Bill Fulton
Appearances
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
So that's very hard to convert to apartments because there's so much interior space that would be without windows.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
Nevertheless, sometimes developers work around that and you are seeing more and more redevelopment of old malls into mostly housing. That's probably the most promising part of it. More promising probably than the big old office buildings because it's not that hard to tear down a mall. So that's happening more and more.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
Right. You typically don't convert the mall building to residential. You tear it down.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
And yet we think it's really weird if it's in a suburban mall. But I think you're going to see that more and more.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
Good evening, everybody. Public hearing number one.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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. And that is what I think will prevail in the end.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
People 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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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. It's those things and more.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
Yes, that's exactly what a planner does.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.
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Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments? (classic)
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.