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Architects explain how they're turning office buildings into apartments with high ceilings and more natural light - Business Insider   

Vacant downtown office buildings may be the next SoHo lofts. That is, after they go through the costly process of being converted into apartments and condos.

Elected officials in cities across the US are trying to solve a housing shortage, empty offices in a remote-work world, and the climate crisis by converting underused commercial space into homes.

Steven Paynter, an expert in office-to-residential conversions at the architecture firm Gensler, thinks converted office buildings will be a trendy, new type of housing. Like the loft apartments converted from former manufacturing spaces that have become some of the most desirable homes in Manhattan, New York, former offices offer unique features and history you can't find in a new building.

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Will China’s Economic Slump Be Contagious? - Intelligencer   

After Xi Jinping abruptly nixed a host of repressive COVID restrictions at the beginning 2023, life in China was supposed to return to normal. But its economy is looking anything but. The central problem at the moment is a long-gestating real-estate crisis, but there are plenty of other indicators flashing red in a country that has become accustomed to steady growth, not crisis. And Xi, an ideologue whose crackdowns on private enterprise and pandemic measures have helped fuel widespread uncertainty, may be exactly the wrong leader to solve the problem. To understand the state of play in China and how it might affect the rest of the world, I spoke with economist Brad Setser, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former staffer at the Treasury Department who frequently writes on the subject.

Every day seems to bring another headline about the weakness of China’s economy. Consumer spending is down, youth unemployment is way up — the government stopped even publishing statistics on that. Is there one concrete thing you can point to as a reason for this malaise? Or do you think this is mostly a vicious cycle where everything is going wrong at once because overall confidence has been shattered?I think there is one fundamental reason for the malaise, and in some sense it is concrete. It is the slowing down of China’s property sector, the fall in new construction, the modest fall in housing prices. A lot of housing prices are artificially being maintained at a high level through various regulations. They’re not being allowed to fall. The property sector, property development, building new apartments, associated infrastructure, furnishing those apartments and the like — had been the biggest component of China’s economy, close to 25 percent of it. That sector is now shrinking. It’s probably between five and 10 percent. So, you just have a really substantial drag on overall activity coming from the property sector. And of course, that is spilling over and having some impacts on broader household confidence. But I think fundamentally, this is about a long-term downshift in the pace of sustainable residential and commercial property development and the associated adjustments in China’s economy.

Was this a predictable outcome in some way, since the boom times had lasted so long and they perhaps weren’t sustainable? Or did it come as a surprise to you and other people who follow this closely?I think it’s been a surprise that this downturn has persisted for as long as it has and that there hasn’t been a stronger policy response to date. That said, there was clearly going to come a time when new construction, which was tightly linked to a series of financial excesses, was going to come down, and that was going to pose a challenge to China’s economy. But the precise timing of the slowdown was clearly initially a policy choice. The “three red lines” policy that triggered the initial property correction was an intentional attempt to deflate a property bubble. And the persistence of this downturn does seem to reflect the fact that the Chinese political system has had some difficulty coming up with a coherent response. But fundamentally, this was both a predictable crisis, and the timing and persistence has been a little bit of a surprise.

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Inside the Ad Boycott That Has Facebook on the Defensive - POLITICO   

Hundreds of companies are boycotting the social media giant. Here’s the backstory of how it happened.

The advertising boycott battering Facebook is unlike anything the social-media giant has faced in its 16-year history: Three days in, 800 companies worldwide have pulled millions of dollars in advertising from the social network, with brands from Coca-Cola to Ford to global conglomerate Unilever demanding that Facebook monitor hate speech more aggressively.

With pullouts mounting and the company’s name constantly tied to racism and hate in the news coverage, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded by livestreaming part of an employee meeting — one of the few times he’s done that in the company’s history. Then, on Wednesday, Facebook’s powerhouse policy and communications chief, former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, issued an open letter, titled “Facebook does not benefit from hate,” touting its efforts to police its content.

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