Refitting office space to make it liveable is actually super expensive. Commercial spaces don’t have the electric, plumbing, or insulation typically required or expected by residents. It can be cheaper to gut or even tear down the building in order to add the necessary MEP and framing, which is why you see developers are still building new rather than converting old commercial spaces. The money will encourage redevelopment which is far less wasteful and combats sprawl.
That said, I agree with you that you could make the money available to buyers instead of developers, but developers are the ones paying the bribesdonating to campaigns.
Then those millionaire (from the examples in the link, billionaire) developers can let their building sit empty…
This is America, where a single cancer diagnosis can bankrupt a family for generations. If we were a civilized country, sure, bail everyone out.
But I don’t have sympathy for them when normal people are in such a tight spot.
Like if you’re a cardiologist and you’re helping someone you saw sprain their ankle, you’d be an idiot to keep helping them when there’s five people having heart attacks in the same room.
The problem is that they are happy to let the building sit empty most of the time
The value of the land and building continue to go up as an investment, even if they aren’t earning money today on the space .
So they don’t actually give a fuck if it sits empty, but society does 
I’m with you, but you’re kidding yourself if you think the billionaire is going to suffer. They have leveraged the value with banks, and would skip on down the road with their fortunes while the banks that make mortgage loans have to shore up their books at the expense of common folks. Homebuyers, small businesses, and taxapyers will be expected to cover the losses.
$35B sounds more like it’s intended to find a way to make these conversions possible and create a “blueprint” to be used elsewhere.
These conversions are already possible. It’s a big financial decision because you basically have to gut it, but it’s not hard work. (No you don’t have to demolish the whole building like the other guy says). Each building will be different so you can’t make a generic blueprint.
There are people developing solutions to this one of which is essentially building panels that house all the equipment and hookups and installing them at location. This is the mobile home industry trying to adapt.
SIP panels aren’t going to increase the main stack capacity. Commercial buildings just don’t have the capacity for all of the sinks and toilets being used at once. It’s a neat idea, and a low voltage lighting system could save a ton of energy, but you still need to gut the building and add critical MEP infrastructure.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/imyPVFFACTk/?t=1m38s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
99 percent invisible did an episode on it recently.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/transcript
