I think they’re afraid of over reach. A lot of them would love the services he’s building!
Wow, he’s a magician. He can create something out of nothing. I don’t think he’s heard of secondary consequences !
The perfect reaction gif does not exi—
It’s so perfect I have to exercise restraint not to over use it, but he keeps winning and fascists keep whining…
What are they, specifically, in this case?
I’d bet the consequences is more black people having better lives, which somehow is a bad thing to that commenter.
Centrist democrats will shit on anything that helps poor people.
Yeah!
The only ones who can create something out of nothing are those magical job creators who keep cutting jobs.
I don’t think that you are smart enough to know what the secondary consequences would be without being told by Joe Rogan first
Why do dude’s lips look like he could sail away if he caught a decent breeze with them?
Someone should either slap you or kiss you for that username, both concurrently even.
I will accept said actions with honor.
at no cost to the city
Converting office space into apartments has a cost, it will be easily recouped but there is a cost.
Seems like a good idea though.
to the city
Can you just get the win? It is healthy to be skeptic but in the context of how shit everything else is, what’s the point of stating the obvious?
It’s wise to look for the potential ‘catch’, and the story provides it if you look, though the headline itself makes it pretty obvious by stating there will be 3,000 unaffordable residences.
In this case, the ‘catch’ still seems pretty solid. Sure a real estate company gets to gouge 3,000 units, but 1,000 units may well be worth that. But it does mean continued vigilance, to make sure the real estate company doesn’t somehow screw up stewardship of those 1,000 affordable units.
This is the haternet. The only reason people come online is to nitpick and naysay others.
3/4 of the apartments will be market rate, I bet it’s paid off in the first year when you look at market rate there.
Where I live they are trying to do the same. Sadly the shape of the building do not work well for housing. There’s more inside dark areas than window accessible areas. The proposal was to make a “community area” towards the centre of the building which is a terrible idea. The alternative is converting the inner area to apartments without any sunlight, which isn’t going to work even if it’s legal. The building sits empty because nobody can provide a good idea how to use it.
Vacant buildings have a cost too. A vacant high rise building that gets repossessed becomes a massive cost to the city.
Source please if you have one, I’d love to read about what those costs are if they’re real
The costs are real of course, but seemingly handled by a private company that was willing to pay for the project.
Which means the cost to the city was - everyone all together now:
The point is that the original commenter accurately noted that there are costs, but this particular little screenshot does nothing to explain the nuance.
So you have to acknowledge the costs and how they were actually handled, instead of just 'I need sources for the very obvious reality that renovating a building isn’t “free”.
“No cost to the city” is accurate, but it’s completely reasonable to fixate on how ‘no cost’ doesn’t make sense and not think hard enough on the ‘to the city’ part of it and ask for some explanation/discussion of that nuance.
Sinks and showers and walls do not install themselves? What kind of a source are you looking for here?
Just because there is A cost, doesn’t mean it cost the city anything. The original comment sounds like an assumption, and I’d like to validate it
Having trouble finding any real info on this, but it appears that the city isn’t actually performing the work, just changing rules and providing incentives to do the conversion.
So the “no cost” is really just that the city isn’t paying for it.
Seems like the setup is that the developer gets paid back via the market rate housing revenue, while the city gets a guarantee a minimum number of the new residences are rent controlled. So the developer self funds (or take loans) to start the project, it seems. And the city is still the landowner as far as I can tell, so the developer pays the city a share, which is how the city funds getting new office buildings for agencies to replace these.
I had to dig into what they mean by cross-subsidy to figure that out
So do they sell off sections of the building to developers, who do the work and then sell units back to owners at a price cap?
They rent a building to a property-developer/manager (eg Hines, Douglas Elliman, etc) that converts to residential and rents apt units to individuals, with a guaranteed portion of them affordable and rent stabilized.
It’s like if the city had a fleet of commercial vans they let a local taxi cab company lease at a submarket rate and convert to taxis. In exchange for the deal on the fleet, the taxi company sets aside a certain number of cabs dedicated to shuttling New Yorkers whose disabilities make public transit hard to use.
This property development business model is common, as is the affordable housing stock deal developers make with the city for things like tax breaks. What’s unique here is that the mayor’s office addressed the problem of perpetually lagging housing stock creation and skipped past years of slow property development and construction by offering a large building in the city that’s already built and ready to convert to residential. The city will then use the lease revenue to construct a new office. In the meantime, New Yorkers have more places to live.
It appears funding is coming from private sources and upkeep labor is being organized by the 32BJ Union, a massive local union that specializes in affordable housing that’s populated with people who work and specialize in “cleaners, property maintenance workers, doormen, security officers, airport workers, window cleaners, building engineers, school and food service workers, factory workers, etc”.
The conversion costs and labor appear to be funded and plan to be performed by GFP Real Estate and city partners, no doubt in exchange for good favor for future permit approvals and project integration by the Mayor’s administration.
Pretty smart if you ask me.
A lot of commercial real estate has gone unoccupied since COVID and the explosion of remote work. I see for lease signs all over downtown in my city.
So it doesn’t necesarily have a cost and could in fact be revenue positive to convert to residences.
- They’re not converting office space. They’re demolishing and rebuilding.
- There’s no cost to the city because they’re selling the building to a private developer on the condition they use the site for housing.
Civilization is expensive and can only be paid for on the installment plan.
When you see what good your taxes can do, it makes you question why the rich don’t pay their fair share. They do not like this.
Next, convert Trump Tower into affordable housing.
Nah, convert it to a pile of ash.
Shit no. That would be like living in Mordor. No, to hallow that place turn it into the Trump library with every floor an exhibition of the lies, stupidity, evil and crimes he committed, with the penthouse dedicated to the Epstein Files.
I was gonna say to just line every wall on every floor with copies of the unredacted files. Name it the Trump Epstein Corruption Library
And Trump into compost for affordable food?
That would turn any food grown with it into poison, tho?
[Deleted Duplicate]
Corollary: where did those tax dollars go previously?
Politician pockets via dark money and obfuscation, as is always has. The reason most people hate taxes is they go right into corrupt pockets. I wouldnt mind taxes if they actually did shit like this.
It’s why the corporate neo-libs hate him too. They truly are in the business of managing decline instead of doing their fucking jobs.
Is there even such a thing as a non-corporate neolib?
I think there kinda sorta used to be, in 2026? Naw not really.
They’d rather support a sexual predator that they said should resign from being Governor a few years earlier.
Office buildings are generally unfit for apartment conversions since they have so much interior space that isn’t really appropriate to use as homes - there’s usually a requirement that you get an actual window in your apartment, something I don’t think is particularly unreasonable.
A great podcast episode on the topic: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/551-office-space/
Is there a written version of this podcast, all this article says is there are structural and governmental problems, ending with if we want more have the government doing it, which is what they did.
There’s a transcript here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/551-office-space/transcript/
But really, I recommend you give it a listen.
My conclusion from it was that, sad as it may perhaps be, it’s probably better if we replace these buildings with actual purpose-built apartment buildings. The juice is not really worth the squeeze for these retrofits, in most cases.
Around here the commercial buildings are insulated very differently from the residential. I don’t know the specifics, just that commercial has worse insulation (per my insulation guy)
It’s more costly than doing cookie cutter patterns that have been used for residential buildings. It’s way cheaper than demo and rebuild though.
They’re not converting the building. They’re tearing it down and building new ones.
That’s a different story then. I could only really go off of the fact that the image said “converting”.
Lies.
Office space is easily remodeled. Most high rise commercial buildings have windows. they are designed for it to be changed every few years.
Older buildings regularly get turned into housing and sell well exactly for their unique characteristics.
I lived in a converted building that had an enormous industrial crane structure inside of it. They had retrofitted a pool, hot tub, and basketball court on the roofs. It even had two stall parking.
They have windows, yeah. They also tend to have way more internal space than your average residential high-rise.
I’m all for reclaiming unused office space, but sometimes it’s just better to build a new building on the lot, that is fit for purpose.
More internal space means more or larger units. Or am I misunderstanding?
Usually it’s that the insulation sucks
Also, the plumbing isn’t suitable. Office buildings have all the lines routed to a few huge bathrooms per floor, plus maybe a standard break room that’s in the same place on every floor.
An apartment needs its own bathroom, its own kitchen, etc. So, instead of the pipes going to two areas on each floor, they now need to be re-routed to go to 50 small areas on each floor. So, the entire plumbing for the building needs to be redone.
Also, modern office buildings are very big, and there are a lot of cubicles / offices / open areas that are nowhere near a window. When the place doesn’t have many walls, maybe that’s not so bad, because you can still vaguely see a window off in the distance. But, when it’s an apartment building, you can’t now have an apartment that doesn’t have windows. So, the apartments have to end up being these narrow things with windows only on one side at the end.
Big windows, but only on one narrow bit of an apartment is bad for ventilation, and it also means the place gets really hot when the sun hits those windows. When the thing was an office building the entire floor was one “climate control area”, with a limited number of walls and lots of wide corridors. So, if it got hot on one side it would even out across the floor. That doesn’t work when that floor is subdivided into 50 individual apartments. So, now you need brand new solutions to the problems of ventilation and climate control.
It’s less work than building a whole new building from scratch, but there are a lot of trade-offs.
How does converting an office building have zero cost?
Following a competitive request for proposals process, the city selected GFP Real Estate to develop the site.
Note it said only 1,000 affordable residences, but 4,000 overall. A real estate company is happy to cover the cost and cede 1,000 units to affordable terms in exchange for 3,000 residences at market rate.
No cost to the city as explained in comments written long before yours in this thread
They rent them out, so likely had a contractor do the conversion and then woth the rental income cancels out the cost. “No cost” is also just what that post used, doubt official documents say no cost.
It seems like a significant cost is in reading the whole sentence.
No cost to the city. Sounds like some other entity foot the bill.
Converting the Oldest House into literal housing? Bold choice!
God, living there would suck. Somebody accidently turns harmonization device off and your hallway is now non-Euclidean shape.
Or take wrong turn when searching laundry room and you are now lost in interdimentional quarry.
Upvote for anything control❤️
<The nostalgia/pandering is very much appreciated/tolerated.>
I live in Harlem. He really has been great! He’s just a genuine and nice guy too!
Edit: word
Edit: word
You don’t have to add “word!” just because it’s Harlem
Church.
Word
It’s ok, we speak jive.
I hope Mamdani doesn’t get cynical about all of the roadblocks that will be put up against him. Keep the faith against those white old corpulent entrenched establishment types!
If he hasn’t gotten cynical at this point, he’ll be fine. It’s basically expected that he’s going to get roadblocks from the establishment and he has been so far, whining from the left is also fairly inevitable and it seems like he has a good enough support system and popularity that I’m not concerned about that.
BUT HOW ARE THE LANDLORDS (I am not one) GONNA AFFORD TO LIVE!!! THE POOOR LANDLORDS
BUT HOW ARE THE LANDLORDS (I am not one)
So many of these NYT / WaPo Op-Eds are written by Landlords. So many Twitter shitposts and Facebook hate threads are started by landlords. So much of the local news bullshit is financed by landlords.
The NYPost is landlord required reading.
Yes. The biggest advertisers for most city papers are real estate and the results as predictable as they are obvious.
its why most democrats are against him too.
Cause hes setting a dangerous precedent of an elected official serving people, not money.
My thought is that for many many years politicians didn’t really have to do anything to re-elected. And when they were asked to do something they would always say “we can’t afford that.” or they would write a bill that would promise “thing” will get funded 10 years from now. So these lifelong politicians have turned into lazy fucks just there for the money and are pissed at these younger officials that are actually doing the job they were elected to do.
I have to admit I had been lulled into a sense of nothing will change attitude and now that I see how wrong I was I’ve become quite pissed off.
Start rolling out guillotines and i bet they’d start finding ways to serve their electorate rather quickly.
That won’t be their first instinct. Their first instinct will be to kill anybody who seems at all threatening.
Slavoj Zizek calls the Democrats “capitalism with a kinder face - LGBT rights and so on and so on.”
That’s really it. They think the core economic system is working. They’re fine to greenlight social policies that don’t challenge it, especially if they think it will win them votes. And that’s all they are.
Slavoj Zizek calls the Democrats “capitalism with a kinder face - LGBT rights and so on and so on.”
Let’s not pretend they stand for the T in that acronym.
They stand for whatever gets them votes. Given the current cultural climate with the right actively controlling the media landscape and the left busy purity testing before they even consider voting, they would obviously consider taking a seat on the topic.
They stand for whatever gets them votes.
They stand for genocide and nothing else and do not care about votes.
Ah, you’re one of those persecution fetishists. Normally y’all are about Jesus.
Then you should have no problem identifying an issue that the centrist wing of the party has fought for harder than it fought for netanyahu’s campaign of genocide.
Literally anything lol wtf are you smoking?
