A school assignment turns into a highly visible community campaign for improvements to an empty office building in Kalamunda's town centre, labelled the "pigeon hotel" by locals.

The owner doesn’t care about the building, its just a glorified mobile phone tower for them now. You can see it in one of the pictures.

  • wheeville@beehaw.org
    3·
    1 year ago

    The council is the petition’s intended audience, not the building owner. The council has invested money to improve the area before so there’s a chance the increased public pressure makes a real difference behind the dais. They could end up helping the owner demolish the building or offload it to someone who wants to fix it up, without losing private money, for the purpose of benefiting the public.

    • DogMuffinsEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Sorry I just don’t see how that can work.

      I have no idea of the actual values but I would be very surprised if the actual building (not including land value) in it’s current dilapidated state is worth less than $1m. Would you sacrifice $1m just because the public didn’t like the look of your building?

      Offloading it to someone else who wants to fix it up is easier said than done. Selling a property like that isn’t like selling a house where there’s thousands of potential buyers. You need to find someone who wants to buy it. Selling it because of public pressure again means selling it for much less than it’s real market value.

      Sooner or later some government department will be interested in leasing it. They and the owner will bear the various costs of bringing the building to a useable state.

        • DogMuffinsEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Fair enough. I can see how that might work with a dead mall, where the building really does have no value as its format just isn’t viable. A municipality might intervene for everyone’s benefit.

          In this case, the building looks ugly, but still has value. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that property would be with $1m less if the building were demolished.

          Unfortunately in many cases rentable value has fallen from its former glory, and owners don’t want to rent for a realistic price as it may reduce the value of the property itself.

          IMO the best solution would be a vacancy tax.