Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

Lots more example I could list.

However I think there are contexts and levels of abstraction where diversity at one level prohibits diversity at another. An example of this would be standards. There is little diversity in shipping container sizes and designs and that standardization enables more shipment of goods.

Standardization in web protocols enables larger diversity in website content.

While I'm not an expert in biology, I'm pretty sure some of our organs have a lot less diversity in cell types than others. E.g. a healthy heart has little cellular diversity compared to a healthy gut.

By standardizing money (limiting diversity in barter) enables a larger economy with greater diversity of products and services.

A highly functional team will all share a core set of values, and if everyone had extremely diverse values the team wouldn't be able to function. For example some businessess thrive on a culture of internal competition, and some thrive on internal cooperation, but mixing these up can create dysfunction. At the same time, some diversity in values leads to better decision making, so again context matters.

So my point is that diversity is a really important property that sometimes needs to be maximized, sometimes needs to be minimized, and sometimes needs to be balanced, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. I also think that in general maximizing global diversity is a good north star value, and I am acknowledging that to achieve it requires minimizing diversity in some narrow contexts.

Of course this utopia would attract folks from other areas, so can’t be solved only locally. Needs national support.

Putting parks half a level above (or below) street level is a surprisingly easy hack for vastly improving the experience. I wish more places did this.

I'd rather live in a somewhat 'noisy' vibrant neighborhood where I can walk to shops or restaurants than an absolutely dead residential cul-de-sac where I have to literally drive miles to the nearest amenity. If the noise bothers you at night, get a sound machine or install triple pane windows.

I understand having industrial separate from everything else, but commercial and residential should always be blended IMHO, and SFH zoning should not exist.

I would kill for reformed zoning standards like they have in Japan.

A 3 bed with 1K sq ft still gives you like a 10x10 room - more than enough space for a crib and a queen bed. And you have two other bedrooms to spare. As they get older and need space to run around and stuff, there’s no shortage of parks / trails / fields.

do fatass americans just need more space to function?

You can think of class c office space, broadly speaking, as oil wells that have very little life left, and get bought up by folks who intend to extract the cashflow until they dump the externality on the public government and taxpayers (like abandoned shopping malls).

A recent example in St Louis is the AT&T office tower [1] [2].

[1] One of St. Louis’ tallest office towers, empty for years, sells for less than 2% of its peak price - https://www.costar.com/article/642008108/one-of-st-louis-tal... - April 10th, 2024 ("Goldman Group buys 44-story former AT&T office tower for $3.6 Million")

[2] St. Louis office vacancy hits all-time high [21.2%] as major companies downsize their footprints - https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2026/01/15/office-v... - January 16th, 2026

(conversions when the economics pencil out, haircuts for investors when they don't and more investment is needed to wholesale replace a structure)

US office vacancy rates chart supposedly pulled from Moody's: https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1p8mhmq/us_office_v...

There should probably building code changes to ban the latter type of office building, and keep the space more flexible and convertible to residential. A big plus is the resulting office space would probably be nicer to workers.

https://www.boston.gov/news/officials-celebrate-first-100-un...

There's also a lot of work that probably needs to go in to the ventilation and fire code changes. An office building isn't designed for people having ovens and stoves. It also often just assumes its OK to have less isolation between units for the ventilation, or previously entire floors were considered to be one space ventilation-wise but now you might be trying to split it into 2-3 units that require separation. This separation can also complicate things like AC and heat.

The ventilation issue comes up a good bit with a lot of these poorly done conversions. You end up with units that just don't get nearly enough airflow, and all the windows are sealed so its not like one can just open the window to get more air.

Yep, and that's fine. It's literally a tangible instance of 'creative destruction'. I see people arguing that oh, we have to RTO to save the current model and it seems so backwards to me.

Commercial office buildings are optimized for seating space, so you get a lot more interior walls already built and often shorter ceilings then industrial spaces. That's a lot more renovation to add in all the necessary plumbing for showers and toilets and often laundry in every unit.

New building codes mean that everything has to be done right to today's standards, not yesteryear's, so it becomes cheaper to demolish and rebuild than retrofit, especially if the building has a lot of interior space that doesn't have access to exterior walls for mandated windows.