office space to. they don’t actually care about the peasants who can’t find affordable homes
That’s kind of the definition of a slum lord, though, isn’t it?
instead of “tenants” i should have said “badly run businesses that nevertheless have tons of capital to blow on office space”
Ah. Sorry. I misunderstood ‘tenants’ in terms of the civiz who would rent the tiny flat, and not as the businesses who would rent the entire floor.
Who do you think owns those fucking buildings with office space?
The same investment firms. That’s my point. They own too much, and need regulation.
Why do they have to be micro though?
So they can make as much money as possible
There are enough houses.
There are too many landlords.
Seems excessive. Loads of people have spent many many years in as little as 18 Sq. Ft. Why can’t people just be happy with that?
/s
Lots of housing is the solution to the housing crisis.
Outlaw AirBnB and corporate ownership of residences or the amount of housing will literally never matter.
Also ban housing as an investment vehicle.
Pull a japan and make wooden houses have a lifespan so I’m not paying top dollar for house that wasn’t renovated since 1935.
Most houses in my area are wooden and at least 60 years old. And there are plenty of 100+ and 200+ wooden homes too.
I thought the reason Japan has so many younger homes was all the carpet bombing in WW2. Same with German housing stock.
Not quite. From what I’ve been able to gather, housing in the postwar era was made fast and cheap to ensure everyone could have a place in the immediate aftermath of the devastation. Then, in the sixties, they came up with better building standards, more regulations, and evaluated the lifespan of typical housing. I don’t remember the exact number, but they determined a conservative lifespan to be like 20-30 years. With this in mind, they started to constantly update building codes to make new construction safer and more resilient to natural disasters. So, what would end up happening is old homes stay cheap because not many people want to buy at the end of its life, and it’s less expensive to build new to modern standards than rehabbing an old home. Side note: recently the old estimated lifespan was re-evaluated and they determined that housing lasts, again I don’t remember the exact number, closer to 50 years.
Now, while all this is happening they have a different relationship to zoning than, say, America. What’s in America? It’s mostly single use zoning. They have a lot more mixed use zoning that allows for building housing where it would be illegal in America like commercial zones or light industrial zones. Side note: America used to build like that too until suburbs were invented and pushed as THE solution to housing people in our postwar era. Think of the older parts of towns with stores on the ground level and housing being 1-4 floors above them. With this freedom to build, they have built way more housing than is actually needed and in places people want to live.
The last point, which was already mentioned above, is that they don’t view housing as an investment. It’s a place where you raise your family, you store your belongings, and sleep. You don’t buy a home with the idea of selling it to make a ton of money in a few years or even decades. With that, there’s no incentive to buy up housing and leave it sitting empty for the right time to maximize the investment. It’s sort of like we view cars. Cars don’t typically increase in value, and the ones that do it’s because they’re rare, beautiful, or historic. MFers are out here trying to sell the housing equivalent of an '80s Ford Fiesta at 2024 fully loaded Toyota Camry or even Mercedes S Class prices.
Summary: Housing has a shorter lifespan, can be built almost anywhere through more mixed zoning, and it isn’t an investment, it’s just a place to live.
Just ban housing 🙂
Almost there… It’s really about ending capitalism.
While true, in the USA, there are millions of “investment homes” owned by investment firms, all sitting empty, driving down supply and driving up costs. The solution to the housing market in this instance isn’t to increase the availability of 150sqft slum lord flats, but instead to significantly decrease the number of “investment homes” an entity is allowed to own [and to restrict its use (for example, it must not sit empty for more than 6 months)].
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I think this deserves a closer look. This isn’t just affordable housing, but affordable housing in the middle of Downtown areas loaded with walking distance services, jobs, and public transportation. Moving working class people into urban areas is a good thing that can have a reverse-gentrification knock-on effect as the extra housing inventory pressures landlords to cut rents.
It’s student accomodation - short term , probably ok for youths for whom sharing with strangers as part of the “experience”.
That’s no place for putting down roots, or for a full time worker. It’s not a bad idea in principle - i agree. But each unit should be 2-3 times the size and include a private shower room, toilet. and at least a small kitchenette. And the conversion should be nominally permanent - i.e. require a plaanning application to reverse.
That plan doesnt even have a washbasin/water supply. My guess is they want to cheap out on plumbing - hence the communal bathroom and kitchen. So that it is reversible back to office space - they’re not building a home if they want it reversible - it’s temporary “accomodation”. No good for a lasting comunity. I’d want this type of accomodation to be no more than a few percent of the homes in an area.
To me the fact they scaled down the plan of the “traditional studio” to make their plan look bigger betrays the fact that these are disingenuous salespeople not actually interested in making viable homes for people.
edit: It’s also fine for housing the homeless - no argument there, but I’d hope for them a pathway to adequate long term accomodation.
yes private real estate bad but also guys this is infill housing, this is good.
EDIT: wait no hold on just saw how small those are that’s awful
Ehh that studio on the right is perfectly livable for two adults. Common to see in Europe.
The left looks like some cursed dorm-type setup with shared restrooms and kitchens which is just unsanitary (have you met an average American?).
But the size is fine. Americans just insist on having ridiculous amounts of square footage to “live” because they don’t live. The US has no third spaces so either you go somewhere and pay for the privilege of being there, or you use your apartment as your all-in-one space for gatherings, exercise, relaxing, creating, etc.
The U.S. has a lot of third spaces like parks, libraries, art spaces, community/rec/senior centers, churches, etc. It’s more that there’s been a cultural shift away from using those spaces, because the norm for work-life balance has been steadily shifting toward only work, so people don’t have energy left for themselves or their communities.
The issue isn’t lack of existing housing.
No. It’s not a lack of existing housing. It’s lack of available housing. Millions of homes sitting empty, owned by these firms as investment properties.
It’s the diamond in warehouse treatment.
This idea in particular seems inconvenient to me, but there may be people who would prefer something like this.
I had a very small apartment when I lived in Japan, and honestly, I really liked it for the most part. It was a bit bigger than what I think they’re saying in this article, though.
A lot of American municipalities have banned a lot of the cheap and small apartments that could house working people. Offer it as an option; it seems better than sleeping on the streets.
While I’m not fully on board with this idea, I do think it could help some people out. When I got my first job out of college, I definitely couldn’t afford to live anywhere aside from my parents house. All my friends were in the same boat and even with our meager salaries together, we could not afford to get an apparent together. It took us 3-4 years out of college to have the salary to be able to come together and get an apartment. But what if you moved to a new place and don’t have friends to share with? What if you just… Don’t have friends or have some reason you can’t live with others? This is a great solution for that. My brother was in a situation recently where he felt stuck in a relationship with his batshit crazy girlfriend because he couldn’t afford to be on his own and would have to move in with our parents if they broke up. It eventually worked out and he has an apartment all his own, but I feel he could have removed himself from that relationship sooner if there was a cheap option like this for him to use temporarily.
