Transplanting a Seattleite

We had a Pandemic.

Many would argue we still have a pandemic, and I am not here to take a position. What I am here to do is to post links to current or recent articles about empty commercial towers (people still working from home) converting to residential (because need a bigger home, now that you are working in it).

I’ve looked at this several times (not necessarily posted about it), and the top issues seemed to be large floorplate issues, egress requirements, load requirements, plumbing and electrical requirements and zoning issues more generally. My sister called to chat about it, having heard about it twice on the radio, and with questions revolving around, well, if you had a sink and a toilet, could you share bathing/laundry and would that help. I said those were kinda far down the list of issues, but then looked to see what was going on in DC (nearest Metro to her), and discovered several projects in progress, and tax incentives from the city to encourage more.

Expect edits.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/12/15/dc-office-residential-conversions-downtown/

This is the most relevant one I’ve seen and I found it while on the phone.

“Nearly 2.5 million square feet of office space in downtown D.C. is already dedicated to residential conversion projects. But with more than 20 million square feet of vacant office space across the city — a record high — the District is actively encouraging more builders and developers to consider conversions through promises of property tax relief for new office-to-residential projects.”

The article contains some additional details about proposed tax incentives.

This is a Seattle Times version of a NYT article about Backlot making it easy for content creators to use vacant spaces around NYC to create content in:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/getting-creative-with-vacant-office-space-storage-gym-film-set/

That seems temporary at best. Altho, also, wow, that’s a sign of the times.

Hochul, Adams, DSol, Tighe and others agree: need to do something about NYC CBDs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-14/nyc-aims-to-cut-average-commute-times-to-30-minutes-as-part-of-revival-plan

This got picked up at a bunch of other news sites in short form, but the Bloomberg version (probably paywalled) is most detailed.

Finally, people are going, you know, they are not going back into the office. Better do something else with the space. There is a proposal for a new Office of the Public Realm (!!!) in NYC.

Next article after?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-13/new-york-goes-full-yimby-from-long-island-to-buffalo

YIMBY is Yes In My Back Yard

“Meanwhile, if Albany gets it right, the governor’s agenda is bound to fall like a hammer on jurisdictions that want neither apartment buildings nor tenant protections.”

Increasingly, we see people recognizing the lack of supply as a problem in providing affordable housing / dealing with homelessness, and the lack of supply goes straight to NIMBY. The fight begins!

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/21/business/boston-explores-converting-office-buildings-into-housing-challenges-abound/

Not a lot of options from the 1970s and 1980s for conversion in Boston, because Boston was sleepy for a really really really long time. But there are a few possibilities and they are being explored. Work from home space is a factor in making these bowling alley type units desirable.

“ Created in 2019 by an Interlocal Agreement between Seattle and King County, the Regional Homelessness Authority was supposed to take the reins on homelessness from cities around the county that often had varying approaches to homelessness. The authority is supposed to create a unified strategy implemented with united funding.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/north-king-county-cities-agree-to-fund-regional-homelessness-authority/

But most of the funding so far has been coming from Seattle, with other King County cities reluctant to turn money over to the authority and still wanting to regulate how homelessness programs operate. No surprises here. According to the article, there has been no recent funding at all for homelessness from Lake Forest Park. But for the other cities in the group, existing programs are transferred from some North King County cities to the Authority. The cities can pull back out in 2024 if they don’t like how things go. For this part of the world, regional coordination is often how big changes get their start. OTOH, previous regional coordination is how they really slowed down building new housing of all kinds in the first place, so one really does not know what to think yet. I don’t, anyway.

It’s all very discouraging. The cities are concerned about not wanting money from the Authority to go to homelessness efforts in Seattle — while most of the funding for the Authority comes from Seattle. I mean, I do _understand_ the long history of parasitism of suburbs on cities, but this is a stark reminder of it. Obviously, people go back and forth across the boundaries of these cities and Seattle every day, including homeless people.

Certainly, this is _less_ inspiring than what has recently happened in LA.

But there is some home here. Shoreline Mayor Scully “said his faith in the authority has grown as it has touted recent successes — bringing hundreds of people indoors from large, long-standing encampments and helping more than 1,200 people utilize federal housing vouchers to find permanent housing.”

Coverage in Orlando Sentinel about PadSplit, which has been around since 2017, but I failed to notice.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/real-estate/os-bz-padsplit-orlando-affordable-housing-20220621-m7ydx2klqffu5ipoiu4w53lffm-story.html

They connect low-income renters with rooms, rather than apartment, and they work to convince real estate investors to rent rooms, rather than flipping. They also only operate in places where they have a plausible argument they are compliant with local zoning, and they also work with communities to adjust zoning so that they can operate there.

Admirable! Another version of the return of the boarding house.

https://www.padsplit.com/

Their website indicates that they may check your credit score but do not have a minimum credit score to participate. They say they will report your rent payments, and that 95% of the people staying in PadSplit report and improvement in their credit scores as a result (this is a way _out_ of the hole of low credit score, where no one will let you do anything, so you cannot show that you are making payments on time).

I ran across a reference to this in a Medium essay about cohousing experiments (Common, WeLive, etc.) in the Bay Area, NY, etc. It sounded _exactly_ like the kind of thing I like, so when Amazon had it used for $70 and up, and no ebook version, I requested it from my local library system. It turns out you can just go read it over at google books, so if your library doesn’t have it, you don’t have to miss out (and the google books version is a facsimile, so the pictures are in decent shape).

https://books.google.com/books/about/Living_Downtown.html

Since the book dates from the late 1990s, gentrification was definitely in progress at the time of writing, but was nothing at all like what it is currently. Groth is looking at the history of the built city from the perspective of the SRO crisis: property owners of old-skool cheap housing no longer wanted to continue to run their properties. They wanted to tear them down and replace them with much more valuable, more modern buildings. People with young children were still moving out of the cities for suburban schools, but that trend was tapering off as young people who were starting families didn’t want to move out of cities when they had kids and were figuring out ways to make that happen.

Groth uses census and property records to make up for the absence of most of residential hotel history in more standard works on the history of the urban built environment. And he does a really great job of explaining _why_ the reformers and bureaucrats responsible for the standard works on housing in cities rendered residential hotels so completely invisible (even the expensive ones). It’s a fascinating look into how late 19th / early 20th century Republican reformers thought about families and housing — and how relentlessly they ignored anyone who was not within the family structure in either sense. Erasure: it’s a real thing.

More than one commentator has remarked that we are recreating “The Gilded Age” or some other historical time period which overlaps with this books time frame (1880-1930 in the United States, primarily focused on SF). I spent a lot of the time I was reading this book trying to figure out what a “decent” minimum standard would be today. I also buggged all my regular conversational partners for their perspectives. We all landed (the author, my sister, various friends) in roughly the same space: en suite toilet stall, a sink NOT in the same space as the toilet, so it can double up with the mini fridge / microwave. None of us sees anything wrong with people eating most of their meals out of their “home”, nor do we have _any_ problem with the idea of sending the laundry out, etc. To be honest, I spent a chunk of time thinking about palace hotels and wishing they existed _now_ so I could move my family into one (until the money ran out!) and never have to do any housework again — and not have to do any of the management of the people doing the cooking and cleaning, either. A life spend tipping just as one would do on vacation would definitely be a weird life; I don’t see anything morally wrong with it. There, at least, the reformers and I part ways vigorously. OTOH, income inequality. Hard to know what the right thing to do is.

If you read articles about Apodments or NYC or SF experiments with microhousing, or you read about furnished rooms with shared kitchens and lease lengths as short as a month and scratch your head and wonder, what would that be like? That sounds odd! Well, this book will recalibrate your perspective. NOT having this as an option is probably even more odd.

ETA: Late in the book, he describes things like The Baltic Inn in San Diego as new-built rooming houses. It has since been closed, renovated, and re-opened as a hotel more in the style we are accustomed to (for travelers).

#22

Technically, 21 and 22 were read in the other order, but reviewed in this order. Whatever.

I recently read that in addition to “regular” housing (apartments, condos, single family homes) being used as by-the-night or by-the-short-period-of-time housing (a la hotels, B&Bs, hostels, etc.) through services such as Air B&B, VRBO / HomeAway, etc., suites / long term stay hotels in areas of certain very busy cities are being used as corporate housing with most of the units being used by people staying for a summer (interns, for example) — to the point that it becomes difficult to get a room for by-the-night at that hotel, and if you do, you can’t make use of any of the benefits of staying in a hotel (something wrong with your room? We’ll switch you to another. Rollaway microwaves, fridges, etc.). There are also instances of things like the Travelodge on 8th becoming a dorm for a college, then being purchased by Amazon and used by Mary’s Place as a family shelter.

While R. likes to mention that he has stayed in corporate housing on the east side when working at DECwest (condos rented by DEC and then supplied to traveling employees who would be staying for several days or more), that is really an example of just how poor the supply of hotels was back in the 1990s on the east side — and how rare facilities like Residence Inn, Homewood Suites, etc. with full cooking options were back then _everywhere_. Because the market wasn’t supplying it, the corporation cobbled together a solution, and housing (at least condos) as a market on the east side back then wasn’t too tight to make it work out.

R. also likes to mention that a HoJo’s and later a Hyatt were used for years (maybe decades) as dorms in Boston / Cambridge before reverting the hotels they were originally intended as. I would argue that was a straightforward case of overbuilding hotels and underbuilding dorms.

There is always some flexibility across the housing spectrum. Mansions on Cap Hill converted to triplexes (or more units), then back converted to mansions. Bungalows turned into professional offices (law, medical / dental). Restaurants popping up in absolutely anything, but really frequently in housing. The two major causes are way too much building space (that leads to combining units, and marginal uses getting really nice digs), way too little building space (that leads to splitting units, and marginal uses being unable to get any space at all), and incorrect mix. I’m puzzled by the idea that one could simultaneously see conversion of by-the-year leased / purchased housing to by-the-night(s) housing AND by-the-night(s) housing converted to by-the-large-fraction-of-a-year housing. Seattle has seen a ton of conversions from apartments to condos when condos were in demand and apartments were on the way out, and a ton of conversions from condos to apartments when the financial crisis hit. What you don’t see is both directions at the same time.

I’m _assuming_ that what is going on is convergence of pricing across markets that have historically maintained separate pricing. Here’s the short form of my theory: hotels in Seattle post crisis focused on raising their RevPAR, and they got really good at that for a variety of reasons. Regulators helped out by making it hard to build more hotels. The economy helped out by creating lots of reasons for people to travel to Seattle. This made it actually tempting for people to start mooching some of that cash by renting out space in housing. AirB&B made that easy. The safety valve provided by AirB&B and similar meant that RevPAR quit going up, so it was hard for hotel builders to justify building more hotels either on an investment basis OR to regulators who have their own reasons for not wanting overbuilding in hotels. The income to landlords via AirB&B became steady enough and high enough to meaningfully exceed renting by-the-month / by the year, and created pressure on that market, again, aided by lots and lots of competition to lease those units for any length of time and again, regulators trying to slow everything down, either to please their constituents who were already unhappy about traffic / influx of new people or because of concerns about what happens in the next bust if overbuilding happens (something Seattle regulators NEVER forget).

Hotels and leased housing are thus essentially — in certain parts of Seattle anyway — acting as a unified market, with the rate set by the _hotel_ rate (ETA: RevPAR, not rack rate. Not discounted rate. RevPAR.). Normally, in this sort of situation, renting would be so expensive that buying would make sense. However, regulatory limits and geographical limits on building new housing for purchase have combined to keep _that_ housing (for purchase housing) escalating more or less just ahead of all rent increases.

I know everyone in Seattle is pretty happy that enough apartment buildings have come online that rental increases have slowed. But things are not going to be recognizably like Elsewhere until there is enough slack in the hotel supply to drop RevPAR. That’s what I’m predicting, anyway. It might never happen — Seattle could just basically act like NYC and other places where finding an affordable hotel room is basically impossible, for the indefinite future.

This could turn into a link fu post, if I find anything interesting. Feel free to send me things, or include them in the comments. I’m not looking for screeds and I’ll delete anything that is Being Mean to Homeless People, or just plain mean.

ETA: Tech Crunch article about the startup space around shared housing / co living:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/19/shared-housing-startups-are-taking-off/

Really long New Yorker piece mostly about Common, haven’t finished reading it yet:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/the-rise-of-the-co-living-startup