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Remote Work to Wipe Out $800 Billion From Office Values, McKinsey Says
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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We need more housing not places to work. Sounds legit to me.
Yeah but a business park or industrial estate is no place you want to live, so it's not like thoss offices can be converted.
Turn them into vertical farms if its apparently too hard to turn them into housing ;p
I don't think we're in need of more food though. In developed countries, so much of it is just plain thrown out because it doesn't get eaten.
Yeah but it would add localised - and extremely high efficiency in terms of water, yield, etc. - food supply that's more resilient to climate shifts, needs no pesticodes, etc., and for those of us on islands like the UK where we import lots of food it would be good.
Might also help those countries we import from build up more food supply resiliency because thry have more excess. Or massively reduce land use for food ^.^. And a lot of the places food gets imported from or otherwise farmed are also at large risk for climate change, so perhaps using vertical farms or other climate controlled farming techniques would be a good idea for them too nya
Furthermore it makes the supply chain more auditable, so you can reduce the reliance on questionably or very unethically sourced stuff. A controlled environment might also allow for even more automation.
I'm a pretty big fan of vertical farming for lots of reasons though to the point of writing an article on it, so I'm a little biased ;p. The main obstacles are land/building price and energy (and also some techniques for growing staples, though I think that is not a fundamemtal limitation, and I think the other two are solvable)
Edit: also I think it's desirable to return agricultural land to less managed environments like forests. Moving more human infrastructure into cities would enable more of this sort of "rewilding" (though I think that's a bit of a misnomer as environments everywhere have all been fundamentally altered by people, and a lot of people's idea of "nature" is the very sanitised version that avoids the constant slaughter and death, like cityparks and stuff which are actually very human managed - good for mental health, but not really ""nature"" in the same way)
They can be converted, and lots of cities are in the process.
They can be, but do you want them to be. Most are not in convenient places.
They absolutely can. If Canadian cities can do it with less people and money then certainly some of these massive multi-billion dollar real estate companies can do it too.
Cities, you just said keyword there cities, you can do it in cities because people want to live in cities. They don't want to live on the outskirts. Most of these offices are not in the city centre because the city centre is a really expensive place to have an office, only massive corporations are based there.
The vast majority of office space is in low rent districts on the periphery of cities. Because no one lives there there's no shops, no leisure centres, no schools, no parks or other green spaces. You can't just convert every building into a housing unit without considering the surrounding environment.
It would be infinitely cheaper to just build homes where you actually want them, than to try and convert a building that was never designed for the task.
I know it's not trendy or hip or exciting to say that, but when you look at the economics it just doesn't make sense outside of some very limited circumstances.