Downtown Pittsburgh office space purge (Philadelphia, Johnstown: new home, school districts, living)

[erieguy]

Originally Posted by PghSportsGuy420

Not all opinions are created equal, or deserve the same consideration. "140,000 people died in a scheme to get the president out of office" is not an opinion anyone needs to entertain.

By any objective measure, the president has done a horrible job of being president.

Just as he did a horrible job of being a businessman.

Turns out that game show hosts don't make good presidents.

I couldn’t be happier, especially with my investments since he took over. Made retirement that much easier.

Definitely one of the most prosperous businessmen the country has ever seen.

[Independentthinking83]

Originally Posted by SteelCityRising

Eschaton, your wife is an architect, and your IQ is higher than most of the conservative posters’ IQ’s combined, correct?

Given your aforementioned expertise, couldn’t a lot of Downtown’s excess office space just be converted to apartments or condos?

I mean residential demand Downtown is still sky-high. I thought Terminal 21 and GlassHouse (technically South Shore) were both crazy overpriced, but they have been leasing like hot cakes.

If the city replaces occupied office space with occupied dwellings isn’t that still a good thing?

Is there a demand for it? That’s the key.

Plus it is very costly to just turn buildings over from office space to residential. People have a hard time understanding the age of the buildings in Pittsburgh make a lot of things cost prohibitive. You literally have to gut those places down to the core. Plus I’m willing to bet a lot of downtown buildings are energy wasters. The cost to upgrade building utilities in a high rise is astronomical.

There are a lot of smart conservatives that see the bigger picture and have high IQs. A liberal with a low IQ just expects things to happen without looking at the big picture of cost vs investment vs long term returns

Pittsburgh has an overbuilt downtown for its size. And I think you are going to see that as more evident in the upcoming months and years.

[erieguy]

Bingo

[Knepper3]

Originally Posted by Independentthinking83

Is there a demand for it? That’s the key.

Plus it is very costly to just turn buildings over from office space to residential. People have a hard time understanding the age of the buildings in Pittsburgh make a lot of things cost prohibitive. You literally have to gut those places down to the core. Plus I’m willing to bet a lot of downtown buildings are energy wasters. The cost to upgrade building utilities in a high rise is astronomical.

There are a lot of smart conservatives that see the bigger picture and have high IQs. A liberal with a low IQ just expects things to happen without looking at the big picture of cost vs investment vs long term returns

Pittsburgh has an overbuilt downtown for its size. And I think you are going to see that as more evident in the upcoming months and years.

I won't bother commenting on the IQ portions, I know plenty of high and low(VERY) on both sides. Generally the more extreme of one side the lower the IQ but anyway. I think the point here if very key, demand. Is there really the demand and then consider the COVID concerns of being so close also possibly driving down demand. I agree, our city is oversized. I like it and wish for the best but look at our airport, they are (were?) building a new one but not because we need more but because it was too big and they wanted a right sized airport for the traffic that goes through.

[Independentthinking83]

Originally Posted by Knepper3

I won't bother commenting on the IQ portions, I know plenty of high and low(VERY) on both sides. Generally the more extreme of one side the lower the IQ but anyway. I think the point here if very key, demand. Is there really the demand and then consider the COVID concerns of being so close also possibly driving down demand. I agree, our city is oversized. I like it and wish for the best but look at our airport, they are (were?) building a new one but not because we need more but because it was too big and they wanted a right sized airport for the traffic that goes through.

LOL I couldn’t agree more about the IQ thing.

But yep it’s gonna come down to demand. If there is money to be made it will happen. Unless job growth and or population growth ramp up I don’t see it happening. The cost to do a single building is astronomical. It becomes a point where it is just cost prohibitive. Many people here complain about housing prices to begin with. Who is in line to spend 300,000 or more for a place downtown with the current state of downtown during this pandemic.

You are right the airport was a great example of overbuilt. The USAir hub never made money here. Operating costs were so high. They occupied 95 percent of that airport in its heyday. In 10 years flights were cut back and soon after it was a shell of itself before the age of 20. Now look at it. A huge waste of money. 12,000 employees for usair were here during the 90s. Now it is 0. That is a lot of taxpayers lost and families.

Downtown has too many highrises for sure. I doubt all of them will be maintained if owners can’t get paying tenants. We may actually see the downtown sky line shrink in size via demolition and dynamite.

[Independentthinking83]

Originally Posted by PghSportsGuy420

Do you have any idea how insane it sounds to rational people when they hear that you think 140,000 Americans crawled into the grave as part of a scheme to get the president removed from office?

Your surrogate daddy doesn't need help looking bad, he does quite well on his own.

He could have taken decisive federal action to prevent the spread of this disease, like Obama's administration did for H1N1 and Ebola. He chose to do absolutely nothing except recommend that people drink bleach and cry about how unfair everyone is to him.

In a sane and rational world he'd have been removed from office by now for corruption and negligence. That anyone is going to vote for a man who has allowed through his inaction 140,000+ unnecessary deaths is a sign of just how unhinged this country has become.

And what’s interesting is the democratic cities and house districts are feeling the brunt of this pandemic. I know you and some of your friends were licking their chops at this being the end of trump. And you may be right. You thought the Republican country voters would hurt the most. It hasn’t happened how I believe many had hoped. It’s erasing liberal institutions, districts and strongholds.

It was a total miscalculation. The same high tech sexy jobs are erasing the need to live in dense inner cities. You can live in small town suburbia and not have to report to an office in downtown Pittsburgh. The very companies people love on this board born out of CMU are the same ones going to be responsible for inner city and downtown declines. It’s quite amusing to say the least. Pandora’s box was opened during this pandemic. And liberal dense living is gonna be done in by the liberal high tech companies that gave us the technology to work from home.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by SteelCityRising

Eschaton, your wife is an architect, and your IQ is higher than most of the conservative posters’ IQ’s combined, correct?

Given your aforementioned expertise, couldn’t a lot of Downtown’s excess office space just be converted to apartments or condos?

I mean residential demand Downtown is still sky-high. I thought Terminal 21 and GlassHouse (technically South Shore) were both crazy overpriced, but they have been leasing like hot cakes.

If the city replaces occupied office space with occupied dwellings isn’t that still a good thing?

The article in the OP actually said (if you click through) the main reason a lot of office space is available downtown is the energy extraction industry is in contraction mode, and with the big downtown extraction employers shedding office jobs.

I am sure that demand for office space downtown will be going through a negative cycle as employers consider having a larger proportion of their workforce employed remotely, but I don't see any particular reason why we'll be one of the worst-hit cities by this.

Conversions of smaller-scale historic buildings are still happening downtown on a regular basis. Indeed, one of the reasons that so few actual new construction residential units have been built in the last 10 years downtown is there's just so damn many medium-to-small-scale buildings being converted over. My office is moving out of Gateway Center to a different building near the Mon, which was actually are #2 building, because the first one is planned to be converted to residential.

My IQ isn't really all that high BTW. I don't think I've ever tested higher than 135. I just love to read and have a very good ability to retain information I've read and spit it back.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by Independentthinking83

Pittsburgh has an overbuilt downtown for its size. And I think you are going to see that as more evident in the upcoming months and years.

Pittsburgh is by all rightful measures a city of over a million. The ~305K figure is only the central 54 square miles.

Jacksonville, FL's city limits are larger than all of Allegheny County.

Pittsburgh has deliberately been kept from growing organically, as cities do, by the Second Class City Law that was passed after the city annexed Allegheny over a century ago, which keeps the city from annexing new territory.

This has kept the city's tax base constrained, and kept the county sliced up into increasingly unviable minor fiefdoms. There are over 40 school districts in this county of 1.3m. Sane areas have one unified city/county school district.

Had Pittsburgh merged with the county as it should have done years ago, it would be the 12th most populous American city.

Pittsburgh status as a "small city" is a lie based on legal technicalities and political games stretching back generations.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by Independentthinking83

It was a total miscalculation. The same high tech sexy jobs are erasing the need to live in dense inner cities.

Speaking from personal experience, those of us with those high tech sexy jobs prefer to live in dense inner cities regardless of whether or not we telecommute, because we want places to spend that high tech sexy job money.

Living in dense cities is a natural human pattern going back millennia. It is the most efficient and effective form of living. Calling it "liberal living" is a bizarre characterization.

The suburban pattern of living has only existed in it's current form since the post-war period. It is tremendously wasteful in terms of service delivery and depends on the automobile. In my lifetime, automobiles have gone from a 36 month purchase for the average family to seven or more year loans.

Suburban development has been flat since the end of the global financial crisis and they will continue to decline as the average American family finds maintaining three, four, or more cars completely unaffordable.

Andres Duany's book "Suburban Nation" is a good read if you've got the time.

(BTW, these stories you keep posting about how city dwellers are fleeing the cities are full of it. They're basing that conclusion on an increased incidence of realtor website searches in the suburbs. A search is just that, a search. Not a sale.

https://www.curbed.com/2020/7/13/213...moving-suburbs
)

[szug-bot]

Originally Posted by PghSportsGuy420

Pittsburgh has deliberately been kept from growing organically, as cities do, by the Second Class City Law that was passed after the city annexed Allegheny over a century ago, which keeps the city from annexing new territory.

not sure that is accurate. i think Overbrook, New Homestead, Lincoln Place, and possibly the East Hills were all late additions. One of those, maybe Overbrook, was as late as 1948, I think.