Today is the Fix the Tix Coalition’s day of advocacy, seeking passage of the Fans First Act, which’d protect US consumers from price gouging, hidden costs, and other predatory ticketing practices. The coalition, which includes independent venues and artists like Billie Eilish, Dave Matthews, Cyndi Lauper, and Green Day, doesn’t mention any opponents by name, but we have this strange hunch it rhymes with “cricket blaster.”
In today’s email:
Home office: Turning old offices into housing to save downtowns.
Content is king: Gen Zers consider themselves video pros.
Weird patents: Waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
Around the web: All the musical subgenres, sleep studies, and more.
👇 Listen: What’s the story with the new inflatable space station coming in 2030?
The Big Idea
Credit: Williams New York
Can converting offices to housing save downtowns?
Underused office buildings could revitalize dying downtowns as housing.
2024-07-09T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
An estimated 24% of US office buildings will be vacant by 2026 as employees continue to work from home, cutting commercial property values by up to $250B.
But shrinking downtowns predate covid. In 2019, architecture firm Gensler had already developed an algorithm to determine which underused office buildings could become residences, largely eyeing cities where a major industry had left — e.g., the auto industry in Detroit, or Calgary’s oil industry.
How it works
Steven Paynter, Gensler’s global building transformation & adaptive reuse leader, told The Hustle that the algorithm quickly breaks down a building’s data, then compares it to a “Goldilocks” building — “a perfect residential building in that same neighborhood” — to determine if it’ll work.
What makes a building a good fit?
Paynter said they’re most often approached with “Class B” buildings — they’re neither high quality nor cheap, and thus will never bounce back.
But the biggest issue is the distance between the elevators and the windows. Ideally, it’s ~35 feet, allowing for 30-foot-deep units.
But not every building needs to work:
The US office vacancy rate is currently 20%.
While 30%-35% of office buildings can be converted, just 10% would alter demand to make remaining offices more viable, per Gensler.
In Calgary, five office-residential conversion projects are creating 1.2k+ new housing units and office vacancy rates are trending down.
Why it’s beneficial
Office buildings and their open floor plans offer developers flexibility, and can accommodate ground-floor businesses. Grouped together, that creates a desirable neighborhood.
Also, buildings aren’t torn down, meaning:
Communities usually don’t push back, unlike with new construction.
Conversions retain ~90% of existing concrete. Concrete accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions, 4x that of the airline industry, so retaining it is a massive boon to sustainability.
Can this fix the housing crisis?
Well, maybe — if developers receive incentives from local or federal governments to create affordable housing; a lack of such funding is largely why only 5% of the possible conversions Gensler has identified are underway.
The White House does have a 54-page guidebook to such funding, if you’re interested in some light bedtime reading.
toolbox
Take it from people who’ve been called “tools” over and over again — tools ain’t so bad. In fact, these ones might just make you better at your job:
💡Flip that switch: All founders need to go “beast mode” at some point. Two experienced hands will show you how it’s done.
🏆 Winning habits: The biographer who captured John Wooden’s and Walter Payton’s stories shares the daily routines and mindsets that propelled those legends to the top.
TRENDING
French cyclist Julien Bernard was hit with a $223 fine for stopping mid-race to kiss his wife and son during the Tour de France. Cycling’s governing body said Bernard’s behavior did “damage to the image of sport” because they are idiots. Hard to imagine a better spent $223.
SNIPPETS
Boeing is taking a plea deal to avoid going to trial over two 737 Max crashes. The company will pay a $243.6m fine and invest at least $455m in compliance and safety measures.
Paramount Global and Skydance Media sealed their merger, putting Skydance CEO David Ellison in charge of iconic brands like Paramount Pictures, CBS, Nickelodeon, MTV, and more. Skydance will invest $8B in the media company.
Eli Lilly is buying Morphic Holding for $3.2B to expand its drug offerings and compete in the multibillion-dollar irritable bowel disease market.
John Deere will lay off ~600 employees in Iowa and Illinois due to reduced demand and declining farms in the US.
The FDAbanned brominated vegetable oil — often used to stabilize citrus flavors — in all US foods and drinks after studies found adverse health effects, including hyperthyroidism.
Microsoft added spellcheck and autocorrect to its Notepad app, which has somehow been around for 40+ years without either feature enabled.
SpaceX won a $843m NASA contract to destroy the International Space Station. That’s not a typo: When the ISS is retired in 2030, a SpaceX-built spacecraft will guide the space lab out of orbit so it properly burns up on reentry.
Copenhagen is launching CopenPay, a new initiative that will reward climate-friendly tourists who support the city’s green initiatives — biking, train travel, cleaning up, etc. — with free access to activities.
Air France said it expects a revenue shortfall of $172m-$195m this summer, thanks to the Paris Olympics. Some tourists are avoiding the City of Lights during the games and other airlines have upped competition on Paris-bound routes.
Google Doc hacks: Read our Google Doc master guide to speed up your workflow with 25 hotkey commands, advanced features, and tons of little timesaving shortcuts.
Don't miss this...
Nobody likes emails that are self-serving, pointless, or pushy. So maybe stop sending them? This list shows the five worst sales emails a person can send and how to fix them.
Data Point
Content creation generation: If you know a Gen Zer, it’s likely they love social media. And video remains king for the younger crowd: Nearly one in five teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok “almost constantly.”
What’s more surprising is that Gen Z isn’t just consuming content, they’re creating it — a whopping 65% of people ages 14 to 24 described themselves as video content creators in a recent YouTube survey, perThe Washington Post.
Young people aren’t just turning their cameras on in the hopes of landing sponsorships, but as part of a shift to a more participatory internet. Uploading reactions, commentary, and responses via video has become much easier with user-friendly video apps like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Unfortunately, this can only lead to one thing: more content creators running wild in your local community. Stay safe out there.
fit the bill
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: Initially a division of Microsoft, this website was a dot-com boom success story, spinning off into a public company in 1999.
Clue 2: She may not have grown up flying commercial, but it didn’t stop Chelsea Clinton from being installed on this travel company’s board of directors.
Clue 3: This company owns a fair share of the fare-sharing economy, with a portfolio including its namesake site, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, and Trivago.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
Weird Patents
Rise and a shiner: Well before the days of smartphone alarms, waking up on time required special gadgets. That’s why, in 1882, Samuel Applegate of New Jersey patented a “device for waking persons from sleep” for early birds who never wanted to miss a worm. The invention involved a wooden frame hanging over a person’s pillow that would drop onto their face at a predetermined time. Applegate wrote, “It will strike a light blow, sufficient to awaken the sleeper, but not heavy enough to cause pain.” Ouch.
AROUND THE WEB
🍒 On this day: In 1850, President Zachary Taylor died mysteriously after 16 months in office. Taylor had eaten cherries with iced milk, then water, leading to speculation that he may have died of cholera present in either the ice or water.
🎵 That’s cool: A place to learn about hundreds of music genres.
🛌 That’s interesting: Some people think they were tossing and turning all night, even when they slept.
Today’s Fit the Bill answer is Expedia Group (Market cap: $16.49B)
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman. Editing by: Ben “Starting to think nobody likes Ticketmaster all that much” Berkley.
