A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/commercial/a-fire-sale-has-u-s-office-buildings-going-for-90-off-8fa8b5d8

74 71 4 months ago

When I travel around the US, vacant storefronts and empty commercial buildings are a constant, not just office buildings, and not just in certain places.

hedora• 4 months ago

Yet there is still a widespread housing shortage.

LinuxAmbulance2• 4 months ago

Commercial buildings can't be easily converted into housing - notably, plumbing is not designed for smaller units and can't be retrofitted.

postalrat2• 4 months ago

Widespread affordable housing shortage. There is an abundance of unaffordable housing. he proposed solution, brand new housing, will never solve this.

milkytron2• 4 months ago

For a long time, the US had the money to build things, use them, let them slowly deteriorate, and then abandon them.

It was cheaper to simply let things fall into disrepair, and build shiny new buildings and developments further away from the city center. Rinse and repeat. This is why a lot of inner ring suburbs are filled with strip malls that can't maintain their parking lots, don't have the residential density to support nearby businesses, etc.

It's kind of an interesting development pattern that's been pervasive since the 1950s, and some towns and cities are trying to reverse it with infill.

toomuchtodo3• 4 months ago

Debt funded sprawl.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon...

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt...

https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2025/4/14/cities-are...

DroneBetter• 4 months ago

no way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_rings on a macroscopic scale

cucumber37328424• 4 months ago

It wasn't cheaper for any physical reason. It was cheaper because we regulated it that way on purpose.

We've intentionally made it unconscionably expensive to bring anything not built to current standard back into service even in a limited capacity (e.g. sublet a factory into smaller space) because we have because this stuff is mostly the purview of local governments who seem to optimize for some middle-ish ground path of "what makes Karen screech least" and "what makes the professional developers who know everyone in government happiest". There's various exemptions for small residential stuff, but at scale it's all just crap that tends toward "don't allow anything that isn't a new build or a high dollar revitalization project"

Seriously, go to your local zoning board, planning board, etc public facing meetings sometime. The shit they put people who just want to spend huge sums of money to develop stuff, run businesses etc, in your city/town through is beyond the pale. And then some "professional" shows up with a BigCo packet about "here's why our toxic waste dump on the ground floor with a strip club on the top floor can go beside the school" and they can't approve it fast enough. You'll be looking for bulldozers on facebook marketplace before the meeting is half over.

nitwit0053• 4 months ago

Look into US retail space per capita. It has far exceeded other nations for some time. Some retail store CEOs have directly discussed too much supply.

JumpCrisscross4• 4 months ago

Look into US retail space per capita

Recommend a source?

blitzar2• 4 months ago

I tried going out to shops again to buy things recently - its so much harder, more expensive and time consuming than having it arrive through my letterbox the next day.

jerlam• 4 months ago

I've shifted in the opposite direction. It's hard to judge the quality or fit of items online, especially when major platforms have been easily gamed. "Anything goes" marketplaces shift the burden of choosing good products to the buyer, while showing duplicates of indistinguishable products at seemingly random price points. Shippers have become unreliable and returning things comes with a time cost.

triceratops3• 4 months ago

Online shopping is a demoralizing, soul-sucking, time and energy drain. Hundreds of options and no way to tell if anything is good. Reviews mean jack shit.

I do the bulk of my shopping IRL.

mono4423• 4 months ago

The AI is going to replace most of the office workers in the next few years, the office buildings are going to be worth as much as the land they are built on is minus the cost of demolition.

cucumber37328424• 4 months ago

Will never happen. They'll lobby to create permitting process so absurd that you can't develop new sites in order to preserve the value of their investements.

And the usual demographics where support for such boondoggles throughout history is found will cheer for it because they'll dress it up in environmentalism and 15-min cities and whatever the other issues of the day are.

mbg7212• 4 months ago

The lower-friction result is that the offices become huge apartment buildings with reverse-commutes to the suburbs, hoping the "stuff to walk to" survives. There are issues with that too, like plumbing and windows.

nitwit0053• 4 months ago

AI was already supposed to have replaced all of us.

silexia• 4 months ago

Office buildings are going the same direction horses went a hundred years ago after the invention of the internal combustion engine.

A fire sale has U.S. office buildings going for 90% off

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