“The structure of an office building is unsuitable for conversion to apartments. There is not enough water or sewer facilities, and the ventilation systems are all wrong for subdividing into smaller cells controlled by more thermostats.”
That’s total bullshit. Tell that to the people who worked there and spent up to 60 hours a week in those buildings. If workers can be there that many hours a week, then so can the so called “homeless” or “illegals”.
I’m guessing your degree is not in commercial/residential hi-rise buildings. The building mains, the utilities & HVAC distribution requirements are in no way similar.
That is what people who build office buildings and high-rise condos tell me.
I trust their experience and opinion more than yours.
Their explanation is that water and sewer facilities in an office building are laid out in a central core with very few branches to the restrooms and break rooms. In a condo, the lines have a much denser branch structure that needs to reach each apartment with a much higher maximum capacity on each branch.
During the commercial breaks of the Super Bowl, you might have 2/3 of the residents scoot off to the can and then flush all at about the same instant. The peak load from apartments can be way higher than anything you could find in an office building during a lunch break.
Gotta plan for these things, you know.
HVAC systems have analogous problems with centralized chillers/heaters and ventilation. The zones in an office are way too big for apartment spaces and the vents are too few to work in apartment spaces.
You want the thermostat that controls your apartment to be located three units down the hall? I thought thermostat arguments in a common office space were nasty.
All this stuff can be changed. That change is expensive and amounts to gutting the whole building and replacing everything in it. Maybe one such project will be commissioned in one city as a virtue signaling effort to the rest of the nation.
The opportunities for graft and bribes ought to be spectacular. But I would bet that the project will run late, over budget, and will never be fully completed. And there won't be another one. We will have too many other problems more important than caring what is happening to bankrupt commercial property owners or where the illegals are living.