What It Takes to Convert a Multi-Million Dollar Office Into Housing
That’s a whole other set of problems, I know I’ve read articles about that too but a 15 second google didn’t find it.
If I remember right, the main issue isn’t the building shape like with skyscrapers, it has to do with power and plumbing. They’re only set up for a certain amount of usage of both, and residential is massively higher and you basically need to ripe it all out and do it from scratch. And considering malls are predomenantly just in the middle of empty land anyway, at that point you might as well just get the next bit over of empty land and do it from the get go with the appropriate infrastructure.
What It Takes to Convert a Multi-Million Dollar Office Into Housing
The Modern Farmhouse Is Today’s McMansion.
The Math Problem Stymieing Small Businesses in Rural America
The article is about a kind of niche problem that I hadn’t ever considered before, appraisals for buildings in rural areas are either low because there are less people who might want them (especially for specialized new commerical construction) while building costs keep rising OR the price of land in touristy areas is so high no one can afford to buy for local businesses. Either way, it complicates actually growing or starting businesses in those places. WSJ tends to have a paywall, so feel free to use https://archive.ph/ [https://archive.ph/] if you don’t already have a preferred way of bypassing that.
Portugal's drug decriminalization faces growing opposition as downsides grow
Not at all to say the net balance on the pros/cons for decriminalization has tipped, especially since one of the main points the article mentions is that the funding that was supposed to social services and rehabilitation programs that went hand in hand with decriminalization has absolutely cratered over the last decade, but flubbing the execution on programs like this is why they don’t catch on more and one of the main (and to be fair valid) points of contention about spreading ideas like this further.
If you're enjoying this, I might recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. Guns, Germs, and Steel was one of the first books in that genre of "where do we come from" style books I (and a ton of people) read and loved, but it gets a fair bit of flack for skipping over stuff to support their theory.
Dawn of Everything is sort of the next step from that, it doesn't explicitly refute GGS outside of a time or two they were directly wrong so much as just be much more comprehensive and point out how insanely varied our history is and that there isn't really a one size fits all story. It's weirdly conversational, I've described it as sitting in on a lecture from a really ecentric professor, and I think any who loved how GGS opened their eyes to common threads in our history and what that might say about the world now.