An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing.
There are a lot of problems with this recommendation. First, both people and jobs are moving away from the cities, so who is going to want to live in former office buildings anyway? Second, office buildings are not designed for human habitation, so converting them will be expensive, probably far more expensive than the single-family homes people are moving to.
I don't have any problem with relaxing zoning to allow office-to-housing conversions. But because of these two issues, doing so isn't going to lead to any new housing. When that happens, you know what the next step will be: cities will begin subsidizing such conversions, leading to all sorts of gigantic boondoggles.
All of this is predicated on the idea that cities (meaning dense inner cities, the areas whose office buildings are currently half empty) as opposed to urban areas are somehow vital to society. They aren’t and haven’t been for a century. It is also predicated on the idea that planners know what cities need and can write zoning codes and create tax incentives and subsidies to provide that need.
In fact, urban planners are almost totally clueless about the cities they claim to be planning. They haven’t understood those cities for decades, instead trying to impose their personal preferences and 60-year-old “visions” on other people (even though most planners themselves prefer single-family homes).
I believe it was the architect Louis Kahn who once advised students, “Let the room be what it wants to be.” Planners should leave cities alone and let them be what they want to be. Someone will figure out a use for those office buildings. Though the owners of those buildings will probably be upset that they aren’t getting the rents they expected before the pandemic, that’s not a problem taxpayers should be required to remedy.
This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.
Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.
Photo: Tomi Knuutila via Flickr under CC 2.0 License