<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>kdmccormick</author><text>Develop the conserved federal land? No way. Let&amp;#x27;s redevelop some of the effing parking lots and one-storey strip malls that take up half the land space in most US cities.&lt;p&gt;Real life example, Assembly Square near Boston: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ScoutSomerville&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1211708380391366658&amp;#x2F;photo&amp;#x2F;1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;ScoutSomerville&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;12117083803913666...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>RyanAdamas</author><text>This is why changing zoning laws is so important. These buildings and their underlying values can be saved by &amp;#x27;going condo&amp;#x27; or conversion to smaller unit spaces for the purpose of housing so many who are struggling with massive increases to rent. Most rent does not increase because of increased asset expenses, it increases because of increased owner expenses and that quickly becomes a slippery slope in the face of advancing inflation and housing prices.&lt;p&gt;Rent is becoming a social tool for class stratification and it began in classically liberal cities when they started asking for First+Last+1Mo Dep which often equaled $5k+ in one shot. That used to be a down payment for a house and it&amp;#x27;s absolutely ridiculous given the amount of money rental income sucks out of the economy that would otherwise be used for production and consumption.&lt;p&gt;In the United States, the government holds hundreds of millions of acres of land in trust and it needs to be relinquished in part to help grow the actual base of humanity they hold stewardship over, even if it means reducing investment values for the rich and powerful who have amassed so much through manufactured crises. Blackrock and other hedge funds should have never been given the power to buy homes the way they did by the Fed; it was just another shell game to hide their incredible myopia.&lt;p&gt;So much so, they are now backtracking on a labor advancement which is remote work in order to stabilize their personal portfolios in real estate. That&amp;#x27;s a conflict of interest that can be tantamount to investor fraud considering the Board is not acting in the best interest of the shareholders, but in the market for which they are beholden through consolidated power at hedge funds and banks.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Office real estate crash will be so sharp, values unlikely to recover by 2040</title><url>https://fortune.com/2023/06/23/commercial-real-estate-crash-office-values-unlikely-to-recover-by-2040-says-capital-economics/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nocoiner</author><text>This is not really how a lot of this works.&lt;p&gt;Zoning is basically irrelevant - the problem is that the cost of converting an outmoded commercial building to residential is usually within the same order of magnitude as knocking it down and putting up something built for purpose. I would bet real money that there aren’t more than a handful of municipal governments that would die on the hill of maintaining existing zoning restrictions if they had viable proposals to convert vacant commercial buildings.&lt;p&gt;Those millions of acres owned by the government are mostly desert and national parks and in any event there’s no shortage of privately owned undeveloped land closer to existing cities (or hollowed out existing cities that are ripe for a renaissance).&lt;p&gt;Also, just nitpicks, but when was $5k a down payment for a house? 1955? And BlackRock isn’t a hedge fund. You might be thinking of Blackstone (also not a hedge fund, but they own portfolio companies that are buying up a lot of single-family housing and turning them into rental properties, which is evidently extremely lucrative but I find incredibly distasteful).</text><parent_chain><item><author>RyanAdamas</author><text>This is why changing zoning laws is so important. These buildings and their underlying values can be saved by &amp;#x27;going condo&amp;#x27; or conversion to smaller unit spaces for the purpose of housing so many who are struggling with massive increases to rent. Most rent does not increase because of increased asset expenses, it increases because of increased owner expenses and that quickly becomes a slippery slope in the face of advancing inflation and housing prices.&lt;p&gt;Rent is becoming a social tool for class stratification and it began in classically liberal cities when they started asking for First+Last+1Mo Dep which often equaled $5k+ in one shot. That used to be a down payment for a house and it&amp;#x27;s absolutely ridiculous given the amount of money rental income sucks out of the economy that would otherwise be used for production and consumption.&lt;p&gt;In the United States, the government holds hundreds of millions of acres of land in trust and it needs to be relinquished in part to help grow the actual base of humanity they hold stewardship over, even if it means reducing investment values for the rich and powerful who have amassed so much through manufactured crises. Blackrock and other hedge funds should have never been given the power to buy homes the way they did by the Fed; it was just another shell game to hide their incredible myopia.&lt;p&gt;So much so, they are now backtracking on a labor advancement which is remote work in order to stabilize their personal portfolios in real estate. That&amp;#x27;s a conflict of interest that can be tantamount to investor fraud considering the Board is not acting in the best interest of the shareholders, but in the market for which they are beholden through consolidated power at hedge funds and banks.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Office real estate crash will be so sharp, values unlikely to recover by 2040</title><url>https://fortune.com/2023/06/23/commercial-real-estate-crash-office-values-unlikely-to-recover-by-2040-says-capital-economics/</url></story>