Having lived in many an unconventional domicile over the years, it seems to me that there is an untapped market for the type of furniture solutions that you only need when you're living somewhere not designed for living.<p>I lived in a hotel for a while. White carpet! White marble sink! Don't drink any grape juice or wine!<p>When your kitchen is just a mini-fridge, hot-plate, electric kettle, and a toaster, everything takes so many extra steps to protect your environment from any possible spills. Had to do dishes in the tub, and while the laundry was broken, also did laundry there and then turned the whole room into a drying area.<p>Things like this are going to be happening with increasing frequency. Landlords and property managers are going to get mad or at least very stressed about %$#@# dangit these &@#^@# people how can they live like this!? Meanwhile the tenants will be pissed about living in the converse situation wondering @#$@#$ dangit how are we supposed to live any other way if the facilities are built for other activities!?!
As a resident of San Antonio, I was happy to see one of the projects here featured in the article. I've been happy living here, with among other things, the low cost of living, great parks, unique culture, nearby beaches and wine country, plus a few options for gigabit fiber internet.<p>However, the city's never had a lot of tech employers, and the vacant office space downtown seems like such a waste. It is good to see it being put to use.<p>As an aside: with the expansion of major tech employers in Austin and pervasiveness of remote work, I wonder if there is much demand for optional hybrid setups like teams from in the region going into the office once a month or so for collaboration. I am not sure if I'd prefer it to full remote, but in person meetings with coworkers can be quite enjoyable.<p>Allowing people to live a little further from Austin while commuting in occasionally seems like a good way to get some of the benefits of in person work while letting people choose locales with a lower cost of living.
Not for me. One of the reasons to live downtown is to be close to the office, and to benefit from other people being around. If you dont have an office and the local shops and restaurants are closing, why live downtown?
I like this trend for Dallas and think it is long overdue. Covid made it very obvious. The city has grown a ton in recent history but has had a hard time bringing people to downtown for anything other than work. It's usually dead in evenings and on weekends. Restaurants struggle unless they cater to the lunch crowd, etc. While it's improved in the past ~5 years or so versus the previous ~10; I've seen recent numbers that say there are only about 10000-12000 residents in the Downtown area. Anyways, I've been reading a lot on the local happenings and am interesting into how this trend will reshape the area culturally/economically. For example, Texan's don't tend to put up with homeless issues like they exist and the city really needs to figure that out or this could be a wasted opportunity. These are all new "luxury apartments" and those folks aren't going to tolerate the homeless issues but even that's hard to say since we've gotten such an influx of more liberal minded folks that are more compassionate on those issues.
> The trend seems tailor-made for Texas. Office-vacancy rates in most of the state’s major downtowns are high (roughly 25 percent in Dallas and Houston, in the teens in Fort Worth and San Antonio). The cost of single-family homes has skyrocketed and interest rates have risen, making many would-be buyers renters. And relatively few apartments are available, with vacancy levels in the single digits and pricey monthly rents expected to get even pricier<p>Similar trends and numbers apply nationwide, if not worldwide. You could certainly say all of this (indeed, to an even greater extent) for places like San Francisco and New York City.
I would certainly welcome some life returning to downtown Dallas. When I worked there in the aughts it looked more or less indistinguishable from a lot of the Rust Belt downtowns I visited during the same period. Skyrocketing vacancies and anemic accommodations because of all the the companies who fled to real estate deals in the burbs.
I'd love it if these developments would grant equity to its tenants. But then they'd just squat on the land, making it useless.<p>Is this really the best of all possible worlds, where a small number of investment groups with vast wealth can keep accumulating the core real estate of cities, to extract wealth from its citizens?
This needs to be done everywhere. Move as much people to remote as physically possible, which is basically everyone who works in an office, and change all that into residential real estate.
Apartments full of people sitting in some tiny room all day zooming into their meetings. Imagine allocating 25% of your expensive 1200sqft apartment for your work from home office. 25% allocated to the sole use of your employer. And it isn’t even tax deductible because you are a w2. It’s like Uber only instead of people using their own property to drive other people around they are using their own home to benefit your employer. Behold the brave new dystopian future.<p>This stuff is a fad. I don’t care what people say. Sitting on some tiny urban apartment working at home all day makes zero sense. Neither does paying for some co-working space to escape said tiny apartment. Might as well go to the office… oh wait… same thing in this brave “new normal”<p>All we are seeing is the rebirth of white flight to the suburbs branded as some kind of new revolution in tech work.<p>It’s a fad. Covid mitigations we’re temporary. Pendulum is gonna swing back. It’s just a matter of time.