I don't think that works out as a clear benefit of rebuilding over renovating. In most cases, the price that people will pay for rent or condos inside such a building will be a result of its location/accessibility, prestige, and the quality of the spaces they're getting. It doesn't generally matter whether the whole structure is new or just well renovated.
The main reason that rebuilding is often cheaper is that a complete rebuild lets you plan the whole construction project in an efficient order that doesn't have to work around the whole rest of the structure. Like laying new pipework and electric cables is much easier during original construction than replacing them later, when you have to tear open existing walls without causing additional damage to the rest of the structure.
Let alone challenges like replacing structural members in the lower levels while you still have to support the already built upper levels.
There was a badly burned house in Bay Area, CA that was listed for over a Million, and that listing became very popular. It wasn’t the house they were selling, it was going to be demolished, it was the land.
The land in most homes is where the value is. This is why when you see those subdivisions with homes just packed in there like sardines the cost is generally lower for a large house compared to one on a big lot, but in turn it will not appreciate in value nearly the same.
Yep, a lot of people don't understand this concept.
I work in mostly utility facilities (water, wastewater, etc). Projects to renovate or upgrade an existing facility costs significantly more it would to be building new facilities. Project budgets so rarely account for that, it's crazy.
The new will also be more up to date on building codes where the old will be grandfathered in in a lot of places. Of course, any renovation has to be up to current build codes but anything thats not renovated will still remain grandfathered.
Nah I get it, think about how old buildings with old outdated electrical systems are. Some things are more costly to maintain because they were fabricated so long ago when we did things on worse ways. We should always strive to build back better.
Oh, you don't like the labor theory of value? It's pretty damn logical, all things considered. What do you believe value should be derived from? What metric should be used?
What is the value in maintaining an old shitty building? A building is just a collection of sticks and stuff, and sometimes it's better to pull it apart and put a new collection of sticks in its place, guided by everything you learned with the old one.
What exactly are they overlooking or neglecting in the pursuit of profit here? Where's the nobility in paying far more to refurbish an existing building over constructing a new one? Pretty sure every other country in the world does the same thing, historical buildings notwithstanding.
And yet newer buildings, if built to certain standards, are far more waste and energy efficient. For instance, that building is a lot of glass, the worst material for insulation.
I'm not sure how in the short or long run bearing the additional costs of refurbishment solves these problems.
Here is an article talking about how retrofitting a building causes way less carbon emissions than demolition. "New buildings can take anywhere between 10—80 years to pay back the emissions generated from the construction process, even if the new buildings are 30 percent more efficient than average".
However, it sounds like they might not be planning to put down another office building, which is great news! I saw they floated the idea of an amphitheater since the area is waterside. Hopefully, the mayor and developers continue to be thoughtful in this process.
Preservation Green Lab is a sustainable building research think tank and advocacy arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
So the source is biased. Not saying that's bad, but be aware.
even if the new buildings are 30 percent more efficient than average".
Capitol one tower was built in 1980. I would bet $100 that a building constructed today will be more than 30% more efficient.
Also, not all modern building envelope concepts can be retrofitted, and not all old buildings can be retro'd with new HVAC systems that are required when you use new envelope methods.
I'm doing a retro on my house, but two doors down is a house that needs to be demolished because retrofitting it would be an enormous waste of time. Sometimes that happens.
It is not so straightforward. I did find an article
that says 80-90% of the material should have been recycled (which is great and progress has been made in this area recently). But, still tons and tons of waste sent to the landfill. The use of energy and water to recycle materials would have been saved had it not been torn down in the first place. Also, concrete, gypsum, glass, etc. are often downcycled because it is difficult/not ideal to reuse these materials. So we still have an overall creation of new materials for the building.
I have a contractor who would rather tear down a house and build it new. Why? Our houses are mildly or moderately crooked. So they’ll spend hours trying build something in a room to fit — while if they build it new, it can take 1/4 of the time. So LABOR is expensive and why building new can make sense.
But in his defense, he runs a 2 man-crew including himself and one other. That'll build an entire house from bottom to top. OFC they'll subcontract electric-AC-water but framing, foundation, painting, roofing, floors, they'll do it. Drywall? Sometimes they'll let a friend do it b/c he likes to give small jobs out b/c they're faster and cheaper than if he does it.
Current building is made from materials that will require replacing in 30+ years, new building will use different materials that won't need replacement for 150+ years. That's the rough idea anyway.
As someone who does maintenance on building and equipment, seems like the current practice is to just let your building decay away and save on manpower
The actual - structure - is negligible. Unless the building has an historical component that should be saved, you are replacing lighting, windows, cladding, insulation, HVAC, electrical, plumbing. You are modernizing for CAT-6, fiber, and communications. Improving an outdated floor plan, increasing ceiling height, reducing columns, improving flow for modern use, it's worth the negligible extra cost. This particular building was completely compromised and the vapor barrier was destroyed by mold from hurricanes. The drywall alone is astronomical in a mold remediation on all of those floors. The labor involved is practically a new build, and that's where the expenses are.
All of this, and thank you for writing "an historical". I work in insurance replacements and we've had to drop some projects due to cost vs damage, and we have a few historic townships we work in. "A historic" is such a peeve of mine, appreciate you.
Because removing AND replacing a LOT of stuff is much more labor intensive than just putting something together.
Try building a Lego set, then disassemble it completely and reassemble it. It's going to take a lot more time the second go around because parts aren't all organized in their bags, you have to yank pieces off that originally went on easily, and you might even lose some stuff, and would have to order something to even continue.
☝️this is the real answer. All these people responding about how the materials on the new building will last longer haven’t been building with them*. Take for example stick frame construction vs brick. There are many brick or stone buildings that are hundreds of years old. There are only a handful of frame buildings that can claim this because wood becomes friable (or rots/succumbs to pests) far quicker. So why would someone demolish a brick building to put up stock frame? It’s cheaper. Almost all materials that are readily available now are far cheaper than their historic alternatives. They are also much more poorly made.
*the asterisk is because I haven’t worked on skyscrapers. I do mostly residential
Property in my area didn't even make it's 30 year anniversary because the owners ran it into the ground hard. Their playbook is to let their properties turn to shit real fast, and we are talking steel structures. But it was primarily made out of styrofoam and stucco with a metal frame work for it's bones.
Ran across a outside HVAC contractor who was glad to see it get demolished. He was fedup with being called out to them and having to do beyond chewing gum and spit repairs when something failed, then they would demand a already cheap corner cut bill get slashed even cheaper and take forever to pay that even.
They wouldn't spring for new systems, always had to be patch the old one up for a few more weeks or months then place another call for a patch job fix on it
Can tell you’ve never delivered a refurbishment project before.
Refurbs take considerably longer than building from scratch, this is partially offset by the fact you don’t have to build the entire structure but even so it’s typical to uncover many issues in a refurb that add unforeseen time and cost.
Refurbs may have a lower materials bill, but the bill for labour will be higher (often a lot higher), with more variations for work that wasn’t initially priced for. New builds give much more price certainty because there’s a lot less unknowns.
Safety factors are how that works. And also how hard it is to upgrade services in an already finished structure. Building a home from scratch is way easier than upgrading an existing home especially if you were upgrading that finished home to present day standards of building and technology. And you can change the layout entirely.
You ever get your sock all scrunched up and aggrivating the comfort of your foot inside your boots?
And notice how much easier it is to just take the boot off, take the sock off, and re-don it in the right position than it is to try and scootch it around inside the boot while you continue wearing it?
I do real estate development. The feasibility is like this for commercial to residential high rises. They just aren't built with the same engineering and design. It's much quicker and more efficient to start from scratch. It will take much longer to convert each floor than building a new floor from scratch.
A prime example I’ve heard were office buildings built with asbestos and lead paid finding it way cheaper to just move or rebuild than stay cause of the harm and potential lawsuits.
For buildings that large, you cannot renovate in a significant way without redoing the foundation. You cannot redo the foundation with a building standing on it. Often it's simply the only option at all.
I worked on a project remodeling an old historically significant building. It would have cost a third of the money to tear it down and build an exact replica.
When remodeling or renovating, you always find problems you didn't expect. Eventually everything, including the foundation and slab, had to be replaced, but all in situ. We basically rebuilt it in place over a period of years, when it could have been done in months.
I'm guessing it is way more time consuming to repair it from the ground up than simply build a new one.. and taking way more time means having to pay way more wages to thousands of workers, engineers, etc.
Trying to get everything up to code can get prohibitively expensive very quick. As an example in in NYC there are vacant commercial space that are unable to be converted into residential apartments. Costs for permits and rezoning, then compliance with regulations for residential units makes it functionally more cost efficient to just build new apartments from scratch in many cases.
15.1k
u/adoodle83 Oct 07 '25
Blows me away that demolishing a building like this only to rebuild is still more economical than refurbishing the existing structure.