Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments?
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Hi, this is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Each week I answer a question I have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, a question concerning empty office buildings that I think a lot of people have right now. We'll get into it after these ads. Search Engine is brought to you by Sleep Me and their ChiliPad bed cooling system.

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Currently, I have been working out of an office. It's cool. Feels like the olden times, before everybody had their meetings on their couch while apologizing for how they were dressed or what their children were doing. Next door to the office where I work, there's this other office that is perfectly frozen in time. They have a big pile of unopened mail stacked just inside their glass door and a hastily typed sign saying, everyone's working from home, but we'll be back soon. Something to that effect.

New York is filled with empty offices right now. New York's not special, so it's pretty much everywhere else. And I recently got an email from this woman named Julia, who lives in Santa Rosa, California, and had a question about that state of affairs. Here she is reading her email.

I live in an area with a catastrophic housing shortage and sky-high rental prices. However, the odd thing I've noticed is that an extreme surplus of commercial properties will sit vacant and empty on the market for months or years. Oh yeah, here's the other thing. The offices are all empty. Apartments are just ridiculously expensive. Shortage of affordable apartments. Surplus of empty offices. Maybe you can see this question coming.

Why, when we have such a shortage of housing, does there seem to be no reason to convert vacant real estate into residential properties? It's a great question. The thought you have had, I have had in Brooklyn and in Toronto, where I visit friends sometimes, where...

Housing seems very scarce. And you walk around and there's so much empty commercial property. And not empty for a little bit, like empty forever. And it feels like one of those problems where you're like,

Right. How would having empty property be more profitable than having a tenant in there? Yeah.

Julia was so hung up on this question that as we were wrapping up, she mentioned that when she drives around Santa Rosa, California, where she lives, she'll sometimes take photographs of the empty buildings she thinks should be converted into apartments. I would drive by often and just see these places. And it was while I was usually looking for a place to live. And I was like, I can live there. It's a house. Like, why can't I live there? Yeah.

I really like this question, partly because it just feels like the kind of thing I'm tempted to try to explain without understanding. Like, oh, something, something zoning, maybe? Or something, something capitalism, probably? But if you actually press me to explain it, I would struggle. I think most people would. And I wanted to remedy that. After a short break, we try to find a real answer. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight.

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Welcome back to the show. So this question, the more I looked into it, perhaps not surprisingly, while it was fascinating to learn about, it's very complicated. Complicated enough, I actually want to give you a table of contents at the start of this.

So to understand why an office building can't just turn into an apartment, we're going to give you an answer in a few chapters. Chapter one, why zoning makes this really hard. Chapter two, why the buildings themselves are making this very hard. Chapter three, why the people in the town are making it very hard. And chapter four, who needs to die in order to fix this? I'm not kidding. People will have to die. So let's get started. Hi, Bill. How's it going? Hi, PJ. Hey, Jay.

To help us get into chapter one of our answer, zoning, I called a man named Bill Fulton. Bill has spent his life thinking about zoning and cities in one way or another. Early in his career, he was a journalist. Later, he was a mayor of a town called Ventura, California. And after that, he was San Diego's urban planning director. What does a planning director do? The planning director...

in San Diego oversees the long-term plans for all the neighborhoods, how big the buildings can be, what infrastructure has to be included. You get into big fights with the neighbors over whether there's going to be more development in their neighborhood, that kind of thing. So you sort of play SimCity, but with everybody yelling at you. Yes, that's exactly what a planner does. That sounds really, as somebody who just finds SimCity stressful, that sounds terrible.

I told Bill about Julia's question, and I told him why I'd assumed zoning was the culprit. In my brain, zoning is just all the regulations that say, in a given city, what can get built where. Why some streets are filled with houses and others are filled with stores. And I figured the obstacle stopping Julia's empty office from becoming a full apartment was probably a zoning obstacle. Well, first of all, it is correct that zoning has traditionally been very inflexible. And...

underneath zoning is the assumption that different types of uses of land, you know, houses,

stores, factories, they should all be separated. Why do we assume that we should separate those things? Like, where does that historic idea come from? Right, it originally came 100 plus years ago from the idea that in those days, a toxic factory might be right next door to houses or to an apartment building. And so separating those two things became very important. There's a sort of a classist and racist idea

Bill is condensing about a hundred years of very complex history into a paragraph.

which is a very courteous thing of him to do. But I actually want to uncondense it and give you a history of the story of zoning. Because even though story of zoning sounds like the title for a book so boring you could hide drugs in it, it's actually a good story. And it's a story that gets at a question underneath the question that Julia, our listener, is asking. That question is just, why do we have a housing shortage in the first place?

In the 1910s, it was becoming clear that there was something very wrong with American cities. Skyscrapers had recently been invented, and in New York, people were building them pretty much willy-nilly all over the place. As the skyscrapers got taller, the streets themselves were getting darker and darker as these new buildings blocked out the sun, which meant that now, if you were a builder and you wanted light, you had to build your own tall building, and your tall building required someone else to build their tall building.

It's the kind of everyone-has-to-be-selfish-and-insane-because-there-are-no-rules style of behavior that you might see at Best Buy on Black Friday. Into this hectic scene steps Edward Murray Bassett, the so-called father of American zoning, who points out we probably need some regulation here because otherwise the cities are going to be a total free-for-all. These new laws said that citizens would not be forced to live in overcrowded living conditions, buildings would have to offer everyone natural light,

nobody's apartment would be next door to a slaughterhouse. Many of the assumptions we take for granted about what constitutes a good home are actually written into zoning laws like these. Of course, there's another side to these laws that planning director Bill Fulton alluded to. You're probably familiar with this, but I'll give you an example. In Los Angeles, in 1904, the city's very first zoning law was passed, and what it does is it bans laundries from certain residential neighborhoods.

Which sounds perhaps like a strange priority for the first zoning law, unless you know that many of these laundries were owned by Chinese citizens, who the planning committee wanted to exclude from white neighborhoods. In the years that follow, these kinds of zoning laws actually become less subtle, more explicit. In 1910, Baltimore passes a segregation zoning law that makes black neighborhoods black and white neighborhoods white, a trend that spreads throughout American cities until it's knocked down by the Supreme Court in 1917.

Zoning in America in the decades that follow remains this strange mix of these two impulses. One word, zoning, describing both common sense regulations meant to make cities more livable, but also, in many cases, to allow neighborhoods to exclude groups of people. And the thing is, it's not always clear, looking at a particular zoning regulation, which kind of regulation it is.

If you want to understand how complicated this can get, how not straightforward and messy and strange it can all be, I would invite you to consider something I have never thought very hard about. The idea of a single family home. Literally the archetypical house that a child draws when you ask them to draw a house. The setting of every sitcom, the plays where both the Flintstones and the Simpsons live.

many people in America, regardless of their race, their income, the level of prejudice in their hearts, would just prefer to live in a single-family home. But zoning a neighborhood for single-family homes has also historically been a tool for keeping out poor people or people who aren't white. When in 1917, the Supreme Court ruled you couldn't have a whites-only neighborhood,

Canny city planners, realizing that white wealthy people at the time were much more likely to live in single-family houses, just excluded tenement buildings from certain neighborhoods. Like Berkeley, California. Originally zoned single-family to keep the neighborhood white and wealthy. In 2021, the very progressive city council passed a bill condemning the racist history of single-family zoning in Berkeley. But the process of actually convincing people who own expensive houses to allow apartment buildings to be built next door to them...

The council indicated that while that work was important, it wasn't going to happen overnight. Bill Fulton says that zoning restrictions like the ones in Berkeley have become one of the big reasons we don't have enough affordable housing in this country. If you go to a city like Los Angeles,

and you go to the most desirable parts of town, say the west side, you will see vast areas that are zoned for single-family homes. If you removed zoning, many of those single-family homes would be redeveloped to higher density, and there would be a lot more housing available. So to a certain extent, single-family zoning is used by homeowners to retain housing

what they call the character of their neighborhood, which of course excludes others, right? And also inevitably increases the price of the houses. It doesn't necessarily increase their property values because they might literally make more money if they could tear their house down and build something more. But it does raise the value of the houses that are there above what they otherwise would be.

In pretty much every American city, there's a zoning debate happening between two sides. You might be familiar with it. NIMBYs versus YIMBYs. On one side, the NIMBYs, the not-in-my-backyard activists, who are often against new development because they typically own houses and they think it'll hurt the price of their house to have, like, a duplex next door. And on the other side, the YIMBYs, the yes-in-my-backyard activists, who want more housing built so that their neighborhood becomes a more affordable place to live.

Bill Fulton began his zoning career in California, a state where this NIMBY v. YIMBY debate has been raging for a very long time. But these days, he's relocated to Houston, which, if you're a zoning freak, you know is a pretty big deal. Because Houston, famously for us zone heads, is a city that does not have zoning requirements. Which means, if you live there, you're sort of a de facto YIMBY.

completely unique in America. Just picture a city without zoning laws for a minute. You can build anything anywhere. In fact, in one of my regular slideshows, I have a funny picture of a single-family house in Houston and a roller coaster right behind it. Is that an argument for or against zoning? Well, I have to explain that not everybody in Houston has a roller coaster in their backyard, and in fact, some people might want one. Obviously, I look this up.

The Houston Chronicle interviewed the Killian family, who lives right next to the Boardwalk Bullet. Their white two-story house is just underneath this enormous wooden roller coaster. This is a video taken from the front seat. You can see their house. While some people might want a roller coaster in the backyard, the Killian family said, quote, it's such a shame, really. We all used to just love the peaceful quiet.

So in a city without zoning laws, where neither the homeowners nor the city gets to say what should get built where, who does decide? What happens in Houston is that developers tend to dictate what gets built. So you see a lot of single-family homes being torn down and replaced with four to six townhomes on the same parcel.

And you see a lot of old, in urban areas, little mini malls being torn down and replaced by, say, five-story apartment buildings.

And do you feel like, like, does Houston feel like, does it feel like an advertisement for what we can have when we don't have zoning? Does it feel like a cautionary tale of, like, why some zoning is helpful? It's both. It's actually, interestingly enough, it's both. Traditionally, in urban planning, Houston was seen as an anomaly, this strange place that didn't have any zoning, so it must be weird.

And it is kind of weird if you look at it in some ways, like the roller coaster in the backyard. But at the same time, as the inflexibility of zoning has become more apparent, partly because of the housing shortage and partly because of this revisiting the racist history, Houston has come to be viewed as a place to look at, to say, okay, if you don't have zoning or you loosen it up, what happens? And the answer is you get more housing built.

New housing is still mostly high-end housing, but there's definitely more opportunity and more options in a place like Houston than you see in most other cities at this point. And you think that other cities might eventually become more Houston-like, either because people are looking at zoning laws and seeing what was...

socially undesirable about it from our more progressive present or because they're just like we're out of space and like everything can't be a suburb anymore yes i do think that other cities will become more like houston they probably won't give up zoning altogether but they'll make zoning more flexible than it has historically been

So to go back to Julia, remember Julia, and her question, she lives in Santa Rosa, California, a town that unlike Houston does have zoning laws. And zoning is likely one obstacle to the conversions that she wants to see happen. But it turns out there's another one, probably a more significant one, which leads us to chapter two, the buildings themselves. Bill says that the way office buildings are constructed is a bigger obstacle to conversion than most people realize.

Right now, we're looking at every downtown in America with a lot of empty streets.

office space. So why can't you convert that to apartments, right? There are a lot of people trying to figure that out. In some cases that has happened, particularly with older buildings, you get to a bigger retail space and a bigger office space, and it actually gets pretty complicated. We are now to the point where most of the vacant office space that we're seeing in downtowns

is from the last time we had a huge office boom, which was the 1980s. The floor plates are huge. So, you know, a typical floor plate, by which I mean to say the size of a floor in one of those office buildings, is maybe 50,000 square feet. So that's very hard to convert to apartments because there's so much interior space that would be without windows.

I see. You picture like a giant office bullpen with tons of cubicles. Right. And you try to convert that into apartments when you have that much space that would wind up being interior without windows. That's very hard. Bill says the conversions that can be done easily, often they have been done. That's why in a lot of cities, old factories that used to make pencils or shoes are now luxury condos. But that's not enough. We still need more housing. So what do you do?

Well, Bill says there's a different kind of commercial space that is actually ripe for redevelopment. Huge properties that increasingly look like empty ghost towns in the hearts of American cities. Shopping malls.

Conversion of old retail space and particularly old malls is more promising. And usually the malls have the largest contiguous land ownership in built up desirable areas. So interesting. And we are beginning to see more and more malls being redeveloped as at least part of the property being redeveloped for apartments or condos.

There's a bunch of complicated factors there. Nevertheless, sometimes developers work around that and you are seeing more and more redevelopment of old malls into mostly housing. That's probably the most promising part of it. More promising probably than the big old office buildings because...

It's not that hard to tear down a mall. So that's happening more and more. I see. So it's not that malls, because when you started saying that, I was like, well, when I picture like, you know, the King of Prussia Mall where I spent my youth in Pennsylvania, that also seems hard to convert into, like, I wouldn't want to live at the, I mean, I would have wanted to have lived at the GameStop. Now I would not want to live at the GameStop. But what you're saying is they're easier to tear down. Right. You typically don't convert the mall building to residential. You tear it down.

Typically, you do not convert the mall building to residential, but sometimes you do. If you find yourself needing to restore your sense of wonder at the strangeness of this world, I suggest you Google apartment building inside mall in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, a building called the Arcade. There's a video of this online.

Inside, it looks like a normal shopping mall. Vaulted ceilings, two-story mezzanine, except on the top floor, the stores have been converted into apartments. - This is my humble abode. So you can see it's pretty small, but it's really all you need. - This medical student gives a tour of her place. It really is small. The kitchen has a tiny fridge, very few cabinets.

It's like a kitchen you'd see in a boat, maybe, or in a European hostel. It's an efficiency kitchen, which doesn't have a stove. So I bought my own toaster oven, which works well. The people living in this mall, there's a person with a small business who makes soap. There's a graphic designer. What they have in common is that they are people who say they're comfortable making some compromises to save money. And then I have my closet, which...

Has been a struggle, but I figured out if you can get slim hangers, that works out really well. It's a fascinating, adaptive way to live. It just takes a little getting used to.

It's funny, I was talking recently with a friend who worked at a video game company in Washington State. And I like their video games and I've tried to picture their offices before and I always pictured their offices in this very cool high-tech way. And I was asking about it and he was like, no, we're in a mall. We're above a mall. We take an elevator down and we go to the food court. And my head was like, oh, that's kind of ridiculous and

I feel kind of embarrassed to say like, oh, kind of unglamorous or something. And hearing you describe it, I should be happy about that because what that probably represents is a city being versatile enough to adjust to how it's changed and to put the things that people need where they need them. I think what you just described, PJ, suggests how deeply embedded in our psyche this separation of development is. The idea that you might have an office

above a mall with a food court. You know, a hundred years ago, having your office above a retail area in a downtown would have been considered very normal. And in other parts of the world, it's still considered very normal. And yet we think it's really weird if it's in a suburban mall. But I think you're going to see that more and more. Bill Fulton says in the 1980s, there were around 3,000 malls in America.

By the time the post-COVID shakeout is done, we'll have about 300, which gives us some more room for housing. Although honestly, we'll need even more than that. Probably a lot more. But in order to get a lot more housing, we will have to surmount our third obstacle. The third reason Julia cannot have what she wants, an office building turned into an apartment building. The obstacle at the heart of most things. That obstacle, after the break. Search Engine is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs.

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Welcome back to the show. Okay. First things first, very easy. Can you just introduce yourself and say what you do for a living? Sure. My name is Raisa De La Rosa, and I am the Division Director for Economic Development for the city of Santa Rosa. ♪

After I spoke with Bill Fulton, I got in touch with the city of Santa Rosa. I was trying to understand how people can be an obstacle to changing cities. And I thought for that, I wanted to actually zoom in on the specific place where Julia lives. Right, you said Della Rosa works in local government in Santa Rosa. She deals with people all day.

She's got a bit of a Leslie Knope vibe, somebody who believes in the civic process, who's very optimistic, who's happy in the weeds. She's worked for the city for 17 years now. Before that, she ran a performing arts theater. I think what makes me probably good at what I do is because I come from an arts background, like I see things probably a little differently or see opportunity differently or, you know, have an understanding of something differently combined with my childhood love of bureaucracy.

I've never heard of anyone saying that they have a childhood love of bureaucracy. This is, like, there's so much creativity in how you can get things done. Like, I don't know what this is, but when I was a kid, like, I would sit at my mom's typewriter and make up forms and then fill out forms. Seriously? I don't know why I liked it. I was like, okay, we're going to, like, efficiently do this. Ray's childhood love of bureaucracy is now an adulthood love of bureaucracy.

And she said that our listener Julia's questions about turning offices into apartments, Raisa spends her days thinking about exactly those kinds of problems. She also drives around scoping out unused property that she would like to see converted. And she says there's actually been some moderate success. We have a ton of things that have been entitled in the downtown. In the downtown alone.

In the building permit process, we have 870 permits. Developers have applied for something. We have 419 in construction, and we have 131 final. So we have a lot of units that are in the pipeline. It's a question of whether or not they can get to the end with their financing. Those 131 new housing units, that includes all new housing in downtown Santa Rosa since 2016.

Obviously, a lot better than zero. But in a city of 180,000 people, clearly it's going to take a lot more than just converting vacant properties to move the needle. Raisa says the will to make a change is there from the city government, but it's very, very hard to get to the finish line. As an example, we have a mall in our downtown area.

And it's owned by Simon Properties. And it had a Sears in it. So we ran hard after that one to have it be transformed into housing on top, grocery on the bottom. We're still trying to get them to do it. We've had fits and starts with it. And I drive by that every day.

And think, come on, man. But, you know, and then there was the pandemic and then finances ground to halt. And then there was the da-da-da-da. And then there was, you know, if it's not one thing, it's another, it feels like. Right. And it's like some things are just like cities are slow, real estate is slow, massive amounts of money, massive amounts of organization, massive amounts of people involved with opinions. I mean, in the end, what I've come to figure is we're just such a small piece of the pie of development.

Often, Raisa says, the city runs into problems because of the landowners. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why someone with a vacant, unused building might not want to make it into something that someone like Julia might consider more useful. It could be the case that there's no incentive to lease a building. They purchase it, they owe no money on it. The

The taxes are very low. Or even if they're a new owner, it could be part of a portfolio where the loss on this one helps offset the gains on something else. So then it actually makes sense to not maybe lease it out. There could be any number of reasons why somebody who owns a property doesn't redevelop it. Developing housing is expensive. Getting financing for housing is expensive. Land property owners have a vested right into doing what they want to do with their property so long as it fits within the laws.

So from the government's perspective, they're free to go if they wanted to convert it. So the problem in this case, the reason zoning is a little bit of a misnomer is it could suggest that the obstacle is coming from the government. And what you're saying is property owners have all kinds of incentives that can be surprising. You might have an instance where someone just doesn't mind holding on to an empty property that's not generating rent because...

because they want the tax loss, because the conversion would be expensive, because they're thinking something else down the line. People kind of hold on to stuff more so than you would think. Yeah. The other thing is neighbors. Neighbors and NIMBYism tends to be the biggest obstacle. Sometimes neighbors, whether it be commercial or residential, have a very short-term view on impacts that can greatly benefit them down the road.

Good evening, everybody. Public hearing number one. If you want to convince yourself that this problem is unfixable, if you want to feel complete and utter despair, the best thing you can do, of course, is go on the internet. I have watched clip after clip of those neighbors that NIMBY's race is referring to speaking out in neighborhood meetings all over the country,

Meetings where a combination of fear and, frankly, some real nuttiness reign supreme. And I just want to make sure that there will be no migrants, pedophiles, or criminals moving in because that's what I'm afraid of. I've been told. Here, an older woman in a floral print top is speaking out against a zoning change in her Long Island neighborhood that would allow basement apartments.

Because obviously, a basement apartment would only serve the kinds of people who flee when confronted with natural light. I kind of heard that this is who's moving in, so I just want to be sure that we're not going to be moving in pedophiles and...

"Undesirables. That's what I've been told. I'm here for limited apartments, meaning that Huntington will not be saturated by accessory apartments." About 20 miles to the west, in the Bronx, this speaker, a woman with a mic, is trying to calm down an enormous NIMBY crowd. It's not working. She tries to remind people that this proposed new development will offer affordable housing with no cost to the taxpayer.

This goes over about as well as if she told them that the government was going to make them eat burned hair sandwiches. I just want to reiterate that we're talking about providing affordable housing with no public subsidies. We don't need it! We don't need it! Like a lot of complicated problems that exist today, it's easy to just fixate on the part of the problem that makes you mad. On the arguments. It's easy to reduce everything to a fight. Some people make a lot of money doing this.

Here's Tucker Carlson, back when he was still at Fox, reacting to proposed housing legislation from Joe Biden. He'd also like to eliminate, quote, exclusionary zoning and, quote, needless barriers to producing affordable housing. That means that your neighborhood may have to make way for multifamily dwellings. You don't want multifamily dwellings in your neighborhood? Doesn't matter because it's equity. Shut up, racist. And there's more where that came from. Joe Biden would like to spend... It can all be a bit disheartening.

But when I talked to Bill Fulton, the zoning expert, about how you'd ever change the minds of diehard NIMBYs, he had an answer that was the most weird combination of hope and fatalism I think I've ever heard. And how do you, like, how do you convince the person, like, we've screwed up our housing market, houses have become more and more expensive, even, like, people with means have, like, overleveraged themselves to buy those houses, and, like,

And now they're a political constituency that are like, yeah, yeah, this is messed up, but I don't want to be the person who has to not have an expensive house. Like, how do you force the person with the mansion to turn it into a duplex? Like, what do you do? Well, you can't. But I will say two things. There are two demographic realities here. One is that most of those people are older.

And eventually that constituency will begin to disappear. There's a huge generation gap between older homeowners, mostly white, who resist change. And then you've got basically everybody under the age of 40 struggling to buy a house. And that's where the YIMBY movement has come from, the Yes In My Backyard movement. There's a huge demographic reality gap.

And so the political dynamic is changing, not because people are changing their mind, but because the demographic reality is changing. And that is what I think will prevail in the end. In case you missed that, when Bill is talking optimistically about the demographic reality changing, what he's saying is that of all the things that need to change to help with the housing crisis, one thing that will naturally change is that older people will die.

Historically, one of the larger drivers of social change. Which is not to say, "Hooray for the upcoming deaths of our parents and grandparents." It's bad when people die. And the people living in the houses have all sorts of reasons for wanting to live in the houses. It's not exclusively about the fear of some other coming to ruin the neighborhood. Sometimes it's as simple as, "You grew up in a house with a yard, and you liked it." Or, "You'd rather live next to an empty office building than a big new apartment building."

These are preferences. There's nothing inherently wrong with them. The problem is just we're running out of space.

Good evening, everyone. How's everyone doing? There's one clip that stood out to me in all the clips I saw. This meeting in Brooklyn where a state senator, Andrew Gennardus, stands up and says, the problem with holding on to the way things are is that eventually we just lose the future. We need to build a lot more housing wherever we can. We need to protect the housing we have. We need to update the housing we have. We've got to get the suburbs to do their fair share. This has got to be a comprehensive, we're all in this together approach. Because otherwise...

Young people are not going to live here anymore. Grandkids are not going to come back from schools and colleges and want to live in their neighborhood anymore. Young families won't be able to live here anymore. It's already happening. For all this talk about people leaving New York City, oh, the rich are leaving New York because of the tax. You know who's leaving New York? People who can't afford to live here. Those are the people that are leaving New York. And if we don't find a way to give them a place to live, we're going to lose them forever. So with that, that's a lot to say. It's not a very dramatic clip, which is why I like it.

Despite some evidence to the contrary, I think we usually tend to figure our problems out. And not in the big screaming places, but in meetings like this one, where bureaucrats try to hammer out solutions in uncomfortable chairs over bad coffee in meetings that go on too long. Bill Fulton, former and perhaps future bureaucrat, he says the solution to all this is actually a bunch of solutions.

People in the housing debate tend to try to find a silver bullet or tend to think, oh, if only X happened, everything would be fine. Oh, if we just converted all these office buildings to apartments, everything would be fine. And I think the answer is we've been underproducing housing in the United States for 30 years. It's become very expensive in any place that is remotely desirable. ♪

It's probably a both and, and, and at this point. Over the next 10 or 15 years, we're going to have to do everything. It's not just converting office buildings. It's not just tearing down old malls and replacing it with housing. It's those things and more. So to answer our listener, Julia's question, the reason we have not yet turned the office buildings into apartments is because it's hard and people don't like change.

But the other part of the answer is that eventually, increasingly, it'll likely happen. The office buildings will become apartments. The single-family homes will become apartments. The video game company is going to have to be in the mall, probably next to more apartments. We're going to have to let go of a lot of ideas that we got used to, which always seems hard, until we do it. That's our show this week, but stick around after the ads for Search Engine's favorite thing from the internet this week.

Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home or attending one live, you can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at cox.com slash internet. Cox Internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox Mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5G reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the U.S. to age 2023. Results may vary, not an endorsement of the restrictions apply.

Welcome back to the show. I am joined in the studio by Surgeon and Producer Garrett Graham. Hello, PJ. Truly one of my favorite people. You have a recommendation. You have a pick from the internet. Yeah, it's not so much a recommendation as it is just my favorite thing from the internet this week.

which you haven't told me yet, but we both have been having this weird thing where it's like, you're like, do you know what it is? I'm like, I have a feeling I might know what it is, but I'm not sure that I know what it is. I think you probably know what it is. You are definitely more online than I am. And so if I've seen it, it probably means that you've seen it. Is it the fake Euro song thing? It's not the fake Euro song thing. Well, the fake Euro song thing is pretty good. What do you have? So my thing has to do with a Chinese zoo, right?

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'll take it from the top. Yeah. So a few days ago, a video popped up on Weibo, which is basically like Chinese Twitter, and it showed a video of a bear at a Chinese zoo in Hangzhou. Yes. Have you seen the video? I've only seen a still from it. So I'm going to send you the video. Yeah. Let's just watch. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay, so there's captions that I can't understand. The bear's standing on a rock on his hind legs, and he just... First of all, he's standing totally comfortably, as a human in a bear suit would, but not as a bear normally would. But also, there's a quality to the skin around his legs, where it's a little bit loose, but also his legs are very skinny. I'm assuming the bear's... Boy, I have no way of knowing.

Something about the architecture of my own brain and that assumption. But like the overall effect is just a person who bought a bear suit on the internet that does not seem to work very well.

So this gets posted on Weibo and immediately people are like, that doesn't look like a bear at all. Yes. But the first theory is like, okay, it's not a bear. Maybe it's like another kind of animal. Maybe this is like a dog posing as a bear, which is only funny because like a decade ago, a different Chinese zoo got caught trying to pass off a dog as a lion. Wait, really? In one of their exhibits. Yeah, a Tibetan mastiff.

Just like this big, furry, hairy dog. They sent off their lion for whatever you send animals from zoos away for, and they replaced it with a dog. And people called on, and they were furious. So at first, people on Weibo were like, okay, that's what's happening here. This is a rare breed of dog that they're trying to pass off as a bear. But then somebody posted something to the internet, which is what everybody should have said the first time they saw this video, which is it doesn't look like a dog either. This doesn't look like an animal at all. This looks like

a human in a bear costume. Like exactly what it looks like is an ill-fitting mascot costume at a D3 football game has just been plopped on a poor summer intern and thrown into the bear cage to pretend that they're a bear at this Chinese zoo. Literally, if you forced me to bet money whether it was a bear or a human, I would say human. The only thing that would give me pause is there's a brief moment where there's a kind of close-up on the bear's face and he kind of licks his chops and his tongue appears to come out.

Which makes it seem like... Mascots don't have tongues. Mascots don't have tongues. A really fanatic does, but that's a whole other thing. So what was going on here? So it creates such a controversy that eventually the zoo decides that it's going to respond to this hilarious accusation that it's putting humans into bear costumes and throwing them into cages. And what do they say? They respond in what I think is the best possible way, like the most unhinged way possible, which is they write a letter from the perspective of the bear. Ha ha ha!

responding to the controversy. And so I'm just going to read you part of that letter. Please, yes. Which the New York Times very helpfully translated in their article about the piece because I do not read Chinese characters. Or speak bear. Or speak bear. The letter says, this is the bear, bear named Angela, apparently, speaking. The bear says...

He says,

I do think it's a little suspicious that they don't explicitly say that they're not human. It's also weird they're like adding gas to the fire by being like, no, it's a real bear, but this is this joke where we wrote it from the perspective of the bear. Maybe they've understood that the controversy is selling zoo tickets. I think that's what's happening here. I think this is a brilliant PR move. I think this has actually generated more attendance to the zoo. People are like going to check out this definitely not a human bear at the zoo. That's a really good recommendation. Okay, so we're going to put the video...

Somebody on the newsletter complained about me plugging the newsletter too much. We're going to put the video on the newsletter. I don't care. Throw it in the newsletter. Go subscribe to the newsletter. Please. The point of this podcast is just that people will receive emails. Without a doubt. Garrett, thank you. Thank you.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vogt and Shruthi Pinamaneni. It's produced by me, Garrett Graham, and Noah John. Theme and original composition by Armin Vizarian. Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss. Show art by Ali Moss. No relation. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leo Reese-Dennis.

Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaff. Special thanks this week to Chris Jang.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. ♪