tylerFowler

In the real estate profit space, I agree, but it's been a huge boon to businesses in the area so minimally it's a good first step. It seems a decent strategy for a city to have large developers to the difficult work of conversion and then allow it to change hands over time.

Now, for KC specifically, the Power & Light District is a tad different because several completely new and large apartment towers (One Light & Two Light) were built. I'd argue, still good for the area and its residents/business owners, but less viable in cities with less space.

Tldr; idk, necessary evil?

Definitely, but invariably when the conversation about office -> housing conversions come up these other cities are never mentioned. I would argue the lessons in those cities are very applicable to SF & NYC, where the conversation has been focused in the past year or so.

The history of Kansas City is very interesting - it was well poised to be the size of Chicago until rail travel became less popular. So during the 20's & 30's it was a major landmark for Art Deco architecture.

Well.. yeah when you put that way I see what you mean. No those types of buildings wouldn't be very amenable, I suppose I had assumed we would already exclude those from consideration.

Note that none of the buildings I mentioned are this way (the Wikipedia links have pictures). Although.. I did live in an old saddlery building there that is somewhat like what you're saying, the hallways were just made wide and apartments very long to ensure window access. Still, an Office Space style building will never be that.

Fwiw it's almost exclusively international developers running the conversions in Kansas City. I think Greystar might be the one with the largest footprint there.

Indeed, I think one of the "newest" redevelopments was Commerce Tower which is an all-glass contemporary styled office building but it's still a building built in 1965. It probably helps that that building was also quite thin and had centrally located elevator banks & old style mail chutes that meant all the offices were around the windowed sides anyway.

The redevelopment of downtown did push out many of the artists and so they packed up & moved to West Bottoms. In general KC is such an arts town that people genuinely like to go where the artists go, it's a very cool vibe. West Bottoms is packed with record stores and underground (literally) event venues though the Halloween event people still take up most of the space that might be good for living/working.

Ohhh yeah, they definitely do. Usually just on weekends or for events but you have fully uniformed & armed officers riding the loops.

Yeah crime post-pandemic there is still a major problem, although typically concentrated in poor neighborhoods as opposed to downtown. When I first moved there, the inner city was considered really dangerous and I saw such rapid gentrification that you'd see people walking their dogs in the middle night without incident just within 8 months or so. So it just sorta.. moved.

I definitely wouldn't say KC has made many inroads on crime despite the massive boom it's had in the inner city core, which did increase foot traffic and makes people at least feel safer.

The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new developments (a good thing). This was the first public transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent sized event it became the smartest way to park and not overpay.

They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.

Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.

True - not specifically related to fleeing workers, as I understand it (wasn't there at the time) the office usage was more or less static downtown through all of that. Though, nonetheless, most of the buildings I cited (and many more) remained vacant so over the grand scale of the 150 year history or so of that city, one could say office space was largely unused.

Interesting point on older buildings being easier. I would have thought quite the opposite. Commerce Tower was one of the "newest" buildings converted and it was built in 1965. Although, I suspect older buildings are still an untapped resource in many cities depending on what we mean by "older".

I do think the simple fact of offering hyper-dense communities (especially in cities that lack them otherwise, like many midwestern cities, say) makes any downtown attractive as a living option to a certain group of people who want the "15 minute city" experience. Doing so tends to transform downtowns into actual communities as well, as opposed to places with many low quality vendors that cater to duller, less personable 9-to-5 routines.

And then of course there are knock-on effects to placing people like that (typically young professionals and artists) together like that to rub shoulders, talk about ideas, start businesses etc...

What I love it for in particular is that it expands your vocab in ways that a book may not, or minimally adds an extra bit of "fun study" akin to casually doing flashcards.

For Greek for example, it does expose me to new words/grammatical functions that I maybe haven't gotten to yet in my formal book and then I can hop over to Wiktionary to see it's formal defintion/usage/declensions/etc...

Like with any learning experience, you get what you put into it.

I'm actually a bit surprised to see this, I've been an ardent Duolingo user for years and it works fantastically for me. Do you need to pair it with learning formal grammar rules on the side? Yeah, if you want to go deeper, absolutely, and when I have paired grammar rule learning with Duolingo it like 5x'd my learning & comprehension speed.