Converting office space to housing

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/cities-reviving-downtowns-by-converting-offices-to-housing/ar-AA1afb9y?OCID=ansmsnnews11

A total game changer. If we can wrest housing from the investment people, even better!

@goldfish21: Do you think Vancouver will consider this?

Silicon Valley needs this. I don't live there, but I had to swing through there for job interviews and there are places that have been abandoned since before the Pandemic emptied out office parks. Parts of it look like the Rust Belt.

Calgary is doing it so there was a recent news article saying Vancouver has no plans to do it as they want to keep downtown office space and expand commercial tenants here. We have vacant office space, but not nearly as much as Calgary that was a one industry town so when the oil industry took a dump a bunch of buildings emptied out. Vancouver claims they need the office space available blah blah blah. Plus most politicians are bought & paid for by property developers, so there's little chance any of them are going to do much of anything to make more units of housing available at prices working people can afford when greedy developers are trying to make sure they maximize profits.

When I lived in Perth, Western Australia, they converted all the old woolstores on the harbour boardwalk into loft apartment housing.

The Australian real estate market has been waiting to crash for several decades now. And yet...prices just seem to go astronomical regardless of how much inner city businesses/land is recouped for apartment living or gentrified housing.

There are businesses in Melbourne that have left buildings empty but demand for commercial real estate > domestic real estate market for the moment

I only know a little about the Canadian economy, but someone once said that for some reason Vancouver B.C. was pretty much the only Canadian city that decided to concentrate economic disadvantage c. 1990s. As for the Australian real estate market market, I know even less, but Australian Economist Steve Keen has explained the economic policies he thinks have kept the real estate market there higher than not; basically 2008 did not not happen there, but he thinks there will be a reckoning.

Vancouver invited the world to Expo 86 - that was the start.. and then to the 2010 Winter Olympics, which was a giant real estate promotion to wealthy Chinese people. Our Provincial govt at the time took flights over to China to go on real estate promotional tours. They opened up a bunch of new casinos and handed out instructions to buyers on how to transfer their money into Canada via accounts at govt casinos. Etc etc Billions of dollars flowed. Add in cheap interest rates and FOMO from locals in bidding wars and now it’s over a Million dollars for a condo and multi Millions for houses.. in a place with an average income of $58k and average household income in Vancouver of $82k gross.

Everything else here is hella expensive too. Food, gas, taxes etc. that’s why BC stands for “Bring Cash.”

This sounds familiar, Looks like our developers were reading from the same book on short term real estate projects with wealthy Chinese businessmen.

Our federal government helped this along with lenient business visas and accommodating landlord small business rules for Chinese investors who basically rely on Chinese students and Chinese migrants while obtaining benefit from real estate growth, pocketing healthy sums which they re-invest back in China.

Is the poverty in most Canadian cities spread out across their geography like I've heard? My Dad is from a former manufacturing city in MI, U.S. and the disadvantaged parts of town were in the North (before jobs left and the whole place became poor); N.W. for the whites and N. Central for all the other poor folks. Also cool to see a Canadian say "hella," people in my corner of N. America claim to have invented it.

Depends on how you define poverty. There are poor people in many areas of the city and suburbs. There are also extremely rich neighbourhoods with no serious poverty. There are tons of underprivileged kids being raised in suburb cities, going to school without breakfast or lunch etc.. but there is only one 6 block area of Vancouver that is a true ghetto area full of thousands upon thousands of people experiencing extreme poverty, homelessness, drug addiction & mental illness. It's Canada's poorest postal code (or was at one time, probably still is) - meanwhile Vancouver is Also home to Canada's wealthiest postal code a 25 minute or so drive away. Much like Most developed cities in the world, the cities with the highest number of Millionaires also tend to have the highest rates of poverty.

Others will consider themselves amongst the working poor even if they have a Lot compared to the poorest people, and they're not wrong.. people work a Lot, earn what's supposed to be a good local income, and have difficulty paying for rent/food/transportation etc and keeping their kids clothed & fed. Families earn the kind of money I do for just myself, and pay higher rent, so, there are plenty of people earning above average incomes who are still going deeper into debt every month simply to pay the bills. Yet their lifestyle of having a roof over their head, clothing, cars to drive, food/medicine etc might not meet the criteria of poverty to some - again, depends how you define poverty.

I can understand why so many offices now are vacant in the USA. Not sure what is happening in UK cities, but loads of churches and smaller retail premesis (Shops) are becoming converted into house that one has to ask where all the people are coming from to live in them

There's some retail economics guy they call the wizard or something like that that I recall reading about. He figures the USA has dramatically overbuilt retail space and it will be converted to housing or offices. Same in Canada, but on a smaller scale. This is as shopping moves more and more online.

The people are either unhoused or underhoused - camping/cars or cramming families into small spaces. There are thousands upon thousands here, but farther down the West Coast in California there are homeless camps with like 60,000 people. Most of continent's homeless population move West to be able to survive the Winter.