Agreed. People saying it's too expensive aren't thinking things through. The government can offer incentives to make it worth the initial investment. And IMO, any city with high business vacancy rates not doing something like this is suffering from poor leadership.
I was thinking this and mentioned it to my buddy months ago. We bought a fourplex last year and are almost done renovating it. We will be looking for another investment after it’s complete, commercial real estate is tanking right now and probably only gonna get worse. I told him we should start looking at some of these empty office-style buildings and how viable they’d be as multi-unit housing. We’ve got the construction and carpentry skills to pull just about anything off, people need places to live and it’d be a good use of unused space.
as neither a civil engineer nor urban planner, isn't there a bunch of work that goes into just basic plumbing and electrical things to redesign for something it wasn't designed for? I mean, on highrises where I've worked there were something like 4 sets of M/F restrooms per floor, with something like 20-30 stalls combined. Unless you're making this a college-dorm style setup where you go down the hall to a common shower/bathroom area, is there enough plumbing bandwidth to retrofit them? I imagine electrical loading is easier to amp up (pun intended), and HVAC is probably within capacity, but I wonder about those types of things. To say nothing of zoning...does the highrise or hotel next door want 2,000 formerly-homeless people living concentrated right next door, and will that cause more urban flight? No idea, but at least creative solutions are being investigated. Good for them.
I think the plumbing issue can be solved without too much trouble. You can get rid of the community restrooms and run plumbing to individual units via false walls and ceilings. HVAC is easy with mini splits, and as you say, electric isn't complicated either. These can be high end homes as well. They don't need to be only for homeless. In fact, the homeless would likely only require a very small percentage of each building. Adding thousands of units above businesses in Portland would reduce the pressure on surrounding areas, allowing for less nice places to be used for entry level housing. As far as zoning goes, we're going to need to update that anyway. It's gotta happen. Your concerns are certainly valid, but they can definitely be overcome if the city truly wants to solve this problem.
I think it's all doable. Modern office buildings are designed to have their interiors easily reconfigured. And they've got plenty of all the services needed. The question is whether it pencils out. It surely doesn't pencil out to do it for low income folks until there are heavy government subsidies. It might make sense if you can sell them as luxury apartments to high-rollers. But how much demand is there for luxury apartments in the city core? barfo
Definitely. There should certainly be tax incentives to do this. The fact that Portland (as well as Oregon, and frankly the US) hasn't already offered significant tax incentives for this kind of development speaks to how small minded and/or dysfunctional they are.
