Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)

24:51So that's happening more and more. I see. So it's not that malls, because when you started to say that, I was like, well, when I picture like, you know, the King of Prussia Mall where I spent my youth in Pennsylvania, that also seems hard to convert into, like, I wouldn't want to live at the, I mean, I would have wanted to have lived at the GameStop. Now I would not want to live at the GameStop. But what you're saying is they're easier to tear down. Right. You typically don't convert the mall building to residential. You tear it down.

25:21Typically, you do not convert the mall building to residential. But sometimes you do. If you find yourself needing to restore your sense of wonder at the strangeness of this world, I suggest you Google apartment building inside mall. In downtown Providence, Rhode Island, a building called the Arcade. There's a video of this online. Inside, it looks like a normal shopping mall. Vaulted ceilings, two-story mezzanine. except on the top floor, the stores have been converted into apartments. This is my humble abode. So you can see it's pretty small, but it's really all you need. This medical student gives a tour of her place.

25:58It really is small. The kitchen has a tiny fridge, very few cabinets. It's like a kitchen you'd see in a boat, maybe, or in a European hostel. It's an efficiency kitchen, which doesn't have a stove. So I bought my own toaster oven, which works well. The people living in this mall, there's a person with a small business who makes soap. There's a graphic designer. What they have in common is that they are people who say they're comfortable making some compromises to save money. And then I have my closet, which has been a struggle. But I figured out if you could get slim hangers, that works out really well.

26:34It's a fascinating, adaptive way to live. It just takes a little getting used to. It's funny, you know, I was talking recently with a friend who worked at a, they work at a video game company in Washington State. And I like their video games, and I've tried to picture their offices before, and I always picture their offices in this very cool, high-tech way. And I was asking him about it, and he was like, no, we're in a mall. We're above a mall. And I'm like, we take an elevator down, and we go to the food court. And my head was like, oh, that's kind of ridiculous. And I feel kind of embarrassed to say, oh, kind of unglamorous or something.

27:08And hearing you describe it, I should be happy about that because what that probably represents is a city being versatile enough to adjust to how it's changed and to put the things that people need where they need them. I think what you just described, PJ, suggests how deeply embedded in our psyche this separation of development is. The idea that you might have an office above a mall with a food court. You know, a hundred years ago, having your office above a retail area in a downtown would have been considered very normal. And in other parts of the world, it's still considered very normal. And yet, we think it's really weird if it's in a suburban mall.

27:51But I think you're going to see that more and more. Bill Fulton says in the 1980s, there were around 3 ,000 malls in America. by the time the post-COVID shakeout is done, we'll have about 300, which gives us some more room for housing. Although honestly, we'll need even more than that. Probably a lot more. But in order to get a lot more housing, we will have to surmount our third obstacle. The third reason Julia cannot have what she wants, an office building turned into an apartment building. The obstacle at the heart of most things. People.

28:31That obstacle, after the break.

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31:57welcome back to the show okay um first things first very easy can you just introduce yourself and say what you do for a living sure my name is raissa de la rosa and i am the division director for economic development for the city of santa rosa

32:16After I spoke with Bill Fulton, I got in touch with the city of Santa Rosa. I was trying to understand how people can be an obstacle to changing cities. And I thought for that, I wanted to actually zoom in on the specific place where Julia lives. Raissa Della Rosa works in local government in Santa Rosa. She deals with people all day. She's got a bit of a Leslie Knope vibe. Somebody who believes in the civic process, who's very optimistic, who's happy in the weeds. She's worked for the city for 17 years now. Before that, she ran a performing arts theater. I think what makes me probably good at what I do is because I come from an arts background.

32:51I see things probably a little differently or see opportunity differently or have an understanding of something differently combined with my childhood love of bureaucracy. I've never heard of anyone saying that they have a childhood love of bureaucracy. This is, like, there's so much creativity in how you can get things done. Like, I don't know what this is, but when I was a kid, like, I would sit at my mom's typewriter and make up forms and then fill out forms. Seriously? I don't know why I liked it. I was like, okay, we're going to, like, efficiently do this. Ray's childhood love of bureaucracy is now an adulthood love of bureaucracy.

33:32And she said that our listener Julia's questions about turning offices into apartments, Raisa spends her days thinking about exactly those kinds of problems. She also drives around scoping out unused property that she would like to see converted. And she says there's actually been some moderate success. We have a ton of things that have been entitled in the downtown. In the downtown alone, in the building permit process, we have 870 permits. Developers have applied for something. We have 419 in construction, and we have 131 final. So we have a lot of units that are in the pipeline. It's a question of whether or not they can get to the end with their financing.

34:19Those 131 new housing units, that includes all new housing in downtown Santa Rosa since 2016. Obviously, a lot better than zero. But in a city of 180 ,000 people, clearly it's going to take a lot more than just converting vacant properties to move the needle. Raisa says the will to make a change is there from the city government, but it's very, very hard to get to the finish line. As an example, we have a mall in our downtown, and it's owned by Simon Properties, and it had a Sears in it. So we ran hard after that one to have it be transformed into housing on top grocery on the bottom. We're still trying to get them to do it.

35:03We've had fits and starts with it. And I drive by that every day and think, come on, man. But, you know, and then there was the pandemic and then finances ground to halt. And then there was the da-da-da-da. And then there was, you know, if it's not one thing, it's another, it feels like. Right. And it's like some things are just like cities are slow, real estate is slow, massive amounts of money, massive amounts of organization, massive amounts of people involved with opinions. I mean, in the end, what I've come to figure is we're just such a small piece of the pie of development. Often, Raisa says, the city runs into problems because of the landowners.

35:41It turns out there are a lot of reasons why someone with a vacant, unused building might not want to make it into something that someone like Julia might consider more useful. It could be the case that there's no incentive to lease a building. They purchase it. They owe no money on it. The taxes are very low. Or even if they're a new owner, it could be part of a portfolio where the loss on this one helps offset the gains on something else. So then it actually makes sense to not maybe lease it out. There could be any number of reasons why somebody who owns a property doesn't redevelop it. You know, developing housing is expensive.

36:19Getting financing for housing is expensive. You know, land property owners have a vested right into doing what they want to do with their property so long as it fits within the laws. So from the government's perspective, they're free to go if they wanted to convert it. So the problem in this case, the reason zoning is a little bit of a misnomer is it could suggest that the obstacle is coming from the government. And what you're saying is property owners have all kinds of incentives that can be surprising. you might have an instance where someone just doesn't mind holding on to an empty property that's not generating rent because they want the tax loss, because the conversion would be expensive, because they're thinking something else down the line.

36:59People kind of hold on to stuff more so than you would think. Yeah. The other thing is neighbors. Neighbors and NIMBYism tends to be the biggest obstacle. Sometimes neighbors, whether it be commercial residential have a very short-term view on impacts that can greatly benefit them down the road. Good evening, everybody. Public hearing number one. If you want to convince yourself that this problem is unfixable, if you want to feel complete and utter despair, the best thing you can do, of course, is go on the internet. I have watched clip after clip of those neighbors, the NIMBYs race is referring to, speaking out in neighborhood meetings all over the country, meetings where a combination of fear and, frankly, some real nuttiness reign supreme.

37:47And I just want to make sure that there will be no migrants, pedophiles, or criminals moving in because that's what I'm afraid of. I've been told. Here, an older woman in a floral print top is speaking out against a zoning change in her Long Island neighborhood that would allow basement apartments. Because obviously, a basement apartment would only serve the kinds of people who flee when confronted with natural light. I kind of heard that this is who's moving in, so I just want to be sure that we're not going to be moving in pedophiles and undesirables. That's what I've been told. I'm here for limited apartments, meaning that Huntington will not be saturated by accessory apartments.

38:33I really respect and value all of your passion. About 20 miles to the west, in the Bronx, this speaker, a woman with a mic, is trying to calm down an enormous NIMBY crowd. It's not working. She tries to remind people that this proposed new development will offer affordable housing with no cost to the taxpayer. This goes over about as well as if she told him that the government was going to make them eat burned hair sandwiches. I just want to reiterate that we're talking about providing affordable housing with no public subsidy. We don't need it! We don't need affordable housing! Like a lot of complicated problems that exist today, it's easy to just fixate on the part of the problem that makes you mad, on the arguments.

39:19It's easy to reduce everything to a fight. Some people make a lot of money doing this. Here's Tucker Carlson, back when he was still at Fox, reacting to proposed housing legislation from Joe Biden. He'd also like to eliminate, quote, exclusionary zoning and, quote, needless barriers to producing affordable housing. That means that your neighborhood may have to make way for multifamily dwellings. You don't want multifamily dwellings in your neighborhood? It doesn't matter because it's equity. Shut up, racist. And there's more where that came from. Joe Biden would like to spend... It can all be a bit disheartening.

39:52But when I talked to Bill Fulton, the zoning expert, about how you'd ever change the minds of diehard NIMBYs, He had an answer that was the most weird combination of hope and fatalism I think I've ever heard. And how do you convince the person, like, we've screwed up our housing market. Houses have become more and more expensive. Even people with means have over-leveraged themselves to buy those houses. And now they're a political constituency that they're like, yeah, yeah, this is messed up, but I don't want to be the person who has to not have an expensive house. How do you force the person with the mansion to turn it into a duplex?

40:30What do you do? Well, you can't. But I will say two things. There are two demographic realities here. One is that most of those people are older. And eventually, that constituency will begin to disappear. There's a huge generation gap between older homeowners, mostly white, who resist change. and then you've got basically everybody under the age of 40 struggling to buy a house. And that's where the YIMBY movement has come from, the Yes in My Backyard movement. There's a huge demographic reality. And so the political dynamic is changing, not because people are changing their mind, but because the demographic reality is changing.

41:16And that is what I think will prevail in the end. In case you missed that, when Bill is talking optimistically about the demographic reality changing, what he's saying is that of all the things that need to change to help with the housing crisis, one thing that will naturally change is that older people will die. Historically, one of the larger drivers of social change. Which is not to say hooray for the upcoming deaths of our parents and grandparents. It's bad when people die. And the people living in the houses have all sorts of reasons for wanting to live in the houses. It's not exclusively about the fear of some other coming to ruin the neighborhood.

41:57Sometimes it's as simple as, you grew up in a house with a yard and you liked it. Or you'd rather live next to an empty office building than a big new apartment building. These are preferences. There's nothing inherently wrong with them. The problem is just we're running out of space. Good evening, everyone. How's everyone doing? There's one clip that stood out to me in all the clips I saw, this meeting in Brooklyn, where a state senator, Andrew Gennardis, stands up and says, the problem with holding on to the way things are is that eventually we just lose the future. We need to build a lot of more housing wherever we can.

42:32We need to protect the housing we have. We need to update the housing we have. We've got to get the suburbs to do their fair share. This has got to be a comprehensive, we're all in this together approach. Because otherwise, young people are not going to live here anymore. Grandkids are not going to come back from schools, colleges, and want to live in their neighborhood anymore. Young families won't be able to live here anymore. It's already happening. For all this talk about people leaving New York City, oh, the rich are leaving New York because of the tax. You know who's leaving New York? People who can't afford to live here.

43:00Those are the people that are leaving New York. And if we don't find a way to give them a place to live, we're going to lose them forever. So with that, that's a lot to say. It's not a very dramatic clip, which is why I like it. Despite some evidence to the contrary, I think we usually tend to figure our problems out. And not in the big screaming places, but in meetings like this one, where bureaucrats try to hammer out solutions in uncomfortable chairs over bad coffee in meetings that go on too long. Bill Fulton, former and perhaps future bureaucrat, he says the solution to all this is actually a bunch of solutions.

43:37People in the housing debate tend to try to find a silver bullet or tend to think, oh, if only X happened, everything would be fine. Oh, if we just converted all these office buildings to apartments, everything would be fine. And I think the answer is we've been underproducing housing in the United States for 30 years. It's become very expensive in any place that is remotely desirable. it's probably a both and, and, and at this point. Over the next 10 or 15 years, we're going to have to do everything. It's not just converting office buildings. It's not just tearing down old malls and replacing it with housing.

44:12It's those things and more.

44:17So, to answer our listener, Julio's question, the reason we have not yet turned the office buildings into apartments is because it's hard and people don't like change. But the other part of the answer is that eventually, increasingly, it'll likely happen. The office buildings will become apartments. The single family homes will become apartments. The video game company is going to have to be in the mall, probably next to more apartments. We're going to have to let go of a lot of ideas that we got used to, which always seems hard until we do it.

44:56that's our show this week but stick around after the ads for search engines favorite thing from the internet this week

45:28Welcome back to the show. I am joining the studio by search engine producer Garrett Graham. Hello, PJ. Truly one of my favorite people. You have a recommendation. You have a pick from the internet. Yeah, it's not so much a recommendation as it is just my favorite thing from the internet this week. Which you haven't told me yet, but we both have been having this weird thing where it's Like, you're like, do you know what it is? I'm like, I have a feeling I might know what it is, but I'm not sure that I know what it is. I think you probably know what it is. You are definitely more online than I am.

45:55And so if I've seen it, it probably means that you've seen it. Is it the fake Euro song thing? It's not the fake Euro song thing. Oh, well, the fake Euro song thing is pretty good. What do you have? So my thing has to do with a Chinese zoo. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'll take it from the top. Yeah. So a few days ago, a video popped up on Weibo, which is basically like Chinese Twitter. And it showed a video of a bear at a Chinese zoo in Hangzhou. Yes. Have you seen the video? I've only seen a still from it. So I'm going to send you the video. Yeah. Let's just watch.

46:29Okay. Okay. Okay. So there's like captions that I can't understand. The bear is like standing on a rock on his hind legs. And he just, first of all, he's standing totally comfortably as a human in a bear suit would, but not as a bear normally would. But also there's a quality to the skin around his legs where it's like a little bit loose, but also his legs are very skinny. I'm assuming the bear is a boy. I have no way of knowing something about the architecture of my own brain in that assumption. But like the overall effect is just a person who bought a bear suit on the Internet that does not seem to work very well.

47:05So this gets posted on Weibo and immediately people are like, that doesn't look like a bear at all. Yeah. But the first theory is like, OK, it's not a bear. Maybe it's like another kind of animal. Maybe this is like a dog posing as a bear, which is only funny because like a decade ago, a different Chinese zoo got caught trying to pass off a dog as a lion. Wait, really? In one of their exhibits. Yeah, a Tibetan Mastiff, just like this big, furry, hairy dog. They had like, they sent off their lion for like whatever you send animals from zoos away for. And they replaced it with a dog. And people caught on and they were furious.

47:36So at first people on Weibo were like, okay, that's what's happening here. This is just like, this is a rare breed of dog that they're trying to pass off as a bear. Yeah. But then somebody posted something to the internet, which is what everybody should have said the first time they saw this video, which is, like, it doesn't look like a dog either. Like, this doesn't look like an animal at all. This looks like a human in a bear costume. Like, exactly what it looks like is an ill-fitting, like, mascot costume at a D3 football game. It's just been plopped on, a poor summer intern, and thrown into, like, the bear cage to pretend that they're a bear at this Chinese zoo.

48:09Literally, if you forced me to bet money whether it was a bear or a human, I would say human. The only thing that would give me pause is there's a brief moment where there's a kind of close-up on the bear's face and he kind of licks his chops and his tongue appears to come out, which makes it seem like... Mascots don't have tongues. Mascots don't have tongues. A really fanatic does, but that's a whole other thing. So what was going on here? So it creates such a controversy that eventually the zoo decides that it's going to respond to this hilarious accusation that it's putting humans into bear costumes and throwing them into cages.

48:44And what do they say? They respond in what I think is the best possible way, like the most unhinged way possible, which is they write a letter from the perspective of the bear responding to the controversy. And so I'm just going to read you part of that letter. Please, yes. Which the New York Times very helpfully translated in their article about the piece because I do not read Chinese characters. Or speak bear. Or speak bear. The letter says this is the bear, bear named Angela, apparently. Yeah, speaking, the bear says, Yesterday after work, I received a call from the park manager asking me if I was slacking off and had a biped replace me.

49:19Much to my surprise, I'm just sitting in the mountains and I go viral on the internet. Some people think I look too human when I stand up. It seems you really don't understand me. Previously, some visitors even thought I was too petite to be a bear. I want to emphasize again, I am a Malayan sun bear. Not a black bear, not a dog. A Malayan sun bear. I do think it's a little suspicious that they don't explicitly say that they're not a human. It's also weird. They're like adding gas to the fire by being like, no, it's a real bear. But this is this joke where we wrote it from the perspective of the bear.

49:49Maybe they've understood that the controversy is selling zoo tech. I think that's what's happening here. I think this is a brilliant PR move. I think this has actually generated more attendance to the zoo. People are like going to check out this definitely not a human bear at the zoo. That's a really good recommendation. Okay, so we're going to put the video. Somebody on the newsletter complained about me plugging the newsletter too much. We're going to put the video on the newsletter. I don't care. Throw it in the newsletter. Go subscribe to the newsletter. Please. The point of this podcast is just that people will receive emails.

50:18Without a doubt. Garrett, thank you. Thank you.

50:25Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vogue and Shruti Pinamineni. It's produced by me, Garrett Graham, and Noah John. Theme and original composition by Armin Vazarian Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss Show art by Ali Moss, no relation Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leo Reese-Dennis Thank you to the team at Jigsaw Alex Gibney, Richard Pirello, and John Schmidt And to the team at Odyssey J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf Special thanks this week to Chris Jang Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

51:05Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

51:34Thank you.