I have seriously low expectations for the quality of living in an office building converted to housing. Walls are non-existent, nothing is designed for residential fire safety (containing fire in individual apartments that can’t spread to the rest of the building) and sound between floor ceiling and dividing walls is gonna suuuuuuuuuuck.
Solvable problems but I doubt anyone owning these buildings does it right.
i don’t doubt they will find a way to do it wrong, but commercial construction seems to be held to a much higher standard than residential in the states. the exterior walls aren’t papier mache and popsicle sticks, there are storm shelter requirements for buildings of a certain size, etc. the lack of interior walls means steel trusses/spans. converting a large commercial structure to residential is a matter of adding interior walls, which can be added according to design preferences, not to support the floor above.
on the other hand, for residential apartment construction, they approved the 5-over-1’s, which have one floor of masonry (commercial), with up to 4 floors made of wood and petroleum products (residential). none of them are going to make it 15 years, because they are made out of food for mold. and they are being thrown up literally everywhere. they are far lower quality than anything going on with commercial construction.
I have fewer problems with 5 over 1s because they’re not tall office buildings and fire crew ladders will reach top floors easily. They are easy to evacuate and easy (comparatively) to do rescue in.
I watched Grenfell happen and everyone in London had to see its covered up remains every single day for years. I don’t want to see it happen again.
And Grenfell WAS designed with residential standards, each apartment a unit that fire could not escape from, only cladding caused its spread via the exterior of the building. My big concern with interior walls is that they won’t put up proper units that are designed to contain the fire, and that the floor/ceiling aren’t able or designed to contain the fire in apartment units either. My feeling is that they’ll just put up paper thin divider walls and call it a day.
Better than being homeless, but as always problems are only patched minimally and with an eye toward maximizing profit
I would rather be homeless than living in a building that is unsafe. Many families here in the UK after Grenfell even demonstrated this by literally refusing to return to their own residential buildings until cladding was removed. I don’t know about individuals but I think you underestimate the decisions that families will make about this, over here at least it seems families will choose safety over unsafe shelter. Obviously this is guided by national trauma though.
