TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW Eric Adams’s Long Pizza Necropolis feat. Mattie Lubchansky

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm really looking forward to when this comes to London and we fill these with the sort of like specifically London inflected thing of no one knows what to do with this building, right? Which is vape shops and American candy stores. We're gonna- that's what the shard's gonna be. The shard is gonna be one big store where theoretically you can buy like a six pack of root beer for like 25 quid. There's like a new one that's opened up recently where it's like a mixture of like American candy store and like knock off Harry Potter merchandise. That was generated by an AI and AI told them to do that. Yeah, I saw that and it's called like sort of secret chambers or something like that. And I was sort of just like, oh, is this like fucking promo for like, you know, whatever

Starting point is 00:00:41 fucking Harry Potter things come out. But no, it says like an independently, well I say independently, like it's definitely a front, but it's from what I can understand. We cannot say it is definitely a front. Legally speaking, you know, it's a creative project not seemingly like tied to the Warner Brothers franchise as far as I can see based on walking on the other side of the road. So this is the article. It says New York Towers may be reaching a breaking point. Older offices are losing tenants to newer developments and maintenance costs are rising and landlords are having trouble refinancing their debt as lenders are becoming increasingly wary of the future of offices. The environment, quote, will push a lot of these borderline

Starting point is 00:01:18 buildings over the edge. The only viable alternative for most of these buildings, being that most of them are overbuilt and you can't knock them down, is a residential conversion. To encourage such deals, Mayor Eric Adams is proposing zoning changes and tax incentives. In some neighborhoods such as Midtown, only buildings constructed in 61 or before can be converted without major restrictions, which is of course because people were the offices that were built before then, broadly speaking, were not like hundred and twenty foot glass towers that are impossible to get rid of or live in. Made out of brick or like steel framed and like, you know, weren't just sucking up

Starting point is 00:02:00 all of the sunlight into a beam concentrated into the eyes of everyone trying to live in the bucket. The big glass towers are way easier to convert into a SimCity 2000 arcology. So say that what you will. I mean, the thing is right, if you're just building this entire, like, you know, like we've done sort of like public housing vertically and, you know, sometimes it's a good idea, but you got to have like the infrastructure there to support it. And nobody's going to do that. You know, nobody's going to be putting public services in these things. Nobody's going to like and I think the only sort of logical conclusion for this is either it doesn't work. They stay vacant or, you know, they house the kind of people that you have to

Starting point is 00:02:40 force to live in them, which is, you know, great. Maybe the New York City Department of Correction is looking for like a shitload new like prison space. The tombs too is here and it's 100 stories tall. Exactly. Exactly. Or we just end up in a sort of like post-apocalyptic vision where we're all being hunted by the like sheer robocops. But what we've done is we've like hopped the windows in a few strategic places so we can like zip line between these towers at like the 160th floor level or whatever. And that's going to be, that's going to be New York. You know, I want to be a part of it. So Adam, Adam supports raising that limit to 1990, paving the way for 20,000 new homes in the next decade. Which means like, yeah, going from when the buildings were not all of them, many of them

Starting point is 00:03:24 not, but more of them might be convertible. Like for example, the lofts that David Berman's company got it start converting, right? The first buildings he converted were former office buildings in Tribeca that are now converted into ridiculously expensive loft housing. And it works because those buildings are like five to 10 stories tall as opposed to 120 made of glass. This is also so insane because it's another thing where the problem with housing in New York City is not that there's not enough of it. There's so much of it. There's so much vacancy and landlords are charging too much money. The issue is not there's not enough. They don't need to add 20,000 new houses and old fucking office buildings. They need to make stuff that exists already affordable

Starting point is 00:04:10 or free, right? Like it's not the problem of say like a lot of big cities in California where they're like straight up out of room in the zoning is such that you can't put multifamily stuff up because of local politics issues. But like here, the issue was just that everything's too fucking expensive and stuff lies vacant for years because the landlords will hope rich people either move to the neighborhood or if it's a storefront that a chase bank will show up and use it for a while and we don't have vacancy taxes in the way we're supposed to. But the difference that the problem here is here is they're not trying to solve the problem of not enough housing. They're trying to be realizing that we are panicking because again, I'd say

Starting point is 00:04:50 they probably the best system for economic planning in all of history has created gigantic monoliths that only work as the thing that they were built to be and are too big to tear down and just have to basically be there like some kind of an unurban forever chemical that you can't get rid of and can't process. You ever see that sort of genre of YouTube that's like going to weird shit built under communism like the giant, like the hotel Yeshia and like Czechia or whatever where it's like, man, they built this giant sort of thing on the top of a mountain. It's made out of reinforced concrete. Like 1% of the state's GDP was dedicated to this every year for five years

Starting point is 00:05:37 and now it's just here and it's so overbuilt. No one knows what to do with it and they're trying a bunch of different things and none of them really work. That's what this is going to be. It's going to be like a haunt for future YouTubers. Yeah, people will go and point to the big we work in Dumbo. Yeah. Do you think in like thousands of years in the future, you know, like after you know, civilizational collapse will go to somewhere and they'll be like a monumental edifice of some sort. And we'll be like, it was ceremonial in use, but we don't know exactly for what, you know, like the near hogs or whatever. They're going to be looking at

Starting point is 00:06:08 office buildings in the future. They'll be like, well, they were probably temples to ball. Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is at least the communists put fucking murals in, right? And you could be, you could look at them and be like, oh, there's some like communist stuff going on here. That's what this is about, you know, but none of this is in there really, because like capitalists kind of stopped doing. There aren't murals, but there's like the sort of like, you know, the eat, the eat, pray, love kind of curse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The like cucumber was the thing, the like corporate art in there, because capitalists got burned very heavily on murals.

Starting point is 00:06:40 They got burned very heavily on murals by Diego Rivera in the 30s. And after that, never again. So like, They're looking like the vats of cucumber water and be like, this is probably where they did like their purification rituals. This is the art, the Oracle drink from this. Many, many real estate analysts are skeptical. While older buildings can have a human size scale that makes conversions relatively simple, modern, i.e. built after 1990, i.e. what Eric Adams wants to do, offices are trickier. They can have enormous layouts filled with windowless interiors. And it's an often a long trek from elevator banks to flower-fung spaces, which would

Starting point is 00:07:17 make units dark and unappealing. We've done this in this country. We've turned offices into emergency housing. And that's like the kind of shit British office that's only like, you know, what, 20 floors max, right? And people fucking hate it. And not just in a way that like, oh, everyone hates the housing. I mean, like it's an order of magnitude worse in a country that already has shit housing. Isn't this also just a massive amount of admitting by capital and, you know, the people in power that like the places that people are expected to spend most of their time is just fucking miserable in a shit place to be all the time. Who wants to live in an office? It's awful there. People should just be there 10 hours a day for every day of their lives.

Starting point is 00:08:02 Yeah. And then it turned out we just didn't need to do it. And we just kind of like gab that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And now we just basically have these, you know, tumors growing out of the gigantic steel and glass tumors growing out of our cities that are completely useless. But also you can't remove. I forgot the word tumor there. And I thought that you were saying like, you know, like Kuma or whatever, but felt like the word tomb. And I was like, yeah, I guess kind of a weird place to go with it. But yeah, go on. Okay, tumor. Yeah. So in the UK, Zurich Insurance Group concluded that converted offices giant windows make them vulnerable to heat waves, which I don't know about you. I don't think that's going to be a problem going forward. And also cited independent

Starting point is 00:08:46 research that found other sort coming such as plumbing systems unable to handle household water and a lack of internal ventilation. So just basically, just the first and third, right? Vulnerable to heat waves and a lack of internal ventilation. Awesome. I wonder what kind of future that is ill prepared for in a way that what are you going to do retrofit this all 120 floors of it? I think you got to turn it into a park or something. You got to just let grass grow in there and let people wander around. The other thing is like, I looked into this a bit. That shit doesn't work either. You can't do like vertical farming or whatever other like yogurt ad thing you want to do with it because it just doesn't, they're not built for that.

Starting point is 00:09:25 They're not built for anything other than like people to spend 10 hours a day at a cubicle being miserable. Yeah. Well, I was, I mean, I was also going to add that like one of these sort of use case, although like thinking about it, probably not. Because we do have a crisis of like a bunch of old people are about to die like really soon. And there's definitely not enough land at least in the UK to like bury them. So you could turn them into big, you could turn them, you could turn them into like fucking, you could turn them into parent, like basically the new pyramid. Okay, I'm into this. Let's do it. Yeah. Good. This is exactly. This is exactly that though. That's entrepreneurship. Who's saying I'm very proud of you. Imagine, imagine like how sinister

Starting point is 00:10:05 all of these look. Imagine looking at the shard and going, that is full of our dead. Imagine looking at HSBC's headquarters in Canary Wharf and being like, yeah, the pyramid is where we put our most senior leaders. I guess I'm closer to God.

TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Eric Adams’s Long Pizza Necropolis feat. Mattie Lubchansky

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TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW Eric Adams’s Long Pizza Necropolis feat. Mattie Lubchansky