231
White House opens $45 billion in federal funds to developers to convert offices to homes
(www.marketwatch.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
231 points (98.7% liked)
News
23301 readers
1147 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
This is great news. It's glad that the government is helping with something that everyone agrees should happen. Take these empty businesses and make them homes. It's about time and I'm glad it's happening
It's awful news.
It would be great news if the housing was owned by the public.
This is just funneling public money to private businesses so the private businesses can continue to profit off the public.
$45 billion so landlords can charge people rent. Great. So they get the handout for free, and the rent for free. Just free money all around, lol.
But taxpayers and tenants will be paying.
I can't see how it would be owned by the public. ~80% of this is loan money offered so it does have to be paid back with interest. The properties in question would all be owned by private companies who were using them as office space. So your suggestion means the government would have to purchase all of the property. Costing them 100%. This way they likely spend 15% (assuming a 5% interest made on those loans) and get the incentive going. Add in the fact that you then need to maintain run and rebuild all the housing directly from the public funds after that and you will never get everything situated/passed in our current government. The government gets what it wants. The private companies get what they wanted. The people get more work from home jobs, less traffic, and lowered emissions with the possibility of housing prices not rising as fast do to supply is being increased. (Doubt)
Overall it isn't the worst use of our taxes
It's good to convert them, but I really can't see why this needs government funding.
Incentives tend to make things happen, especially when they would be unlikely to happen without incentives. They often work in "kickstarting" or "bootstrapping" a new market that then continues without incentives.
An excellent example is solar panel incentives. In the early adoption days, these allowed people to afford expensive solar panels, which helped solar panels manufacturing develop into a mature buisnesses that iterated and improved on solar panel design to the point where they are inexpensive enough to no longer need as many or any incentives, which have started to go away. Meanwhile, solar panel manufacturung and install are huge new industries with massive growth that help solve many issues with our nation, including climate change, energy independence, power grid resilience, on and on.
Incentives that turn office building into housing will help solve homelessness, strength worker rights with work for home policies, revitalize downtown buisnesses and neighborhoods, amdreduce emissions/traffic from less people driving. Lots of wins there that clearly are excellent things to incentive.
Solar needed to develop. R&D.
We already know how to do conversions. It's really easy. This is not a market that needs public incentives or public financial lubrication.
90% of the comments in this thread are about how difficult and expensive it is to do, which is a large part of what would be incentived.
Are you saying we already have innovative methods that reduce the cost of this process 100x, like we developed with solar?
Yes it's a lot of work. No it doesn't need government funding.
You are combining many things that are separate. Many things are expensive, that does not mean it needs government funding or incentive.
This is straight forward work. It's not like we don't know how to do it. It's very straightforward electrical, HVAC, plumbing, interior walls work that we do all the time. All the time. So very often. Everywhere. Like every building you've been in. Expensive does not mean that it's not straightforward. It's just a lot of work. You're hoping for some Deus ex machina solution that does not exist.
Except for the top comment already conflating this with "company store" style debt slavery.