If they can't afford to lose money, they should stop being poor.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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They should stop buying avocado toast and make their coffee at home!
It’s really not that hard.
They should sell the buildings...
So, I've thought about it and we have a housing shortage and an excess of offices. Seems like a solid solution. Takes a lot of work to make an office into a home, but it's more profitable than leaving them empty.
But no, that would help people, and the cruelty is the point.
Yep, Ive been saying this for years now as well.
We have giant mostly empty office buildings which could be converted into mostly apartments, with even make shift permitted commercial zones for basically street vendor / convention booth style shops every 10 floors.
Instead it apparently makes more sense to not do this because it makes more sense to keep them empty, heated and lit 24/7, as basically a way to prop up the retail property market.
Capitalism is a farce, and it has already doomed us all: we have now breached the 1.5 C warming barrier, even more rapidly than most of the worst case scenarios predicted. Permafrost in Siberia and Northern Canada is already thawing and releasing methane.
Enjoy the collapse of human civilization in your own lifetime as people and governments continue to squabble and combat each other over scarcer and scarcer resources as our entire way of life becomes too expensive to maintain.
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Let those banks burn. I could not care less. Let the commercial real estate market burn with em.
We don’t need them.
You do know if that sector fails, so does your pension, and probably a whole load of the economy.
Price of doing business. :)
No but seriously, it's a bit annoying that these guys are holding everyone hostage in a way. If they don't make bank, we all suffer? Seems wrong.
It is bullshit that they want to hurt the masses instead of the bottom line taking a hit
Pension, lol. What is this, the fifties?
When were you born, 1950? Who the fuck has a pension at this point?
I work IT on a union contract. I'm building a pension. My cousin retired at 48 from his union mechanic job and now makes 50% pay until he dies.
You should consider a union.
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Not really. The office market is not that huge and the vacancies overall are also not that bad. It's not like every single office is suddenly empty.
On the flip side: where these offices are located, housing is extremely expensive, so you could transform some offices to apartments, pivot projects currently in construction and maybe even demolish some older buildings.
These headlines are just a sign that the current management class is utterly incapable of reacting to anything but "line go up". They can't understand that they can't exploit their way out of this for once.
Turning office space into living space is often mentioned in discussions like this. It should be noted that converting the space is not as easy as it seems. In particular, moving the plumbing infrastructure to support individual bathrooms and kitchens is extremely challenging and it makes some projects impracticable.
Some.
We're not talking about total conversion of all office spaces. Even if just 5% of the vacant offices can be converted, that's already 5% less office space to worry about. Let the market decide.
It's also not even a valid talking point. Sure, SOME work will need to be done, but office buildings are built to be modular by design, and are much easier to retrofit than these bloviating idiots online love to yap about without evidence. Buildings have plumbing and electricity for a number of people that will be vastly different than if it was apartments. Think about a bathroom with 10 stalls and 4 sinks being reduced to one with a shower.
Yep, been saying this for years now, the vicious and irrational hatred against work from home employees is driven by two main factors:
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At a systemic level, despite work from home being obviously less costly in the long run than maintaining an office space, if work from home were allowed to proliferate it basically pop the commercial real estate bubble and then basically every corrupt mayor and idiots in upper management would be shown to be corrupt idiots.
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At a more personal level, upper and middle management people essentially get their kicks from seeing busy little worker bees near them, and they would personally have existential crisis when they realize that 90% of what they do is negging and then ommitting or misrepresenting that in actual meetings. Actual meetings which can easily take place in zoom, or often replaced with just an email.
Another part of #2 is they can no longer be toxic and verbally abusive, like they could in person. Anything virtual might be recorded and every email is a record.
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And you can’t sleep with employees who work from home.
I count my wife as my secretary every now and then, does that count? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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If only there was some solution to unused corporate office space and the housing crisis that has tents in every city?!?
Oh well. Better give the bank a bailout and stop thinking about it.
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That doesn't make sense. The companies that want people to come back to the office are the ones paying rent. That rent doesn't get better or worse if people come back to the office.
These companies tend to own or have long term leases, so either they are stuck paying rent and have to justify the expense or they own an asset that is depreciating in value and they could stop that from happening by spending no money to force their employees back into the office. You have to think about the big money, too. Real estate is a cornerstone asset for big money, many banks and real estate empires hold these enormous office buildings and society trending towards WFH means those buildings are rapidly losing their value.
Justifying the rental expense doesn't really make sense, because they end up paying more in utilities in addition to the rent. If you're still on the hook for a lease and have most employees WFH, just downsize when the lease ends or move everything remote if possible.
Seems like banks are worried about the loan holders defaulting and are pushing companies to bring employees back to bring up demand for commercial real estate?
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Yes, thank you! I hate this constant narrative that back-to-office is always tied to commercial real-estate investments, or that there's some magical tax incentive.
Usually what you have is: bank lends money to a commercial real estate company that owns the building. Commercial real estate company leases out office space to one or many companies. When those companies reduce or terminate their leases, the commercial real estate company struggles to pay their mortgage and defaults. Commercial real estate loses. Bank loses. And if commercial real estate had pooled investments to fund the building (along with bank loan), then those investors lose as well.
There are some large companies that own their own buildings, but that's more of an exception.
But those rent paying companies have very wealthy boards who are invested in commercial real estate.
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Oh won't somebody think of the shareholders.
Oh wait, I'm doing it right now. Mua ha ha ha ha ha ha!
It's sad that problems for banks are never problems only for banks. They always turn into problems for everybody else
I live in New York. The Wall Street area has been turning older buildings into living spaces for a while. One old office building became an NYU dorm, and the Woolworth Building [once the tallest in the world] is now luxury condos.
This is simply sunk cost fallacy. Companies signed leases. Now they regret it but can't back out so they've got to try to pretend it's worth it even if it costs their employees money out of pocket.
It's not really about owners it's more about leases and the company leasing the property "not getting their money's worth"
Often they have signed leases with themselves. With original owners, holding companies etc.
This is a way of extracting value from a corporation without paying it as a dividend or salary. Dividends go to all shareholders. Lease payments go to one specific one.
So obviously if there's no reason to pay these leases anymore, somebody powerful is going to be very upset.
I had to start going back to the office today. I'll eventually split time between two buildings, but my main office is practically empty. Been here 3 days in a row, and I'm the only one in my area that stayed the entire day. The first day 4 of 5 other people left at lunch. The last person left about 4:15pm.
Yestersay I was by myself until about 10am and that person left at 4. I'm here by myself today and I don't suspect anyone will show up late.
On the other side of the floor where the breakroom is, there's maybe been 7 people total across the 3 days I've been here lol.
Yeah it's like that now. People come in late and leave early. I do that too since it's fine. Only one office day is required and I make sure to come in late and leave early to beat traffic. Everyone does. :)
I use it as a day of socializing with the team. Just talking. Not much work.
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lol I wrote this over a year ago
Meanwhile my company wants to double or even triple the amount of office space we lease in the next 2-3 years, but building management is quoting us prices that are even slightly higher than they were in 2020.
Prices only go up. If a price is allowed to fall then the gravy train stops and the owner class gets really salty.
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So more or less, since many businesses are only keeping their offices because they have multi-year leases preventing them from simply packing up and going fully remote or downsizing to a smaller office, we can expect occupancy rates to continue falling and slow-burn exacerbating the commercial real estate crisis. And really, the problem here is just that banks are overinvested in commercial real estate, not knowing that a pandemic would alter work patterns in a lasting way. So again, we're all in for a fun ride on the roller coaster that is capitalism, literally because of problems caused by real estate speculation.
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What's that you say? Rezone these as residential and make more housing you say?
Fwiw, turning most of these buildings into livable spaces is a lot harder and more expensive than you'd expect. For many of them, it would actually be cheaper to just raze it and create a new residential building, even if it maintains the same outer dimensions.
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I just hope something can be done with the empty structures. Turning them into housing is easier said than done for many buildings.
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