Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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Hello, Search Engine listeners. We're re-airing this week a classic episode of the show we're very proud of. But before that, some quick show business that's business about the show, not news about Hollywood. So most importantly, today, Friday, April 18th, is your last day to purchase Search Engine merchandise. We've got hoodies and tees they've been selling like hotcakes. Act now. These are hand-printed, so we can only sell them in limited runs. We cannot make an exception for you on Saturday, no matter how nice your email is. Second, most importantly, I have an announcement about this show itself. I wrote a much longer explanation of what I'm about to say on my newsletter. You can find a link to that in the show notes if the following does not sate your curiosity about the editorial schedule of a podcast you listen to. But the TLDR is that we are going to slightly reduce our publishing cadence. We will now be publishing the show two or three times a month. Right now, we are a team of three full-time people, and we want to just give ourselves a little breathing room.
Also, we think having a little more time to make episodes will let us chase down some of the complicated, weird, and ambitious stories that we love. Stories that, at this pace, we have not always had the bandwidth for. We're really excited about this change. If you want to know more, again, you can check out the little thing I wrote. I talk about our finances, which have hit an exciting not in the red point. I talk a little bit about how the work I do at Search Engine is different from the work I used to contribute at my old show, Reply All. And we talk about internet comments and where you can make internet comments about Search Engine that we'll see. Okay. Without further ado, here's an episode we made last year we really love. Why can't we turn all the empty offices into apartment buildings? It's about issues that have become even more salient in the last 12 months. Housing, yimbyism, nimbyism, and of course, roller coasters in your backyard. Anyway, after these ads, please enjoy. Currently, I have been working out of an office. It's cool.
Feels like the olden times, before everybody had their meetings on their couch while apologizing for how they were dressed or what their children were doing. Next door to the office where I work, there's this other office that is perfectly frozen in time. They have a big pile of unopened mail stacked just inside their glass door and a hastily typed sign saying, everyone's working from home, but we'll be back soon. Something to that effect. New York is filled with empty offices right now. New York's not special, so it's pretty much everywhere else. And I recently got an email from this woman named Julia, who lives in Santa Rosa, California, and had a question about that state of affairs. Here she is reading her email.
I live in an area with a catastrophic housing shortage and sky-high rental prices. However, the odd thing I've noticed is that an extreme surplus of commercial properties will sit vacant and empty on the market for months or years.
Oh, yeah. Here's the other thing. The offices are all empty. Apartments are just ridiculously expensive. Shortage of affordable apartments, surplus of empty offices. Maybe you can see this question coming.
Why, when we have such a shortage of housing, does there seem to be no reason to convert vacant real estate into residential properties?
It's a great question. The thought you have had, I have had in Brooklyn and in Toronto, where I visit friends sometimes, where... housing seems very scarce, and you walk around and there's so much empty commercial property. And not empty for a little bit, like empty forever. And it feels like one of those problems where you're like, it looks kind of simple. Is it that I am blind to the complexities of this in a way that I don't understand? How can it be that people need space to live and there's a lot of empty space and those things are not shaking hands at all?
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