Bill Fulton
speaker
29 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Bill Fulton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Search Engine · Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic) · 18 Apr 2025
podcast
Hi, PJ.
The planning director in San Diego oversees the long-term plans for all the neighborhoods, how big the buildings can be, what infrastructure has to be included. You get into big fights with the neighbors over whether there's going to be more development in their neighborhood, that kind of thing.
Yes, that's exactly what a planner does.
Well, first of all, it is correct that zoning has traditionally been very inflexible. And underneath zoning is the assumption that different types of uses of land, you know, houses, stores, factories, they should all be separated.
Right. It originally came 100 plus years ago from the idea that in those days, a toxic factory might be right next door to houses or to an apartment building. And so separating those two things became very important. There is a sort of a classist and racist part of it, too. And this became predominant in the 1920s.
which is that people who wanted to live in single-family homes, and in those days you had to be very affluent to do that, began to put zoning into place in order to separate themselves from all other types of land uses, including apartment buildings.
If you go to a city like Los Angeles and you go to the most desirable parts of town, say the West Side, you will see vast areas that are zoned for single-family homes. If you removed zoning, many of those single-family homes would be redeveloped to higher density and there would be a lot more housing available. So to a certain extent, single-family zoning is used by homeowners to retain homes
what they call the character of their neighborhood, which of course excludes others, right? And also inevitably increases the price of the houses. It doesn't necessarily increase their property values because they might literally make more money if they could tear their house down and build something more. But it does raise the value of the houses that are there above what they otherwise would be.
You can build anything anywhere. In fact, in one of my regular slideshows, I have a funny picture of a single family house in Houston and a roller coaster right behind it.
Well, I have to explain that not everybody in Houston has a roller coaster in their backyard. And in fact, some people might want one.
What happens in Houston is that developers tend to dictate what gets built. So you see a lot of single-family homes being torn down and replaced with four to six townhomes on the same parcel. And you see a lot of old, in urban areas, little mini-malls being torn down and replaced by, say, five-story apartment buildings.
Interestingly enough, it's both. Traditionally... In urban planning, Houston was seen as an anomaly, this strange place that didn't have any zoning, so it must be weird. And it is kind of weird if you look at it in some ways, like the roller coaster in the backyard.
But at the same time, as the inflexibility of zoning has become more apparent, partly because of the housing shortage and partly because of this revisiting the racist history, Houston has come to be viewed as a place to look at, to say, okay, if you don't have zoning or you loosen it up, what happens? And the answer is you get more housing built.
New housing is still mostly high-end housing, but there's definitely more opportunity and more options in a place like Houston than you see in most other cities at this point.
Yes, I do think that other cities will become more like Houston. They probably won't give up zoning altogether, but they'll make zoning more flexible than it has historically been.
Right now, we're looking at every downtown in America with a lot of empty office space. So why can't you convert that to apartments, right? There are a lot of people trying to figure that out. In some cases, that has happened. particularly with older buildings. You get to a bigger retail space and a bigger office space, and it actually gets pretty complicated.
We are now to the point where most of the vacant office space that we're seeing in downtowns is from the last time we had a huge office boom, which was the 1980s. The floor plates are huge. So, you know, a typical floor plate, by which I mean to say the size of a floor in one of those office buildings, is maybe 50,000 square feet.
So that's very hard to convert to apartments because there's so much interior space that would be without windows.
Right. And you try to convert that into apartments when you have that much space that would wind up being interior without windows. That's very hard.
Conversion of old retail space, and particularly old malls, is more promising. And usually the malls have the largest contiguous land ownership in built-up desirable areas. Oh, interesting. And we are beginning to see more and more malls being redeveloped as well. at least part of the property being redeveloped for apartments or condos. There's a bunch of complicated factors there.
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