Idea for fixing the housing shortage

[JeffDowntown]

Preaching to the choir, but my statement regards the view held among some housing activists that SFH should be eliminated/never built. Other form factors also need to be legal as of right, I would never argue otherwise.

Also, you can accomplish a lot of the goals in suburban settings with well designed cluster housing. Good design get density with a lot of the feel of a SFH. It is a great baby step for communities that are all single family R1.

 

[jbray]

Preaching to the choir, but my statement regards the view held among some housing activists that SFH should be eliminated/never built. Other form factors also need to be legal as of right, I would never argue otherwise.

I personally don't take that hardline stance, but I fully understand it. The egalitarian utopia of people having their own personal space is offset when they clear cut natural vegetation and replace it with monocultures (usually eliminating most/all tree cover and/or replacing it with non-native species), smooth away terrain variation that used to collect water in a way that prevented mass flooding and loss of water supply to the rivers then oceans in a way that exacerbates drought conditions, and is then build in a style that requires personal automobile use to access basic amenities like food and employment which requires more destruction of natural resources in order to provide road and parking access.

The data here is clear: the suburban experiment is ecologically unsustainable and we continue it at our collective peril. That isn't a "doomer" stance given that we have the means and ability to change our habits, but it is necesarry to face that reality in order to find solutions instead of disengaging because the idea is so opposed to our current and previous course of action. I support limited detached SFH as a necessary political evil in order to help today's society feel better about transitioning away from it in the future (better to have some support than people actively harming solutions because they feel it takes too much from them). In actuallity, we should be supporting the exodus of populations from unproductive spaces into density in the hopes that those unproductive spaces will be returned to the (common, not private) wild. This is, of course, a difficult idea to wrap one's head around given that it's all the majority of us have ever known and is held as a measure of success versus failure; how could it be wrong to want or to have what everybody else has? Why should I sacrifice to my detriment when I know other's will not?

None of my post above even speaks to the emerging data on how suburban sprawl has resulted in the failure of municipalities to financially support themselves (even without Prop 2.5) as they rely on new SFH developments that cannot fund their own eventual infrastructure needs (through property taxes and amenity bills) to fund repairs of older ones that are already falling apart. What happens in 20-30 years when both the "new" and "old" developments need capital repairs? Look at the complaints of the MBTA zoning laws where the main concern from residents is about how will they be able to fund growth in school populations when their current schools are already on track to be overcrowded (per teacher/para/specialist and even in physical space for some) and are also in need of rebuilds they cannot afford at present? How can they fund roads, parking, and water connections to dense buildings? How will they embrace a population boom when many of them are struggling for water under the strain of perpetual droughts? Many of them are pure NIMBYs, but those arguments have some legitimency when those municipalities do already require state or federal subsidies from other financially productive municipalties to continue their current existance let alone a transition to a more financially productive state.

 

[jbray]

Also, you can accomplish a lot of the goals in suburban settings with well designed cluster housing. Good design get density with a lot of the feel of a SFH. It is a great baby step for communities that are all single family R1.

This will be the way out. In the UK they are moving from Townhouses and semi-detached housing (duplexes, triple-deckers, and quadplexes) into higher density as their space requires and we are moving toward more townhouses and semi-detached housing as our space requires. The question is whether the Boston-burbs will actually allow spaces near their historic center(s) to be the recipient of the redevelopment (including mixed-use spaces) with a tie-in to the public transit network that may or may not already exist (have existed).

 

[jklo]

5 over 1's are noisy as hell, though.

And that's mostly what's being built. Seaport might be the one exception.

If you're building one in the burbs, you're basically asking people to pay SFH prices for such a unit. Even with the SFH frothiness.

 

[stick n move]

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“Three years since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, New York City has defied the most dire predictions of urban decline, yet today the city faces new challenges. As the city continues to struggle with an acute housing shortage, 560,000 new residential units will need to be created by 2030 to accommodate a growing population and to make up for a shortfall of construction. At the same time, many commercial real estate owners are saddled with a surplus of vacant office space, as the rise of remote work has led companies to reduce their physical footprints. The effects are especially pronounced for older buildings, which lack up-to-date amenities or may require extensive renovations to meet current market demands.

The climate crisis adds another layer to New York’s built environment conundrum. In a city where living space is at a premium, we cannot afford to let any built space go unoccupied. Neither can we afford to squander the carbon that has been expended in building millions of square feet of now-underused office space.

City leaders have recommended the conversion of underused office spaces to much-needed housing, a concept that has been slow to gather steam for a variety of economic, pragmatic, policy, and design reasons. 1633 Broadway, an aging Midtown office tower completed in 1971, is emblematic of the challenges and opportunities for office-to-residential conversion. Our design proposes a new model for residential development in New York—an innovative approach to adaptive reuse that will help to build a more vibrant, equitable, and sustainable city….”

https://www.som.com/research/office...94981&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio

 

[stefal]

Hope they consulted a developer or cost engineer to pen the math out on that - it's as much of a finance problem as it is a design and construction problem.

 

[HenryAlan]

It looks good, but it also looks like a really expensive modification. I would definitely be interested to look at the financial modelling.

 

[JeffDowntown]

The conversions they have been doing in lower Manhattan have been getting, on average, $92,000 in subsidies per unit to make them work financially.

 

[bigpicture7]

Hope they consulted a developer or cost engineer to pen the math out on that - it's as much of a finance problem as it is a design and construction problem.

I've been thinking a lot about the math behind these types of mods lately. I feel too many of the articles I've seen have been hand-wavy and unpractically optimistic, and I consider myself to be a progress-oriented pragmatist at heart (yes such a thing exists)...

Anyway, my question to the architects here is: how much of what we're seeing is anchored in past mental models of what buildings should be, rather then paradigm-shifting creative approaches. Yes, I get that much of it is driven by building code...

BUT where I am going with this is, code nonetheless considered, are legacy aesthetic beliefs/preferences driving these mods to be way more expensive than they need to be? Imagine if SOM's design above, with all of the cutouts, left all the original steel framework in place in the cutout areas, yet moved just the walls inboard? You'd likely have to insulate the exposed steel skeleton, lest it be a heatsink sucking warm interior air out, but that's way cheaper (& environmentally friendly) than demolishing massive amounts of 60-stories worth of structural steel.

I can imagine the skyline dotted with several buildings with partially exposed skeletons - and us getting used to that. What am I missing?

 

[Bananarama]

BUT where I am going with this is, code nonetheless considered, are legacy aesthetic beliefs/preferences driving these mods to be way more expensive than they need to be? Imagine if SOM's design above, with all of the cutouts, left all the original steel framework in place in the cutout areas, yet moved just the walls inboard? You'd likely have to insulate the exposed steel skeleton, lest it be a heatsink sucking warm interior air out, but that's way cheaper (& environmentally friendly) than demolishing massive amounts of 60-stories worth of structural steel.

I can imagine the skyline dotted with several buildings with partially exposed skeletons - and us getting used to that. What am I missing?

Would probably end up being more expensive. Doing a selective demo like that would be logistically difficult (think of crane/machine access to areas with existing structure in the way). The number of custom façade fittings would balloon exponentially having to deal with sealing around those steel penetrations vs just a standardized clean face approach. Steel is one of the most recyclable materials in a building structure so the sustainability argument doesn't pan out.

 

[bigpicture7]

Would probably end up being more expensive. Doing a selective demo like that would be logistically difficult (think of crane/machine access to areas with existing structure in the way). The number of custom façade fittings would balloon exponentially having to deal with sealing around those steel penetrations vs just a standardized clean face approach. Steel is one of the most recyclable materials in a building structure so the sustainability argument doesn't pan out.

Thanks for these thoughts. I can definitely see a poor cost outcome if custom curtainwall modules are used around all the skeletal protrusions. But all of this is just a thought exercise in "what if we did things dramatically differently and allowed for nonstandard aesthetics." How costly would a build-in-place function-over-form wall be in these areas (i.e., allowing for some ugliness)? Or, establishing standard sized curtain wall modules that sit adjacent to big, thick, ugly hand-installed gasket or buffer to create simpler interfaces near each protruding beam?

It could well be that ideas like this won't work, but there is some truth in that a huge swath of the population would gladly trade off a slightly uglier facade for the opportunity for more plentiful and more affordable housing. How many of us seek out ugly but well-located housing that is "organically" ugly (e.g., the multiple triple decker apartments I lived in in my 20s and early 30s with hideous aging asphalt or vinyl siding - and if you asked me, would you be willing to pay higher rent for the same apartment with better siding, I would have said please no!).

 

[stefal]

I'd guess the cost-benefit analysis to keeping the steel vs removing it isn't that different. Demo costs aren't the big line item, from what I've learned. Your exterior shell, however, is a pretty big expenditure, so I'd think keeping it simple (less penetrations) would help you out on the balance sheet.

I'm not privy to all the details of office to resi conversions, but have learned a bit following some developer PMs on twitter, in no particular order:

• Plumbing and HVAC systems in offices work differently from residential units, and the structural systems "accommodate" them differently. When planning out your units, you need a lot of design coordination and contingency in your construction budget available when changes to come up. A project can get killed here during design, even after spending potentially several hundred thousand dollars on studying different configs for your plumbing and mechanical systems.
• Zoning "negotiations" are a big hurdle currently. It introduces time and a lot of risk on an already risky project.
• Facade replacements (typically a given, considering the difference between a typical residential window and an office window) are complex and require a lot of custom work/fitting. The bottom half of One Post Office square is a good example, and in that case, that was an office rehab, not a conversion. You might be able to add some newer elements to the existing facade to make it more appropriate for residential living and sustainable for operating costs, but also consider these facades are close enough to reaching the end of their service lives that you should probably be replacing them if you're pouring this much capital into the building.
• Including the standard market amenities (the marketing team for a developer will demand these) that new builds are including (pools, landscaped terraces, etc.) are difficult to carve space for in a standard office building layout
• Bonus: If you're dealing with an older office building (typically, those are the ones with good floorplates for converting, though the original example in this thread is strictly about using the non-optimal buildings, which there are more of), most of your units are going to be unique. You'll have more known and unknown design fees and construction costs.

 

[LexSEDotVille]

Built from the ground up, lower rise, and vastly different program, but...

Possible Pompidou Precedent?
(external MEP+)

 

[bigpicture7]

Built from the ground up, lower rise, and vastly different program, but...

Possible Pompidou Precedent?
(external MEP+)

Thank you for this. My esteemed architect co-forumers are probably 100% correct about all of their thoughtful answers, but what I am after in this (probably dead-end) thought exercise is: how can we do things dramatically differently to solve a problem that seems near-intractable with present ways of doing things.

Let phrase the prompt differently: construction is ridiculously expensive. More expensive in real terms than it ever has been in human existence. Much of this has good origins, such as environmental sustainability and code requirements for safety. But not all of it is pure. The construction and building materials lobbies want construction expensive, and some of building code is informed by these self-interests. A recent article in the NYTimes discusses the astounding effect of how construction has become excessively more inefficient (in real monetary terms) since the 1970s, an effect to the opposite of almost every other industry.

Sometimes industry insiders (even those with all good intentions) can lack empathy about the real "user need" when it comes to organically affordable housing (i.e., for those with not much money, but above qualifying for subsidized affordable housing). When I was in my late 20s, I remember touring cheap apartments with exposed plumbing (one place had a 4" drain pipe exposed in the living room), another had (seemingly safe, yet ugly) metal electrical conduit installed outboard the plaster so that new outlets could be added to a room that presumably didn't used to be a living room and probably had only one outlet in 1920 when it was built. Some of these bandages may have violated code. But one thing is for sure: I didn't mind any of them. I wanted a cheap, well-located apartment. So do millions of other people right now.

So my thought exercise question remains, how can we innovate to do things dramatically differently to dramatically reduce the cost of converting underutilized buildings to housing?

(P.S., that building you posted is ugly AF ; ) ).
(P.P.S, I still don't fully buy the building envelope stuff: build some CMU (concrete block) knee walls on top of the steel beams, back it with multiple layers of 2"-think polystyrene sheet insulation and use standard-sized windows everywhere)

 

[jklo]

Built from the ground up, lower rise, and vastly different program, but...

Possible Pompidou Precedent?
(external MEP+)
View attachment 37942

It looks like a Video Game level.

 

[Stlin]

Well, I recently read an article on this, and one of the ideas is apparently actually pretty simple - eliminate corridors, and thus the requirement for a second egress. I didn't really consciously realize this until I read the article, but in all the apartments I've been to overseas in both Europe and Asia, they're all directly connected to the stair/elevator area, minimizing "useless" floor plate area, which allows for smaller and cheaper multifamily construction. If you've ever lived in a triple decker, you're already familiar with the idea in principle - you go straight from stairwell to unit with no intervening corridor.

However, predicably the lack of a second fire egress has been controversial, but that can be solved - apparently Germany recognizes evacuation via fire department aerial apparatus as a secondary egress, and triple deckers are fine with a back stairwell - there's no reason that has to be limited to 3 stories as current code dictates.

There's some advocacy for this out in the Pacific Northwest, but nothing I've seen further east.

https://www.larchlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Eliason_CoV-Point-Access-Blocks-report_v1.2.pdf

 

[JeffDowntown]

Multi-family residential is usually cookie-cutter units. Those units or subsets of them should all be modular construction. Stop all the stupid, costly build on site practices. Build in factory, assemble on site.

 

[bigpicture7]

Well, I recently read an article on this, and one of the ideas is apparently actually pretty simple - eliminate corridors, and thus the requirement for a second egress. I didn't really consciously realize this until I read the article, but in all the apartments I've been to overseas in both Europe and Asia, they're all directly connected to the stair/elevator area, minimizing "useless" floor plate area, which allows for smaller and cheaper multifamily construction. If you've ever lived in a triple decker, you're already familiar with the idea in principle - you go straight from stairwell to unit with no intervening corridor.

However, predicably the lack of a second fire egress has been controversial, but that can be solved - apparently Germany recognizes evacuation via fire department aerial apparatus as a secondary egress, and triple deckers are fine with a back stairwell - there's no reason that has to be limited to 3 stories as current code dictates.

There's some advocacy for this out in the Pacific Northwest, but nothing I've seen further east.

https://www.larchlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Eliason_CoV-Point-Access-Blocks-report_v1.2.pdf

Approaches like this abound in greater Tokyo. In particular, exterior staircases are very common throughout the area. Even in some quite tall buildings (I am going by memory, but I seem to recall many 25+ story buildings with exterior staircases). Just a couple of quick examples it took seconds to find:

https://goo.gl/maps/9GBhahm7qVbVVusz5

https://goo.gl/maps/L5tJnbBU2UnfCC4WA

 

[Charlie_mta]

Approaches like this abound in greater Tokyo. In particular, exterior staircases are very common throughout the area. Even in some quite tall buildings (I am going by memory, but I seem to recall many 25+ story buildings with exterior staircases). Just a couple of quick examples it took seconds to find:

View attachment 37956
https://goo.gl/maps/9GBhahm7qVbVVusz5

View attachment 37959
https://goo.gl/maps/L5tJnbBU2UnfCC4WA

One issue with open exterior stairways in the US is security. Much more secure to have interior stairways requiring buzzer entry. Japan probably doesn't have the security risk that we have.

 

[BeyondRevenue]

Multi-family residential is usually cookie-cutter units. Those units or subsets of them should all be modular construction. Stop all the stupid, costly build on site practices. Build in factory, assemble on site.

From what I understand, getting a certificate of occupancy depends on at least 5 separate on-site building inspections (foundation, structural, electrical x2, plumbing, etc), during construction. Modular construction needs those same inspections but each cities codes would have to be changed to allow somebody else to sign off. Considering each of those inspectors has to be paid there has historically been resistance to modularity. As with anything that should happen, hire a lobbyi$t to get state level exemptions for modular design and inspections written into law.
Anyone closer to this fight, please chime in.