> …and they're about to ban windowless bedrooms which will make office-to-housing conversions impossible.
Where is this not banned?
And it’s not like offices don’t have windows or you can’t cut them. The ban on windowless bedrooms is supposed to prevent renting out a utility closet as a “rustic studio”.
No, the ban is because an architect thinks they're icky, sent in a request to ban it, and the building code people take any suggestion to ban anything that anyone sends them. Safety regulations are written in blood, you know!
The ban on windowless bedroom is at least partly about fire safety. A window provides an escape route for low floors, or a means for firefighters to rescue the occupants.
> ban on windowless bedroom is at least partly about fire safety. A window provides an escape route for low floors, or a means for firefighters to rescue the occupants
New York City's fire engines can't reach its skyscrapers' top floors. Not saying you can achieve similar resuls with office-to-residential conversions. But windowless bedrooms aren't a non-starter because of fire safety, they're a non-starter because they make wealthier residents uncomfortable.
The GP's point is that levelheaded cost-benefit analyses on things like that seem to escape regulators, and everything is greatly skewed towards "it's worth it if it saves even one life".
Sure, fire safety in homes is a good thing to have. But is it so good that we can't economically build buildings to meet them, and people end up with no home at all?
We can economically build buildings with windows on all the bedrooms. That has virtually zero impact on the final price to residents so complaining about it is a total red herring. The actual problem is high land prices, slow permit approval processes, and restrictive zoning codes.
> We can economically build buildings with windows on all the bedrooms
There is a lot of space inside buildings and blocks that must be kept open to permit windows in every bedroom.
When I first moved to New York, I illegally subletted a windowless bedroom. That let me save enough money to (a) enjoy my twenties and (b) launch a start-up. When I got a windowed bedroom, I wound up putting sound-absorbing black-out curtains on them for years.
> The actual problem is high land prices, slow permit approval processes, and restrictive zoning codes
These are bigger problems. But the the blind window requirement is a part of the second two. On its own, it isn't prohibitive. Tied together with a million other petty requirements and your minimum costs balloon.
That's only one of many problems with converting office building to residential. While a few conversions have succeeded, usually it's cheaper to just demolish the building and start from scratch. Allowing windowless bedrooms won't change that.
I've no idea about Japan or China, but I do know that "office-to-resi" has become reasonably common in the UK.
Since 2013, it's been classed as "permitted development" (so, automatically allowed as long as the building isn't listed as architecturally or historically important), and liberalised further in the early 2020s.
House prices have outstripped commercial rents for most of this century, and change of use is cheaper than demolish-and-rebuild, so I'd expect to see the trend continue.
The issue with unsuitable floor plates is real, though, particularly in larger buildings. One solution is to cut chunks out of the curtain wall, turning part of each floor into an open-air terrace which functions as a light well. The reduction in useable floor area means that's only really viable at the premium end of the market, though - a prominent (albeit mixed-use) example is https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2024/07/18/striking-new...
Yes they are, and I say this as someone who eons ago lived in a shithole apartment that had a fire scare and needed the Fire Dept to help out. Egress windows and fire trucks with ladders exist for a reason.
> Among other things, elevators are much stricter and so less frequent than any other country
Speaking from experience with elevators in various countries: Let's keep the part where, for instance, elevators need a door. (And I'm sure I haven't experienced anywhere close to the long tail of bad elevators.) Some regulations make sense.
But if there are ways to make elevators substantially faster without being unsafe, that'd be lovely. What do US elevators fail to do that they could be doing?
And in the US, nobody in the relevant unions or regulators cares about cities - elevator workers and firefighters are all suburbanite pickup-truck-Americans. So they're rarely personally interested in anything that isn't about driving a big car around really fast. This has a big impact on road layouts and the outside of buildings, because of course everyone listens to firefighters, but all they want to do is drive a big red truck everywhere with nothing stopping them.
(Which sometimes leads to them eg shutting down pedestrian safety improvements, and always leads to big wide access roads.)
I mean the US has a long history of killing people due to bad designs and cut corners. Everyone says cut safety for cost until 50 people die in a death trap.
