[novariation]

I don't understand your point:

Construction companies build what they were told to build by developers, and developers decide to build stuff by guessing the balance between financial viability and usefulness to users.

In the past there was a need for office space, and there was specifically a need for buildings which are cost optimized for office work. So the developers designed their plans and investment that way, and the construction companies built them.

What is your idea? That it shouldn't be possible to build something that's expensive to convert to residential housing ? Then that'll just make all other types of buildings more expensive, so you'll hurt manufacturing, businesses, public institutions, etc. If you want the construction companies to pay for it, they'll just not build it.

[deltarholamda]

Interestingly, he's not all that far off in a sense. Many commercial buildings used to be built to be multi-functional. The old school classic 3-story brick, with a shop on the bottom, maybe a workshop above, maybe residential (plus rentable space) on the third.

But once you choose high-density, you don't get much in the way of do-overs. For much the same reason that once you choose thinness as a positive metric for laptops, you lose a lot of flexibility.

[novariation]

Yes it's all about tradeoffs, but I think it's useful to accept (e.g.) in the laptop case that having thin and portable devices isn't necessarily a bad thing and it's likely that a good chunk of consumers will want that even if we create economic incentives and policies to encourage recycling and reuse.

I personally don't think it'd be bad to have a larger chunk of buildings be more versatile but you'd lose some of the economic efficiencies (agglomeration effects and positive spillovers) from the concentration of firms in business districts etc.

In every scenario you win some and lose some, and it's not always clear to me we should go all in on any of the bets.