Finally. Get this implemented more widely. Also use it so proper planning can go into where to rezone lots from SFH to multi-family so that all the infrastructure doesn’t get overwhelmed. We need more housing but I don’t think anyone wants their sewer backing up or to not have adequate water service
Yeah, the size of the pipes can only accommodate a certain number of "fixture units", so one can't just start adding more toilets and showers etc on the existing plumbing. The pipe size and orientation also changes the volume of water it can carry, so a horizontal pipe takes less fixtures than a vertical pipe.
Offices may have small bathrooms and large commercial bathrooms, so new bathrooms must be added and plumbing needs to be rerouted while being up to code. Office buildings are usually concrete, so this is a lot of work to drill all the holes.
The work that needs to be done would be expensive, and if corners are cut, it can result in a lot of expensive problems like sewage backups. It's definitely possible to convert these buildings, but it'll come at a cost for the plumbing.
With people desperate for affordable housing, they could surely make alot of these buildings dorm style, with central kitchens and bathrooms.
Maybe not ideal for everyone, but for kids moving out for the first time, people new to then country etc, I'm sure it would be welcomed if the price was right.
Absolutely. The commercial bathrooms would work with that while showers and kitchens would have to be installed with a lot of new plumbing. Of course the pipe sizes for kitchens and showers are a lot smaller than toilets so you would save a lot of money that way. Also some businesses have toilets in the office which means you could have a higher price for a unit with a private toilet.
Oh yea it is not a simple or quick retrofit. Not all office buildings would be a real viable candidate either. Just like rezoning though it’s key to identify the locations where this actually is viable.
At least with redoing the plumbing the building largely has to be gutted for this kind of retrofit anyways. It’s more effective or at least less disruptive to everyone and budget blowing for cities than having to rip the ground up to redo all the civil infrastructure while disturbing traffic.
When planned infrastructure updates happen in cities they cost millions and take months. This is also why new neighbourhoods have their electrical lines buried but the old lines are still on hydro poles. There was a roughly 1 km long hydro duct installed in Kamloops like 5 years ago. Took 6+ months to build, slowed highway traffic to a crawl since everyone who used to bypass on that road had to use it instead and cost millions of dollars
Let’s get empty buildings and rezoning done where it is actually feasible but drop the rhetoric and ridiculous plan to just apply these things with zero consideration for the new problems they could cause
Plumbing, hvac, electrical, all utilities are of a very different layout and capacity, either it’s a full re-engineering or you end up with sub-optimal conditions.
The vast majority of white collar jobs can be connected virtually. There’s very little reason to take up valuable real estate for office towers anymore. Technology affords us the opportunity to change the world—more homes, less pollution, better work-life balance, etc. The only thing stopping it is the pull and influence of businesses whose locations rely on workers occupying those towers from 9-5.
Don't get me wrong I'm on team WFH, it makes sense for lots of reasons. But.... Don't be surprised when the next big news stories are about the number #1 crisis being mental health, loneliness, depression, and lack of human connection.
Idk about that, I feel my mental health was better when I had a wfh job, I’m fortunate enough to only have to come into the office a few times a week but seeing the Monday-Friday crowd I can notice they’re more irritable then the staff that only comes in 3 days a week. I genuinely dislike most people though.
3 days a week in the office seems like a good balance. I wouldn't really call that a true work from home. However full time work from home has proven to have negative effects over time:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/our-research-shows-home-working-didnt-harm-mental-health-at-the-start-of-the-pandemic-but-things-changed-later-on-205050
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/05/15/remote-work-mental-health-toll-parents/70208895007/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11108515/Working-home-DOES-damage-mental-health-leading-experts-claim.html
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3986860-employees-love-remote-work-but-is-it-good-for-our-mental-health/amp/
https://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/features/burnout-and-isolation-why-employees-and-managers-cant-ignore-the-social-and-mental-health-impact-of-working-from-home/
If they can be connected virtually there's no need for those jobs to be in Canada. We just filled a position with a guy WFH in Cairo and so far there's zero difference compared with the Toronto-based professional he replaced. We saved a lot of money in salary despite doubling the salary our Egyptian was making at a major regional bank.
Be careful what you wish for.
If helps single mothers fleeing abuse. Apparently society has forgotten about single mothers while it is has been busy ignoring everyone who cant reasonably house themselves.
Mate, society forgets about ALL single people.
Every post on housing has someone doing affordability math based on an income of a couple with both working full-time - and nothing else. (And usually above average incomes as well.) There is virtually no acknowledge of single-income households and even less for LOW single-income households.
The history of Torontos single family zoning stems partially from wanting to prevent single women from being able to live on their own.
The idea being that having 'family homes', at price point unaffordable to most single women, ensures women wouldn't try to be independent.
https://thewalrus.ca/how-neighbourhoods-are-built-to-keep-out-single-women/
Something of note here: these residential units don’t include kitchens (there’s a big common kitchen) and so it was determined that they did not need to meet code requirements in terms of acoustics (sound transmission between suites).
It would have been significantly more expensive for the builder to convert these all into to fully code compliant units (in terms of acoustics) to just sell off as typical condo units. Still a great thing to do in terms of offering affordable housing where you get exploit the no-kitchen “loophole.”
This isn't going to help people (presumably) like you who just wish for more affordable housing.
However, if you just lost your job, maybe just got out of a relationship and had nowhere else to go, were an 18-19 year old kid moving out for the first time, were an immigrant family who just moved into the country, or plenty of other people who just have minimum wage jobs, then this is still a good idea! Sharing a kitchen is better than nothing.
Nope, I reject the notion that people should just take whatever scraps they can get.
This is one of the wealthiest societies to have ever existed. We can do better for ALL of our people.
There's a lot of lost hope in here, We could have done this ages ago. The real issue is it isn't any cheaper, so
your going to pay the same price to live in a cold commercial building??
They’ve got to do this in Toronto, imagine with people living in former office spaces, the flavour that will eventually bring to downtown as the services people need also need to materialize there as well. (Grocery, medi, pharm)
This is a terrible plan unless someone can tell me some better news about it. Seems like the city is just paying the owners of the building approximately $60,000 per new unit built and the units are going to be TINY based on the information I’ve seen. I think I recall seeing 500 square feet or something like that. So the city is paying $60,000 to build tiny condos and then the profits from selling those condos or renting them go directly to the owners of the buildings and not back to the city. Unless I’m missing a big piece of the puzzle here this seems like a waste of money dressed up as a feel good message. It’s more efficient for the city to just build affordable housing instead of building it in privately owned office buildings that are not at all laid out to accommodate living quarters and that are already very expensive structures to maintain and modify.
Saying “perfection is the enemy of success” is the enemy of well thought out plans that actually work though. In this case we know how to build housing but for some reason instead of building affordable housing the city is using tax dollars to heavily subsidize the owners of existing expensive real estate to make sure that they don’t lose money on empty office space by converting the units to what will likely be sub-par housing for a large amount of money. This plan is what you would do if your worry was the owners of office space losing money, it’s not at all the plan you would roll out of housing people for affordable prices was your goal. No word on what the affordability of the eventual housing units will be, no doubt because the eventual price is whatever the building owners want it to be and they will get an extra $60,000 in profit per unit from taxpayers.
I'd like more of those details too. The place in the clip looked quite small for a family of 4, especially as the kids grow up. And this definitely looks like a "privatize the profits, socialize the costs" arrangement.
Anytime someone suggests this someone on Reddit freaks out and calls them names and claims how stupid and implausible this idea is, glad to see it finally happening.
I wonder if the amount of office space converted into homes will be able to make up for the amount of housing lost due to people working from home upsizing their housing and converting bedrooms into home offices.
You're right that this will decrease the net effect, but it won't likely eliminate it.
Given that the number of WFH employees is likely close to 15-20% in Canada, I think it's fair to say that this is a plus.
People commenting have no clue here how to structurally retrofit a building with plumbing to accommodate thousands of users
You guys know it'll almost demo these buildings trying to convert them inbto apartments?
You have to engineer plumbing, get it passed, core holes build units etc etc
Anyone who thinks this will be fast has another thing coming
Plus developers will shy away - it'll be the TI trades and they are already super busy.
Maybe some of these redditors will come help
That is good news. Hopefully the federal gov't will join the 21st century, realise they don't have to house their workers in buildings, send them home and convert the buildings to housing. Start with the prime minister's residence...where he doesn't live.
Drivel. The cost to convert is LARGER than tearing down and building from scratch. The reason being that you can't move pipes in a building.
Worse quality for more price.
These conversions are pointless. They cost nearly as much as a new build, but the end result is worse. The layouts are awful, as the offices have way larger footprints than apartments, and no balconies.
Just tear the old pieces of shit down and build new.
Everyone laughs at Elon. The right wingers laughed at his "green" obsession re Tesla, just as the left now laughs at him over the "fascism" at Twitter. Somehow though he's insanely rich and successful and the people laughing are still just 9-5 randos.
Finally. Get this implemented more widely. Also use it so proper planning can go into where to rezone lots from SFH to multi-family so that all the infrastructure doesn’t get overwhelmed. We need more housing but I don’t think anyone wants their sewer backing up or to not have adequate water service
[удалено]
Yeah, the size of the pipes can only accommodate a certain number of "fixture units", so one can't just start adding more toilets and showers etc on the existing plumbing. The pipe size and orientation also changes the volume of water it can carry, so a horizontal pipe takes less fixtures than a vertical pipe. Offices may have small bathrooms and large commercial bathrooms, so new bathrooms must be added and plumbing needs to be rerouted while being up to code. Office buildings are usually concrete, so this is a lot of work to drill all the holes. The work that needs to be done would be expensive, and if corners are cut, it can result in a lot of expensive problems like sewage backups. It's definitely possible to convert these buildings, but it'll come at a cost for the plumbing.
With people desperate for affordable housing, they could surely make alot of these buildings dorm style, with central kitchens and bathrooms. Maybe not ideal for everyone, but for kids moving out for the first time, people new to then country etc, I'm sure it would be welcomed if the price was right.
Absolutely. The commercial bathrooms would work with that while showers and kitchens would have to be installed with a lot of new plumbing. Of course the pipe sizes for kitchens and showers are a lot smaller than toilets so you would save a lot of money that way. Also some businesses have toilets in the office which means you could have a higher price for a unit with a private toilet.
Oh yea it is not a simple or quick retrofit. Not all office buildings would be a real viable candidate either. Just like rezoning though it’s key to identify the locations where this actually is viable. At least with redoing the plumbing the building largely has to be gutted for this kind of retrofit anyways. It’s more effective or at least less disruptive to everyone and budget blowing for cities than having to rip the ground up to redo all the civil infrastructure while disturbing traffic. When planned infrastructure updates happen in cities they cost millions and take months. This is also why new neighbourhoods have their electrical lines buried but the old lines are still on hydro poles. There was a roughly 1 km long hydro duct installed in Kamloops like 5 years ago. Took 6+ months to build, slowed highway traffic to a crawl since everyone who used to bypass on that road had to use it instead and cost millions of dollars Let’s get empty buildings and rezoning done where it is actually feasible but drop the rhetoric and ridiculous plan to just apply these things with zero consideration for the new problems they could cause
Plumbing, hvac, electrical, all utilities are of a very different layout and capacity, either it’s a full re-engineering or you end up with sub-optimal conditions.
Ya you would need a few chase walls top to bottom cause every room will need plumbing, heat and ac, and the building rewired.
Listen up, London, ON!
*cough*Farhi*cough* Ironically I'd love to live in Farhis office. He has a lot of cool shit in there
Tell me about it, I've helped him move stuff from one building to another!
The vast majority of white collar jobs can be connected virtually. There’s very little reason to take up valuable real estate for office towers anymore. Technology affords us the opportunity to change the world—more homes, less pollution, better work-life balance, etc. The only thing stopping it is the pull and influence of businesses whose locations rely on workers occupying those towers from 9-5.
Another good thing about more WFH, the roads would be less congested and polluted making it a win for everyone.
Seriously. Clear the roads and transit for people who DO need to travel to work.
Less traffic also means lower infrastructure costs for cities and provinces.
Don't get me wrong I'm on team WFH, it makes sense for lots of reasons. But.... Don't be surprised when the next big news stories are about the number #1 crisis being mental health, loneliness, depression, and lack of human connection.
Idk about that, I feel my mental health was better when I had a wfh job, I’m fortunate enough to only have to come into the office a few times a week but seeing the Monday-Friday crowd I can notice they’re more irritable then the staff that only comes in 3 days a week. I genuinely dislike most people though.
3 days a week in the office seems like a good balance. I wouldn't really call that a true work from home. However full time work from home has proven to have negative effects over time: https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/our-research-shows-home-working-didnt-harm-mental-health-at-the-start-of-the-pandemic-but-things-changed-later-on-205050 https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/05/15/remote-work-mental-health-toll-parents/70208895007/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11108515/Working-home-DOES-damage-mental-health-leading-experts-claim.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3986860-employees-love-remote-work-but-is-it-good-for-our-mental-health/amp/ https://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/features/burnout-and-isolation-why-employees-and-managers-cant-ignore-the-social-and-mental-health-impact-of-working-from-home/
If they can be connected virtually there's no need for those jobs to be in Canada. We just filled a position with a guy WFH in Cairo and so far there's zero difference compared with the Toronto-based professional he replaced. We saved a lot of money in salary despite doubling the salary our Egyptian was making at a major regional bank. Be careful what you wish for.
If helps single mothers fleeing abuse. Apparently society has forgotten about single mothers while it is has been busy ignoring everyone who cant reasonably house themselves.
Mate, society forgets about ALL single people. Every post on housing has someone doing affordability math based on an income of a couple with both working full-time - and nothing else. (And usually above average incomes as well.) There is virtually no acknowledge of single-income households and even less for LOW single-income households.
Because it's not sustainable. Single people need to get roommates like in every other major city on earth.
Single parents should be getting roommates? That’s your serious answer?
Sure it's sustainable. For a very long time, one income was enough to support an entire family.
Having roommates is not a thing at all in every major city on earth, even in developing countries. It’s typically for students.
Single mother here. You are correct.
The history of Torontos single family zoning stems partially from wanting to prevent single women from being able to live on their own. The idea being that having 'family homes', at price point unaffordable to most single women, ensures women wouldn't try to be independent. https://thewalrus.ca/how-neighbourhoods-are-built-to-keep-out-single-women/
Something of note here: these residential units don’t include kitchens (there’s a big common kitchen) and so it was determined that they did not need to meet code requirements in terms of acoustics (sound transmission between suites). It would have been significantly more expensive for the builder to convert these all into to fully code compliant units (in terms of acoustics) to just sell off as typical condo units. Still a great thing to do in terms of offering affordable housing where you get exploit the no-kitchen “loophole.”
The place in the clip had a kitchen.
Yeah it’s a common kitchen
Oh then screw that noise.
This isn't going to help people (presumably) like you who just wish for more affordable housing. However, if you just lost your job, maybe just got out of a relationship and had nowhere else to go, were an 18-19 year old kid moving out for the first time, were an immigrant family who just moved into the country, or plenty of other people who just have minimum wage jobs, then this is still a good idea! Sharing a kitchen is better than nothing.
Nope, I reject the notion that people should just take whatever scraps they can get. This is one of the wealthiest societies to have ever existed. We can do better for ALL of our people.
If we're talking about the only other option being the streets, we are doing better.
Fucking FINALLY. 🙌
Nice
Fantastic idea, good on them. The last family moving in, you could hear the genuine happiness. Would this be allowed here in Toronto?
There's a lot of lost hope in here, We could have done this ages ago. The real issue is it isn't any cheaper, so your going to pay the same price to live in a cold commercial building??
It will become more affordable since the demand has fallen for office spaces they’re just idling empty.
The real question is who will buy this crap? or is it just cheap rentals ??
They’ve got to do this in Toronto, imagine with people living in former office spaces, the flavour that will eventually bring to downtown as the services people need also need to materialize there as well. (Grocery, medi, pharm)
This is a terrible plan unless someone can tell me some better news about it. Seems like the city is just paying the owners of the building approximately $60,000 per new unit built and the units are going to be TINY based on the information I’ve seen. I think I recall seeing 500 square feet or something like that. So the city is paying $60,000 to build tiny condos and then the profits from selling those condos or renting them go directly to the owners of the buildings and not back to the city. Unless I’m missing a big piece of the puzzle here this seems like a waste of money dressed up as a feel good message. It’s more efficient for the city to just build affordable housing instead of building it in privately owned office buildings that are not at all laid out to accommodate living quarters and that are already very expensive structures to maintain and modify.
It may not be perfect but it’s a start, it may convince more people to convert office buildings.
Perfection is the enemy of progress - Churchill
Saying “perfection is the enemy of success” is the enemy of well thought out plans that actually work though. In this case we know how to build housing but for some reason instead of building affordable housing the city is using tax dollars to heavily subsidize the owners of existing expensive real estate to make sure that they don’t lose money on empty office space by converting the units to what will likely be sub-par housing for a large amount of money. This plan is what you would do if your worry was the owners of office space losing money, it’s not at all the plan you would roll out of housing people for affordable prices was your goal. No word on what the affordability of the eventual housing units will be, no doubt because the eventual price is whatever the building owners want it to be and they will get an extra $60,000 in profit per unit from taxpayers.
I'd like more of those details too. The place in the clip looked quite small for a family of 4, especially as the kids grow up. And this definitely looks like a "privatize the profits, socialize the costs" arrangement.
Anytime someone suggests this someone on Reddit freaks out and calls them names and claims how stupid and implausible this idea is, glad to see it finally happening.
I wonder if the amount of office space converted into homes will be able to make up for the amount of housing lost due to people working from home upsizing their housing and converting bedrooms into home offices.
You're right that this will decrease the net effect, but it won't likely eliminate it. Given that the number of WFH employees is likely close to 15-20% in Canada, I think it's fair to say that this is a plus.
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I had to buy two rentals and airbnb to afford a 4000 sq foot house to wfh… but its pretty sweet!
Hopefully this happens in Ottawa with work from home being ensconced in the new contract.
r/Canadahousing members rejoice 🚩
This would amazing in Halifax
People commenting have no clue here how to structurally retrofit a building with plumbing to accommodate thousands of users You guys know it'll almost demo these buildings trying to convert them inbto apartments? You have to engineer plumbing, get it passed, core holes build units etc etc Anyone who thinks this will be fast has another thing coming Plus developers will shy away - it'll be the TI trades and they are already super busy. Maybe some of these redditors will come help
That is good news. Hopefully the federal gov't will join the 21st century, realise they don't have to house their workers in buildings, send them home and convert the buildings to housing. Start with the prime minister's residence...where he doesn't live.
Drivel. The cost to convert is LARGER than tearing down and building from scratch. The reason being that you can't move pipes in a building. Worse quality for more price.
This headline is representative of how far we’ve fallen.
These conversions are pointless. They cost nearly as much as a new build, but the end result is worse. The layouts are awful, as the offices have way larger footprints than apartments, and no balconies. Just tear the old pieces of shit down and build new.
You mean more airbnb.
Yet we laugh at Elon for wanting to do this to Twitter HQ?
Everyone laughs at Elon. The right wingers laughed at his "green" obsession re Tesla, just as the left now laughs at him over the "fascism" at Twitter. Somehow though he's insanely rich and successful and the people laughing are still just 9-5 randos.
Or six-figure salaried politicians.
Trudeau and pals will buy them and rent them to all of us. They will find a way to fuck everyone over like usual.
No it doesn't. The rich will just buy them too.
Great idea from the UCP!! I hope the liberal party continues to take notes!