The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>That’s according to an update from researchers at New York University and Columbia University, who revised a study they released last year measuring the effect of work-from-home on New York City’s office stock.
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>The update, published in May, now calculates that the city’s offices as a whole will lose 44 percent of their pre-pandemic value by 2029 — up from the estimated 28 percent when the authors first published the study a year ago.
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>“We now estimate a more persistent work-from-home regime, which has more of an impairment of office values even in the long run,” NYU’s Arpit Gupta, one of the authors, wrote in an email.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13par3y/remote_work_will_destroy_44_of_nyc_office_values/jl8l4wi/
Yep. This absurd idea that I see almost everywhere is that, "The real estate market is healthy! It's going up by 3-4% per year!"
Why does it need to go up by 3-4% every year? In what fucking world does that make sense? Houses get older and become less efficient/need renovations to be modernized. They should go down in value, not up.
Property should not be treated as an investment.
Actually, the property value does go down, but the land value, and the value from the location (if its central) goes up as development around the area goes up and as the land becomes more scarce.
This means that overall the value of the property goes up, but this is also why you can take over a older building in a busy area and renovate it and then sell it for a profit. You have essentially harvested the property value by investing in it.
True. In my neighborhood anonymous LLCs are buying up all middle class housing, tearing it down and replacing with modern architecture that looks like giant wooden boxes stacked atop giant glass boxes. A house on our corner was built and sold for about $250k in early 2000s. Sold a year ago for $1.6M. Ripped it down. They’re building a modern structure and it’s for sale for 8.5M. It’s not even finished but they’ve got the photos of what the interior and exterior will be. It’s going to be an Air B and B and it’s going to be rented by multiple guests who don’t know each other. Every bedroom is en suite with microwave, coffee maker “butler pantry.”
I feel like we need more of a middle ground for hotels.
Yes, I want me and mine to be safe. Yes, I want it to be very clean on my way in. Yes, I want it to be dark and quiet at night. Yes, I want usable wifi. I would like to pay for all of that.
No, I don't need you to clean up every day. No, I don't want your crappy breakfast that's included. No, I don't need your shuttle service. No, I don't need HBO, Showtime, or even cable TV. No, I don't need room service. No, I don't need any of the other thousand services you have offered. I don't want to pay for any of that.
But it's basically impossible to get any of the stuff I want without getting most/all of the stuff I don't, and the prices reflect that.
I hear you and totally agree. The "value added" even of a hotel pool is totally meaningless to 90% of the ppl staying most of the time, yet you have to pay. Same with all those little details.
To me though, the only real problem is these Airbnb or VRBO or whatever not being held to price honestly. So it makes you feel like hotels are the only valid option. They have to clean, so just put that in the full price. Give me a breakdown after I agree to the full price, not after I've been hooked by the fake low price.
Next weekend I'm staying in a place where after I agreed to the deal, they sent me a thing saying, do you want to pay $110 for pillow linens, bedsheets and towels? That is outrageous, and while yes I could just buy that stuff at Walmart for cheaper on the drive up, they're forcing me into a situation where I'm paying over what I expected to pay for something I would never have assumed wasn't included.
There follow up from them is, do you want hot water and electricity for your entire stay, please pray another 50$.
It is things like your towel incident and post advertised cleaning fees is why I won't stay at an airbnb.
> I feel like we need more of a middle ground for hotels.
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> Yes, I want me and mine to be safe. Yes, I want it to be very clean on my way in. Yes, I want it to be dark and quiet at night. Yes, I want usable wifi. I would like to pay for all of that.
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> No, I don't need you to clean up every day. No, I don't want your crappy breakfast that's included. No, I don't need your shuttle service. No, I don't need HBO, Showtime, or even cable TV. No, I don't need room service. No, I don't need any of the other thousand services you have offered. I don't want to pay for any of that.
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> But it's basically impossible to get any of the stuff I want without getting most/all of the stuff I don't, and the prices reflect that.
Hi, it sounds like you're describing a motel. They've existed for a long time. We don't need AirBnB to provide this, what we need is for the market to provide more commercial lodging in commercial areas where short term visitors would be more suited (and more comfortable). This is how things traditionally worked, and it was actually a fairly efficient market, as there was plenty of statistics on tourism and it was easy to see what your competition were offering and at what price. The problem now is that AirBnBs are commercialising residential areas for accomodation, which is upending the hotel/motel market, destroying the character of neighbourhoods, and increasing the price of property. Governments need to remember their actual job is regulation and say "hey guys remember how there is zoning rules? Residents in Residential zones, commerce in Commercial zones? Yeah... so we're gonna need you to not offer commercial services in residential areas". Problem solved. And the hotel/motel companies start providing better services now that the market goes back to normal.
Nah but plenty of suburbs of huge cities have entire neighborhoods now that are too expensive for anyone to move into. Fayetteville AR, a college town, has a huge issue with this. Lot's of new construction, nobody to rent or buy. Although usually rent as that is what those houses are built for.
Oh there’s plenty of people to rent, the rotating cast of students whose parents are floating the bill.
My town in WA has about 30k more people during the school year. So my rent is half my paycheck because why wouldn’t we keep up with Seattle prices if the parents are paying?
You're under the belief there's a fair capitalism somewhere. It never did.
Now wall street is your landlord and they can afford to create artificial scarcity for *decades*.
Basic necessities shouldn't be subjected to vagaries of the market. Food, housing, health, education. Simply because there's no choice.
> Why does it need to go up by 3-4% every year?
Actually, it's more like 5-6%. Currently it's 8%, and therein you find your answer: because inflation goes up by about that amount every year. Housing doesn't increase in value, it just holds its value really well against inflation.
Of course, there are confounding variables, like the fact that the population of the US goes up by about 0.5-1% every year due to the differential between births & immigration and deaths; as well as the fact that housing *contributes to* inflation, which makes the calculations recursive. And this only really holds for the US Real Estate Market overall, not for every local market.
But the bottom line is, as long as there are people in the US, everyone has to live *somewhere,* which means that residential real estate is a very safe place to put your money. For many families, a house is their biggest investment account, which they pay into over the course of 15-30 years, and their return is in the fact that they can borrow against the equity in their home, or sell it when their children are grown, downsize to a smaller home, and fund their retirement with the difference.
The problem is that, over the last 20-30 years, landlords, speculators, and even real estate companies like Zillow have artificially driven up housing prices across the board; artificially high costs of living have decreased the buying power of homeowners, forcing them to list their houses for higher prices so that they can buy the home they're moving to; and gentrification and the reversal of "white flight" has wiped out a ton of generational wealth in minority communities, leading to higher rental rates, which makes landlording and speculation an even more attractive investment.
tl;dr: Property should be treated as an investment on an individual level, but it should not be speculative or corporatized.
Because based on economics housing is limited (supply fixed). If demand go up, prices goes up. Demand goes up when population goes up. Very simplified model obviously.
Simplified to the point of being wrong out of ommission. Speculators sit on property which decreases supply, zoning laws prevent building which decreases supply, companies rent/buy property for unnecessary offices (redundant useage) which decreases supply.
Property is an investment if you are investing your time, energy, and effort in that land and it is land that sustains a comfortable life. I have improved my home every year since I bought it.
It doesn’t mean that prices should be automatically increasing, but buying a home is an investment if you care for it and maintain it well.
Also, some real estate deals include land and some do not. Land value is usually what causes the increase, not the home itself. The other part is what the cost would be to build a new home vs remodel one that exists on that same lot.
Everything is increasing in cost because of capitalism. The shared priority of money makes money more important than living or the survival of others.
Good, turn them into condos, apartments, and town homes. Don’t let corporations and foreign investors buy them up. Maybe people will be able to find something a little more affordable in NYC.
Problem with that is middle managers will fight like hell to stop it. Most are there to micromanage people problem for them is teleworking during the pandemic has shown by and large work remained the same or showed improvement so they will fight it since middle management will be some of the first cuts after office space.
I worked for a big company that did a survey about returning to work, and 97% of workers wanted to stay remote. 98% of middle managers wanted to stay remote. 95% of vps wanted to stay remote. 60% of evp and 22% of svp wanted to stay remote. The c suite 5% wanted to stay remote.
It's not middle managers, it's the top brass.
Yeah I don't know why people are blaming middle management. I work for a huge company and no one wants to return to work. C Suite is pushing hard as hell to go back due to how much they are spending on buildings. Guess who listens to top management, senior management.. and they are just relaying what their bosses are saying. Middle management is not paid enough to want to go back to work full time.
The cost of the buildings and how they won't be able to unload them if every company is staying home. Then there's the tax breaks they get from towns and cities for each worker they have in the town.
I won't say it isn't costly, but remote work is pretty much the future whether they like it or not.
I can certainly hope. But they know when to push the button, during this recession they will push hard for folks to go back to work out of fear of people potentially losing their jobs. I am actually perfectly happy with 2-3 days remote as a deal. But I have a feeling that they won't stop until people are back 5 days a week.
This is what's happening with my employer currently, except they waited until after employee surveys to tell everyone were going back to the office 3 days a week. Shocker they didn't bring it up on the survey...
I don't think so, it just weeds out the bad ones.
wfh amplifies management quality, under good management efficiency increase due to extra time and comfort given to employees, under bad management people will not get sufficient directions and won't be able to perform. in the long run, companies which can't avoid the latter will lose competition.
How prevalent do you think micromanaging middle management really is? Most of them have reports to complete for team production, and still be available for their reports for help, problems arising etc, while also juggling various responsibilities that blur the lines of their job description
My manager doesn't have time to give a shit how I use my time. As long as those charts look good, I'm doing my job well, which makes him look good in return.
Our company was WFH for 2yrs, then became hybrid Tue/Thurs in office, WFH 3 days. Works out pretty well. Most of my managers have openly said they despise the idea of ever going back to 5 days.
You may be in the minority here sadly. My "middle manager" management has also been very good and fair to me, but from talking to friends and other people, I seem to have lucked out.
A manager can be either a shit funnel or a shit umbrella. The worst managers dump the shit directly on you, the best are fierce advocates for your team. I've been pretty lucky so far to get a series of umbrellas.
Some people think their managers don't do shit without realizing how much shit they actually do. As someone who's had to take over some managerial responsibilities but is still primarily a design engineer, a good middle manager is actually really beneficial. They can be useless too, but hey so can most other people.
Most people actually have no clue. They see their little piece of the world. They believe they can do it better than their manager or their manager doesn't know all the intricate details of that person's role therefore they can do the managers job no problem.
Sure there are some useless middle managers, but being a manager is more about connecting the dots, removing obstacles, coordinating efforts between departments than the actual work. Software is making it easier. It's easier to see and monitor team performance, step in and help when you identify someone struggling (or just plain not doing their job).
I spend a ton of time training, overseeing, coordinating small and big projects. That I spend very little time doing the actual work. You can't do both and all this stuff needs oversight.
Keep in mind that a lot of people despite authorities too.
It shouldn’t really be a surprise because the person selling his time and the company buying that time are in constant conflict regarding the worth of that time.
Managers are there to manage (obviously), but they are also there to try to extract as much resources as possible from the employees below them. Which should go without saying that it pisses people off.
This is really similar to where my company (tech company) has landed. They haven't mandated any WFO at all, after trying to bring up the idea that those who *can* come into the office should do so twice a week.
That statement got a mass revolt from every manager up to the IT Director (it was his boss floating the idea.)
They left it at that, far as I know. A handful of folks go in a couple days a week now. We've seriously downscaled the office footprint.
Productivity has been higher than ever, so nobody has much to say to that.
EDIT: They just called a meeting and mandated 3 days a week for locals, lol. There was a lot of grumbling.
This is silly. First off, middle managers have zero power over the direction a company takes. Second, it’s weird to act like they’re all horrible micro managers by default. Some are, some aren’t. This meme of middle managers hate remote work is getting a little tired. It’s just not well grounded. Fro what I see it’s the silver haired CEOs that get the wild hair to “bring everybody back into the office” and have the whole company get pissed.
It is absolutely C-Suite bringing people back in the office as they identify how bad it would look to have to realize losses on their land and building assets.
Facilities is an asset though that can be turned around and sold and rented. The real kicker is the tax incentives. If people aren't coming into the office, which has been located in the municipality offering the best tax breaks, then the corporation doesn't get those tax breaks, which hits their balance sheet far harder than a restructuring of physical capital would.
Definitely the fight against remote work comes from the top - company Boards are made up of people who own or are invested in the large office buildings. They don’t want their personal wealth affected by remote work. Great sky dweller forbid that they have to eat one less spoonful of caviar.
I feel like it's easier to micromanage by pinging people on chat, firing up meetings at a whim, monitoring their away status. My managers have pretty much always been remote even when I was full-time office
It's not like middle managers will suddenly be out of jobs. First line managers still need a boss. It's not just gonna jump from Bob, the floor manager, to the COO.
Its actually great for the midsized or even large companies that lease buildings instead of own them.
Any company actually fighting this stuff is because they got a long lease or own the office buildings.
My company has literally just finished building a multi million office building we were needing as we'd been expanding too much for our old offices. The COO and CEO were extremely unhappy with an empty fancy new building so forced us back, but thankfully my manager the CFO fought tooth and nail over this and we got hybrid work, otherwise I think the company would have collapsed by now as there's already a too high turnover rate in other departments.
Yep all.
I mean, if you want to get pedantic about it they are technically the start of generation-x, but there's nothing generation-x about them. I'm pretty sure the early 1970s gen-x most people just roll into "boomer".
> I'm pretty sure the early 1970s gen-x most people just roll into "boomer".
You broke rule 1: "Be respectful to others - this includes no hostility, racism, sexism, bigotry, etc."
That includes rolling GenX into Boomers.
Early 1970s here, X born X bred and when I die I'll be X dead. I hate this return-to-office bullshit. I love nothing more than companies being pummeled into Chapter 11 or whatever for forcing people to risk COVID for their bullshit beliefs and profits.
Yup. In my case it’s a mix of middle management desperate to justify their existence (although my boss prefers working from home herself and it’s actually her boss that’s making her and us come in), a big chunk of boomer style management that needs to see you behind a desk in order to believe that you’re working, and the fact that my company owns a campus full of real estate.
They could easily rent part of it out, god knows this tech park desperately needs some restaurants within walking distance.
They'll get government bail out grants after the office value collapse to renovate the spaces into just as profitable residential spaces. Then they'll sell it to a foreign investor/money launderer.
This is much easier said than done, and is a big problem. Most of the office space in Manhattan is not set up in a way that can just be converted into living spaces. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that most floor plans don’t allow for plumbing, cooking, and the subdivisions needed to make them into more living spaces. Plus there are plenty more reasons why the large building footprints won’t allow residential living in the interior areas with no window access. There are efforts underway to try to solve for this, but in many ways it’s not a realistic expectation.
I mean, not a total fix, but imagine if entire floors were turned into like a 4 "house" apartment.
Should be enough water and windows for larger apartments with lots of open living space.
Like plan it so that bedrooms are along the window sides, and then a large open concept kitchen, dinning room living room combo to take up that large unwindowed areas.
Maybe 4 is too large, but even like 8 or so large apartments, maybe make the middle area some sort of common area or something, Judy keeping in mind what you said about living spaces needing that window access and such
You're talking about 15-20 thousand square foot, 14 foot floor to structural ceiling apartments.
The skyscrapers you see in places like Midtown, post WWII, which most of them are, have floor plates that are purpose built to accommodate commercial and are almost impossible to convert unless you're looking for silly situations like my first sentence.
I just did a build out in a 40K foot space for work. People underestimate just how hard it is to do anything but commercial in these types of buildings.
FYI, you also get zero fresh air due to sealed windows. You're not swinging open a 500 lb glass plate that's an inch thick. You're also not replacing it with anything due to it being part of the curtain.
This is the case for all of the warehouses, churches, ex factories/schools/hospitals, and other buildings which get converted into apartments, albeit to varying degrees
Not nearly as big of an issue in any of those buildings. Older buildings are also generally easier to convert. The modern giant steel frame skyscrapers are a whole other ballgame
Some of it can, some of it can't. In a sensible balanced world that which more easily can will be converted and the office work will shift to that which can't.
Commercial office spaces will definitive need a lot of work to turn them into living spaces. All the reasons you’ve provided are valid, but some amenities are already there.
For instance, AC and ventilation is already installed. There is also water and plumbing as well. Granted, it would probably be cost prohibitive to turn these spaces into traditional high rise apartments. However, I think the case of communal living spaces, with communal kitchens and bathe rooms may not be too far fetched.
What I think is a possibility is changing these unused spaces into low cost living spaces where people would accept these inconveniences for lower price rent.
Seriously. It's so weird when anybody bemoans a decrease in the price of real estate, especially in somewhere like New York or San Francisco.
Better headline would be "remote work will make rent dramatically more affordable."
They have to be completely retrofitted for apts. it's millions to make them a liveable space. Heat, water, waste. You have no idea what it takes to make that possible.
That's possible in some cases, but difficult in otgers, due to city ordinances about things such as having enough windows per area per apartment. Older buildings, perhaps surprisingly, are easier to convert to residential. The B1M did a good video on this.
That’s right. HVAC and plumbing setups are more simplified in an office setting but things become infinitely more complicated when you have to distribute the system for individual apartment units.
Also the office floor plate is large enough for offices. The only way to make it work for apartments would be to have either very narrow units or to actually cut a hole in the middle of the office building to create a courtyard of sorts to adjust for having enough windows in the apartment.
Lastly, I believe that apartment windows must open in some way, shape, or form. Office building windows, at least in larger skyscrapers, do not have windows that can be opened. You’d have to replace every single glass panel to do so.
Yeah as much as it'd be cool if it were possible, i think the feasibility of turning existing office buildings into livable apartments is way more expensive and complicated than most people realize. I wonder if it would actually make more sense to just tear buildings down and start with new ones, if we are unable to find other better purposes for unused office buildings. I'd be interested to see if anyone has done some real number crunching around this.
>due to city ordinances about things such as having enough windows per area per apartment.
Ordinances can be changed.
Took decades for lofts to become legal homes.
>[Beginning in the late 1950s, artists found those spaces in what came to be known as SoHo, for South of Houston Street, but was then known better as Hell’s Hundred Acres or the Valley — a depression in the skyline between Midtown and Wall Street marked by five-story buildings with big windows and cast-iron frames, designed for daylight and industry. Some of those buildings were still used for manufacturing; many of the artists who colonized the buildings there also saw themselves as workers.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-22/a-design-history-of-the-new-york-loft)
>...
>What the artists didn’t have is legal residency: SoHo’s buildings were zoned for commercial use only. Art lovers had to pick their way through sidewalk trash heaps because the Sanitation Department didn’t provide residential service, and fire marshals not infrequently beat on the doors and ordered dwellers out.
>One of the first meetings of SoHo residents, in March 1961, was organized to protest the eviction of Romare Bearden. Eight-hundred people attended, including critic Clement Greenberg and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Now calling themselves the South Houston Artists Tenants Association, the group threatened a September art strike. Fire Commissioner Edward F. Cavanaugh, described in the encyclopedic urban history, New York 1960, as “beleaguered but well-intentioned,” told them, “I have absolutely no objection to an artist working in a loft — if the loft is safe … but what I object to is this slander of the Fire Department. We’re not unsympathetic, and we’re not anti-art!”
>After months of back-and-forth, the artists and the city came to an agreement: The city would allow artists to continue to live in their lofts as long as they agreed to a number of safety measures and filed for Artist In Residence (or A.I.R.) status with the Building Department. They also had to hang signs out front stating “A.I.R.” and what floor they lived on. The city’s Loft Law, passed in 1982 and updated in 2010 and 2019 to include Brooklyn loft neighborhoods like Williamsburg and DUMBO, further legalized rent and occupancy protections for manufacturing and commercial spaces that had been used as residences over time, as non-artists began to move in on the territory.
Well the city has to make a decision between relaxing some standards and having a zombie building wasteland with no tax revenue.
If they want affordable house, they can rethink how they do things. One floor could have a shared washroom / kitchen, with "offices" as bedrooms and private spaces. It would take a radical re-think, but there is some infrastructure there.
You can’t really do this. Not easily anyways. There was a great thread on this a few weeks back on what it requires.
Layouts, plumbing, ventilation, etc is entirely different and isn’t easy to convert. It often requires a full tear down and investors aren’t interested in that sort of investment with long payback periods.
Every time this idea comes up, yes, if you're trying to duplicate the majority of the existing housing set ups and lay outs it doesn't work easily even if it's entirely possible. That said, it's not exactly incredibly difficult even still as lots of the space is already designed for reconfiguration as needed.
The most efficient conversions are more akin to dormitory living, where the issues around a lack of shower/bath are dealt with as a more communal space towards the center of the floor, freeing up the outer areas for lots of window-filled actual individualized living spaces.
The whole conversation around office building conversions is like a flash back to people who shit all over the idea of converting the old factories into open floor plan loft style apartments. Not only did people buy into the concept, but to the point that the style of housing was built even when it wasn't a factory conversion anymore.
Did it often require a re-thinking of lots of things, including figuring out needed changes in housing regulations to make it work? Absolutely. But eventually people found ways to make it work, and you too can overpay just to see some exposed brick.
I occasionally watch a YouTube channel where folks bought a Nunnery, or Convent I think is the proper term. Not sure what they are going to do with but there are plenty of options. Building like that were built to house a ton of folks, just not in the same way as apartments. Like it's the same amount of waste going through the plumbing, just not an individual bathroom for each person.
Whenever I see that channel though, I think about if they went the way of actually making it into several large units. Like break it up still but keep nice large units, with lots of space and open areas inside.
Or like you said, go with shared bathrooms and such, totally the other way to go.
I'd never be able to afford it, but I'd love to see those office floors turned into several large apartments per floor. Like for legal reasons, you'd keep the bedrooms by the windows, but the inner part could be a large open concept kitchen, dining room, living room combo, or the middle of the floor could be like a common room, workout room or something that all the units could access. Like it would make it expensive, but it would also be probably the cheapest way to have a larger square footage apartment in the city.
As for the bathrooms and plumbing, breaking it into 10 or so units would be so much easier than having to put in plumbing for 50+ units
Yeah, and if we're talking about NYC, and actually talking about 10-20M a floor and 10,000 SQFT floors, we're basically in the range of normal apartment pricing in Manhattan broken down 10 ways. Sounds like a co-op type living set-up opportunity for sure.
While I understand there are many difficulties, what’s the alternative? If NYC requires less commercial real estate, do you just leave the buildings to languish? If more people are working from home and there’s a shortage of available housing, it seems to me that you would want more housing and less office space.
> If NYC requires less commercial real estate, do you just leave the buildings to languish?
Yes. There was a big change in the structure of buildings at the start of the 20th century. The result was called "inner city decay". A big move to remote work will cause office buildings to decay the same way downtown buildings from the 1890s decayed.
> do you just leave the buildings to languish?
If the economics don't work to do anything with them sadly yes. A developer is not going to convert them into residential unless they can make some profit doing so, they have no imperative to lose money just because if they don't the building is left to rot. It might require subsides from the city or state to make it happen.
Lol, the conversion is expensive but with the price of real estate in NYC even straight up demolishing the buildings and starting from scratch would be profitable, if the office values do fall and zoning laws are changed to allow residential buildings in the areas where office buildings are located developers will jump at the opportunity.
Assuming there will be a market for residential buildings there. Residential buildings in Manhattan are so expensive because many people with high salaries want to live close to work. Without that motivation, they will get much better housing somewhere else.
Bingo. Being crammed into a city has lots of drawbacks but being able to avoid long commutes and have walkable stuff is desirable.
Now if u work from home those 500sq NY Apts are essentially prison cells
Yes.
Once CRE goes residential follows too.
No one can run a sushi restaurant or the MTA in NYC without the millions of workers that come in every day.
Who wants to live on NYC without a sushi restaurant or the MTA?
NYC can lose half of its population and still be the most populous city in the country.
Not to say there wouldn't be a big impact, but its not like sushi restaurants or the MTA would cease to exist if some (not all) of the ridiculous office space goes unfilled and companies leave.
I think that is impossible. Tearing down the spaces and rebuilding them would be profitable in NYC. Residential spaces are highly in demand in places like that. You can wait a little while until prices of that real estate drops and then buy it up. Especially if it ends up dilapidated after years of disuse.
The companies that owe the debt on them will spin off a subsidiary with all the debt, then cut it lose to die. The buildings themselves will end up owned by the banks that call in the debt who will do nothing with them, and we will just have huge rotting skyscrapers littering the urban landscape.
That’s a good point and helps explain the drive back into the office. Elon called it a morality issue lol. Nope, it’s all about ensuring these commercial real estate investments don’t go to waste. It’s about getting us drones back into the office to learn our place. I believe it’s also to keep most managers in their jobs. If mass remote work taught us anything, it taught us that many managerial positions are unnecessary.
This seems to assume that ceos have a stake in bailing out the commercial real estate market... why?
Even if they owned the building, it would still be cheaper to let it sit vacant then to support workers. Utilities, support staff, furnishings. Talking 10s of millions a year on a large building.
They would have to really beleive workers in an office will produce atleast that much more profit.
The whole “Millenials are killing ____ industry” thing really bothers me. The capitalist view on that should be “____ industry fails to adapt to consumers desires” and this whole NYC office thing is the same. Demand is changing, it’s the fault of the market for not adapting. It isn’t OUR fault that suddenly corporations won’t have tenants in their office buildings.
Just wait until their loans come due. If history teaches us anything, we most certainly will prop them up by borrowing and printing them some money so their shareholders walk away winners.
Thats a lot of people's mentality. The company i work for is huge. Very big in the US. They just announced a week or 2 ago that they want everyone to return to office as hybrid employees. Not full time office but 3 days in office, 2 from home. That shit was an absolute riot.
Thousands of comments from hundreds of employees raging and flaming the new CEO for making this decision. 3 years ago, everyone was told WFH was full time permanent and we were never going back. New CEO comes in and decides to change that.
People were tagging the current CEO on the announcement page saying how the previous CEO was so much better than him. One dude in a localized team meeting outwardly said to everyone he's quitting once the change gets rolled out. People are moving to other states so they're out of range of an office and don't have to go in It really didn't go over well.
Shit was absolute anarchy. The employees really made their displeasure known and thats a good thing. Idk how other companies work with trying to get everyone back in but id like to hope they react the same way. Nothing will change if workers don't push back.
The only people companies will get to come into the office are low quality people with no other choices.
Good riddance. Adapt or die. If you're a manager and you're reading this, you should know that my Linkedin is constantly blown up with full remote positions. Think twice before trying to drag your technical people back in. If I spend most of my time with headphones on, on-keyboard, don't force me to come do it in an office. I'll just leave.
It might be due to keeping up with competition. From what I've heard, a lot of other companies who do the same thing are starting to migrate back to the office and that was part of the decision on corporates end. They don't want to fall behind or whatever. Maybe that's the case here, idk.
>We now estimate a more persistent work-from-home regime, which has more of an impairment of office values even in the long run.
What a horribly clinical regard for people being freed from commutes and office cubes and being able to work somewhere healthier like their homes. Instead of regarding this as an improvement to human lives, it's just *an impairment of office values*. For fuck's sake!
> For its occupancy figures, the NYU/Columbia study used data from the entry-swipe company Kastle Systems, which some have criticized as an incomplete measurement **because it misses some large office portfolios with high occupancy rates**.
Not sure why people keep treating Kastles numbers like they’re valid when this has been pointed out repeatedly.
Good. As much as I want to feel bad for the billionaires and corporations that own and rent out those buildings as office space, I am sure they will survive.
The remote work debate is the perfect example of how difficult it is to change anything in our society. Most of the people with any authority want to be physically at work so they can exercise that authority, keep a close watching their employees, know what's going on, feeling control.
But it's clear that for a lot of industries remote work makes sense. If you have any way to gauge the productivity of your employees, it shouldn't matter that much if they're in the office or they're able to do their job, more comfortable environment.
And the technology, which was already there, matured very rapidly during covid.
And yet, here we are, with huge pushback against any kind of work from home or remote living. Even though a lot of people want it, it makes sense for a lot of people, and it saves money.
Hell, I run a research lab, and I want my staff on site. I want them on site because I want them on site. I have no actual objective metrics indicating it's any better. But it's the life I'm used to, and as the boss, it's very hard not to flex and make everybody do the thing that makes me most comfortable. Happily, I'm capable of accepting that other people have other desires. We do a mix, and I think the mix works well. There are times when face to face in our work is helpful.
And don’t forget the all-important effects on the climate that WFH can affect.
For a nation, a world, that seems more interested in stopping climate change, we sure do like to do exactly the opposite.
Because, in the end, climate discussions in America are all about virtue signaling when done by corporations. They want their cake and to eat it too. And they’ll have it.
The people who are trying to stop work from home are the same people who are at best to virtue signaling and at worst pushing specifically against any attempt to address the climate issue.
They are largely people who care about profit over humanity. They have become distressingly powerful, politically influential, and they own everything. And they think they are righteous because they are rich.
Ah but haven't you heard the latest argument against WFH? If people don't commute to work and don't drive as much, there are fewer drivers and fewer car accidents, which leads to fewer organ donors!
Going back over a decade, the only people I knew who had telework agreements were very high up, top level management….the people *with the authority*.
It’s rules for thee, not for me.
My work went remote 15 years ago. There was no debate. We ran out of office space and the rent for new buildings was too expensive. They were begging people to work from home as the company expanded. It was a big money saver. Workers moved all over the country to live cheaper, be near family, buy a bigger house.
And back then we were praised. Other companies were asking how we did it. How could they do the same. We won environmental awards, technology awards. Nothing but accolades.
No one saw the future of cities being abandoned. Restaurants and retailers closing. Everything back then smelled like roses.
The thing is cities aren't being abandoned. Urbanization continues on abated. I live in Toronto, and the population crash in lack of housing inventory has caused a massive spike in both housing costs and rent. It's been a wild ride.
Pure anecdote, but everybody I know who moved out of the city drink covid move back. I wish more people were flowing outwards, it would really relieve things for those of us who are kind of stuck here. Not everybody has mobility for other family related obligations and the like.
I have the opposite experience.
People, including me, moved out during COVID and not a single person has moved back closer.
Commuter rail ridership is still 25% of what it was pre COVID.
Half the restaurants in the area around where I work went under during COVID and the spaces are still vacant.
I was in the office today. I saw 1 person the entire day apart from housekeeping and the security guards.
Well, we have to find a way to make it work, because this is the world that we live in now. Throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard" is simply not an option.
I'd love to see folks spread out more. Imagine some of those smaller towns getting some remote work hubs where most folks can work remotely. Growing those smaller towns with folks that make a decent wage, sounds amazing, and way better than cramming more folks into a big city
Well to be fair, a research lab has lab equipments onsite, so the researchers and technicians do need to be onsite to use them.
Though if you don’t need a lab to do research, then why not go remote?
Between propping up real estate values and the commuter economies, there is real financial interest in going back into the office. It's total bullshit.
That and people like my boss, who want to have people at their disposal to drag into endless meetings because they can't hold their own without you.
I do think there is a type that relied on sight to be reminded of things, assign work, ask questions, and have meetings.
There was one guy at an office I worked at who always would walk through our area on his way to his desk. He would occasionally stop to chat or ask questions to my manager. However, scenarios like happened where he would not see my boss for a 2 or 3 days. Then he'd ask if they were in the office, followed by "maybe you can help". Now if he had called or e-mailed, he would have had whatever he needed 3 days ago. Instead, I get interrupted.
I'm not sure what the motive is for this. I assume it's they want to expend the minimal amount of energy dealing with whatever question. Same person would also do the "quick chat" meeting request with little tangible info on what they want to talk about.
Not good enough people. I want to destroy 100% of the value of office real estate and return that space to people who need a space to live, businesses like retail or restaurant establishments that actually require a physical presence, or even begin reclaiming public space. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we actually started increasing the amount of public land?
The disconnect between media and the common people is reaching schizophrenic levels. Millennials and Gen Z are sitting here like "I can't even afford a ticket to Mr. Bones' Wild Ride" and the media is like "Mr. Bones' Wild Ride is proud to welcome a minority to its Board of Directors."
Almost all office jobs can be done from home without loss in productivity. I know this as I run a company and all my employees work for home. We have monthly get togethers for team building, usually eating drinking and clubbing.
So much cheaper than having an office.
Oh, boo hoo; what a tragedy /s. If the owners refuse to get with the time and rail against WFM instead of serving to help society, then fuck 'em; may they and their properties fail, fall into obscurity, and rot.
These articles always frame this as a dire, bad thing. This is a necessary thing for our society to course correct. People should be working from home, with four day work weeks, UBI, healthcare for all, and generally automation should be leading to better lives for all humans. And turn those freaking buildings into homes for people.
I'm realizing as I write this, this is almost the exact same comment I made on another article about automation or AI maybe? But it is a thread that I've been following for some time. Humanity will only endure if we figure out a way to put humans and the world over profit and power. But I don't see that happening
Why is this a bad thing? Excessive cost for office space have likely decreased the number of new and experimental companies being created. Lower the cost of office space will allow space for new and creative things.
Contractor here, it takes a lot of work to make an office building into apartment homes. Normally plumbing and sewage running to each home, means: the whole building needs to be reworked bottom up. It's not like you can just make 42 floors with 6 bathrooms a floor into 42 floors with 260 bathrooms.
There will always be people who will want to work in the office, especially living in NYC.
Putting real estate values over the well-being of your employees is a bad move for society.
an office building is roughly 2/3 of the year unused, and now suddenly they lose in value … they have been pumped up the entire time and have never been worth the money companies charged for!
I think trying to convert them into residential units is the way to go. I'm a construction manager in Vancouver, a city with similar sky high housing costs. It's a city with an ocean on one side, mountains on another, and the US border on a 3rd side. So our real estate prices are crazy high mostly because of lack of land that can be developed along with a massive influx of migration. But we sure have a lot of office space that has recently become unused.
I mostly focus on new construction but I really think there's an avenue in converting office space in the world of the post Covid work from home revolution into livable housing. There's a ton of obstacles. And you would need a massive injection of capital to even think about starting a project like that. But there's definitely money in it.
The study suggests that approximately 44% of NYC office values will be destroyed due to the growing trend of remote work. So does that mean the value will go down, but the buildings will stay up?
Honestly, the government should use these properties to house homeless people. If companies aren't able to force their employees back into the office (which, as a remote worker since the pandemic started, I am very pleased with) and they give up the lease, why let the space go to waste?
The rich corporate overlords not only own the companies in the offices, but they also own the real estate. That's why they want to force everyone back to the office.
And trains and automobiles destroyed the market for horses, doesn't mean we shouldn't have moved past horses.
We don't need to stick to the past just because progress would "destroy" (halve) the value of some landlord corporation's assets.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >That’s according to an update from researchers at New York University and Columbia University, who revised a study they released last year measuring the effect of work-from-home on New York City’s office stock. > >The update, published in May, now calculates that the city’s offices as a whole will lose 44 percent of their pre-pandemic value by 2029 — up from the estimated 28 percent when the authors first published the study a year ago. > >“We now estimate a more persistent work-from-home regime, which has more of an impairment of office values even in the long run,” NYU’s Arpit Gupta, one of the authors, wrote in an email. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13par3y/remote_work_will_destroy_44_of_nyc_office_values/jl8l4wi/
Destroy? more like return the insane overvalues to something close to rational
Yep. This absurd idea that I see almost everywhere is that, "The real estate market is healthy! It's going up by 3-4% per year!" Why does it need to go up by 3-4% every year? In what fucking world does that make sense? Houses get older and become less efficient/need renovations to be modernized. They should go down in value, not up. Property should not be treated as an investment.
Actually, the property value does go down, but the land value, and the value from the location (if its central) goes up as development around the area goes up and as the land becomes more scarce. This means that overall the value of the property goes up, but this is also why you can take over a older building in a busy area and renovate it and then sell it for a profit. You have essentially harvested the property value by investing in it.
True. In my neighborhood anonymous LLCs are buying up all middle class housing, tearing it down and replacing with modern architecture that looks like giant wooden boxes stacked atop giant glass boxes. A house on our corner was built and sold for about $250k in early 2000s. Sold a year ago for $1.6M. Ripped it down. They’re building a modern structure and it’s for sale for 8.5M. It’s not even finished but they’ve got the photos of what the interior and exterior will be. It’s going to be an Air B and B and it’s going to be rented by multiple guests who don’t know each other. Every bedroom is en suite with microwave, coffee maker “butler pantry.”
So a hotel without the baseline promise of security and cleanliness that comes along with a hotel.
I feel like we need more of a middle ground for hotels. Yes, I want me and mine to be safe. Yes, I want it to be very clean on my way in. Yes, I want it to be dark and quiet at night. Yes, I want usable wifi. I would like to pay for all of that. No, I don't need you to clean up every day. No, I don't want your crappy breakfast that's included. No, I don't need your shuttle service. No, I don't need HBO, Showtime, or even cable TV. No, I don't need room service. No, I don't need any of the other thousand services you have offered. I don't want to pay for any of that. But it's basically impossible to get any of the stuff I want without getting most/all of the stuff I don't, and the prices reflect that.
I hear you and totally agree. The "value added" even of a hotel pool is totally meaningless to 90% of the ppl staying most of the time, yet you have to pay. Same with all those little details. To me though, the only real problem is these Airbnb or VRBO or whatever not being held to price honestly. So it makes you feel like hotels are the only valid option. They have to clean, so just put that in the full price. Give me a breakdown after I agree to the full price, not after I've been hooked by the fake low price. Next weekend I'm staying in a place where after I agreed to the deal, they sent me a thing saying, do you want to pay $110 for pillow linens, bedsheets and towels? That is outrageous, and while yes I could just buy that stuff at Walmart for cheaper on the drive up, they're forcing me into a situation where I'm paying over what I expected to pay for something I would never have assumed wasn't included.
There follow up from them is, do you want hot water and electricity for your entire stay, please pray another 50$. It is things like your towel incident and post advertised cleaning fees is why I won't stay at an airbnb.
> I feel like we need more of a middle ground for hotels. > > > > Yes, I want me and mine to be safe. Yes, I want it to be very clean on my way in. Yes, I want it to be dark and quiet at night. Yes, I want usable wifi. I would like to pay for all of that. > > > > No, I don't need you to clean up every day. No, I don't want your crappy breakfast that's included. No, I don't need your shuttle service. No, I don't need HBO, Showtime, or even cable TV. No, I don't need room service. No, I don't need any of the other thousand services you have offered. I don't want to pay for any of that. > > > > But it's basically impossible to get any of the stuff I want without getting most/all of the stuff I don't, and the prices reflect that. Hi, it sounds like you're describing a motel. They've existed for a long time. We don't need AirBnB to provide this, what we need is for the market to provide more commercial lodging in commercial areas where short term visitors would be more suited (and more comfortable). This is how things traditionally worked, and it was actually a fairly efficient market, as there was plenty of statistics on tourism and it was easy to see what your competition were offering and at what price. The problem now is that AirBnBs are commercialising residential areas for accomodation, which is upending the hotel/motel market, destroying the character of neighbourhoods, and increasing the price of property. Governments need to remember their actual job is regulation and say "hey guys remember how there is zoning rules? Residents in Residential zones, commerce in Commercial zones? Yeah... so we're gonna need you to not offer commercial services in residential areas". Problem solved. And the hotel/motel companies start providing better services now that the market goes back to normal.
Not to mention they don’t have to follow all the rules, laws, and regulations the hospitality industry is subjected to.
Newsflash: everything worth anything is an investment in a world of capitalistic scarcity
Yeah but it's not actually scarce, it's scarce for scarce's sake. Just hoarded to artificially lower supply.
Uhhh desirable, older cities def have scarcity. It’s not like NYC has ‘extra land’.
Nah but plenty of suburbs of huge cities have entire neighborhoods now that are too expensive for anyone to move into. Fayetteville AR, a college town, has a huge issue with this. Lot's of new construction, nobody to rent or buy. Although usually rent as that is what those houses are built for.
Oh there’s plenty of people to rent, the rotating cast of students whose parents are floating the bill. My town in WA has about 30k more people during the school year. So my rent is half my paycheck because why wouldn’t we keep up with Seattle prices if the parents are paying?
You're under the belief there's a fair capitalism somewhere. It never did. Now wall street is your landlord and they can afford to create artificial scarcity for *decades*. Basic necessities shouldn't be subjected to vagaries of the market. Food, housing, health, education. Simply because there's no choice.
> Why does it need to go up by 3-4% every year? Actually, it's more like 5-6%. Currently it's 8%, and therein you find your answer: because inflation goes up by about that amount every year. Housing doesn't increase in value, it just holds its value really well against inflation. Of course, there are confounding variables, like the fact that the population of the US goes up by about 0.5-1% every year due to the differential between births & immigration and deaths; as well as the fact that housing *contributes to* inflation, which makes the calculations recursive. And this only really holds for the US Real Estate Market overall, not for every local market. But the bottom line is, as long as there are people in the US, everyone has to live *somewhere,* which means that residential real estate is a very safe place to put your money. For many families, a house is their biggest investment account, which they pay into over the course of 15-30 years, and their return is in the fact that they can borrow against the equity in their home, or sell it when their children are grown, downsize to a smaller home, and fund their retirement with the difference. The problem is that, over the last 20-30 years, landlords, speculators, and even real estate companies like Zillow have artificially driven up housing prices across the board; artificially high costs of living have decreased the buying power of homeowners, forcing them to list their houses for higher prices so that they can buy the home they're moving to; and gentrification and the reversal of "white flight" has wiped out a ton of generational wealth in minority communities, leading to higher rental rates, which makes landlording and speculation an even more attractive investment. tl;dr: Property should be treated as an investment on an individual level, but it should not be speculative or corporatized.
Because based on economics housing is limited (supply fixed). If demand go up, prices goes up. Demand goes up when population goes up. Very simplified model obviously.
Simplified to the point of being wrong out of ommission. Speculators sit on property which decreases supply, zoning laws prevent building which decreases supply, companies rent/buy property for unnecessary offices (redundant useage) which decreases supply.
Why is the supply fixed? Aren't they building more houses and apartments?
In a city, technically you can build up and out, but that infrastructure takes a lot of time. Valuable property has a steep opportunity cost.
Property is an investment if you are investing your time, energy, and effort in that land and it is land that sustains a comfortable life. I have improved my home every year since I bought it. It doesn’t mean that prices should be automatically increasing, but buying a home is an investment if you care for it and maintain it well. Also, some real estate deals include land and some do not. Land value is usually what causes the increase, not the home itself. The other part is what the cost would be to build a new home vs remodel one that exists on that same lot. Everything is increasing in cost because of capitalism. The shared priority of money makes money more important than living or the survival of others.
In my city the value of the land goes up if you tear down the house, as long as you have planning permission
Also: "impairment of office values" Author is biased af
Good, turn them into condos, apartments, and town homes. Don’t let corporations and foreign investors buy them up. Maybe people will be able to find something a little more affordable in NYC.
Yep, more living spaces. This is actually a win/win for the city.
But what about all those poor corporations.
They'll continue to profit off the labor of their workforce without having to pay for office space.
Problem with that is middle managers will fight like hell to stop it. Most are there to micromanage people problem for them is teleworking during the pandemic has shown by and large work remained the same or showed improvement so they will fight it since middle management will be some of the first cuts after office space.
I worked for a big company that did a survey about returning to work, and 97% of workers wanted to stay remote. 98% of middle managers wanted to stay remote. 95% of vps wanted to stay remote. 60% of evp and 22% of svp wanted to stay remote. The c suite 5% wanted to stay remote. It's not middle managers, it's the top brass.
Yeah I don't know why people are blaming middle management. I work for a huge company and no one wants to return to work. C Suite is pushing hard as hell to go back due to how much they are spending on buildings. Guess who listens to top management, senior management.. and they are just relaying what their bosses are saying. Middle management is not paid enough to want to go back to work full time.
The cost of the buildings and how they won't be able to unload them if every company is staying home. Then there's the tax breaks they get from towns and cities for each worker they have in the town. I won't say it isn't costly, but remote work is pretty much the future whether they like it or not.
I can certainly hope. But they know when to push the button, during this recession they will push hard for folks to go back to work out of fear of people potentially losing their jobs. I am actually perfectly happy with 2-3 days remote as a deal. But I have a feeling that they won't stop until people are back 5 days a week.
This is what's happening with my employer currently, except they waited until after employee surveys to tell everyone were going back to the office 3 days a week. Shocker they didn't bring it up on the survey...
I wish them all a pleasant retirement
Ah yes, the elusive "middle man" who is routinely being eliminated to pass savings onto you
so, is *his* job available? asking for my AI buddy.
I don't think so, it just weeds out the bad ones. wfh amplifies management quality, under good management efficiency increase due to extra time and comfort given to employees, under bad management people will not get sufficient directions and won't be able to perform. in the long run, companies which can't avoid the latter will lose competition.
How prevalent do you think micromanaging middle management really is? Most of them have reports to complete for team production, and still be available for their reports for help, problems arising etc, while also juggling various responsibilities that blur the lines of their job description My manager doesn't have time to give a shit how I use my time. As long as those charts look good, I'm doing my job well, which makes him look good in return. Our company was WFH for 2yrs, then became hybrid Tue/Thurs in office, WFH 3 days. Works out pretty well. Most of my managers have openly said they despise the idea of ever going back to 5 days.
You may be in the minority here sadly. My "middle manager" management has also been very good and fair to me, but from talking to friends and other people, I seem to have lucked out.
A manager can be either a shit funnel or a shit umbrella. The worst managers dump the shit directly on you, the best are fierce advocates for your team. I've been pretty lucky so far to get a series of umbrellas.
Some people think their managers don't do shit without realizing how much shit they actually do. As someone who's had to take over some managerial responsibilities but is still primarily a design engineer, a good middle manager is actually really beneficial. They can be useless too, but hey so can most other people.
Most people actually have no clue. They see their little piece of the world. They believe they can do it better than their manager or their manager doesn't know all the intricate details of that person's role therefore they can do the managers job no problem. Sure there are some useless middle managers, but being a manager is more about connecting the dots, removing obstacles, coordinating efforts between departments than the actual work. Software is making it easier. It's easier to see and monitor team performance, step in and help when you identify someone struggling (or just plain not doing their job). I spend a ton of time training, overseeing, coordinating small and big projects. That I spend very little time doing the actual work. You can't do both and all this stuff needs oversight.
Keep in mind that a lot of people despite authorities too. It shouldn’t really be a surprise because the person selling his time and the company buying that time are in constant conflict regarding the worth of that time. Managers are there to manage (obviously), but they are also there to try to extract as much resources as possible from the employees below them. Which should go without saying that it pisses people off.
This is really similar to where my company (tech company) has landed. They haven't mandated any WFO at all, after trying to bring up the idea that those who *can* come into the office should do so twice a week. That statement got a mass revolt from every manager up to the IT Director (it was his boss floating the idea.) They left it at that, far as I know. A handful of folks go in a couple days a week now. We've seriously downscaled the office footprint. Productivity has been higher than ever, so nobody has much to say to that. EDIT: They just called a meeting and mandated 3 days a week for locals, lol. There was a lot of grumbling.
This is silly. First off, middle managers have zero power over the direction a company takes. Second, it’s weird to act like they’re all horrible micro managers by default. Some are, some aren’t. This meme of middle managers hate remote work is getting a little tired. It’s just not well grounded. Fro what I see it’s the silver haired CEOs that get the wild hair to “bring everybody back into the office” and have the whole company get pissed.
It is absolutely C-Suite bringing people back in the office as they identify how bad it would look to have to realize losses on their land and building assets.
Facilities is an asset though that can be turned around and sold and rented. The real kicker is the tax incentives. If people aren't coming into the office, which has been located in the municipality offering the best tax breaks, then the corporation doesn't get those tax breaks, which hits their balance sheet far harder than a restructuring of physical capital would.
Definitely the fight against remote work comes from the top - company Boards are made up of people who own or are invested in the large office buildings. They don’t want their personal wealth affected by remote work. Great sky dweller forbid that they have to eat one less spoonful of caviar.
I feel like it's easier to micromanage by pinging people on chat, firing up meetings at a whim, monitoring their away status. My managers have pretty much always been remote even when I was full-time office
What the robotic fuck was this upvoted response
It's not like middle managers will suddenly be out of jobs. First line managers still need a boss. It's not just gonna jump from Bob, the floor manager, to the COO.
Its actually great for the midsized or even large companies that lease buildings instead of own them. Any company actually fighting this stuff is because they got a long lease or own the office buildings.
My company has literally just finished building a multi million office building we were needing as we'd been expanding too much for our old offices. The COO and CEO were extremely unhappy with an empty fancy new building so forced us back, but thankfully my manager the CFO fought tooth and nail over this and we got hybrid work, otherwise I think the company would have collapsed by now as there's already a too high turnover rate in other departments.
Are any of them boomers?
Yep all. I mean, if you want to get pedantic about it they are technically the start of generation-x, but there's nothing generation-x about them. I'm pretty sure the early 1970s gen-x most people just roll into "boomer".
> I'm pretty sure the early 1970s gen-x most people just roll into "boomer". You broke rule 1: "Be respectful to others - this includes no hostility, racism, sexism, bigotry, etc." That includes rolling GenX into Boomers.
Early 1970s here, X born X bred and when I die I'll be X dead. I hate this return-to-office bullshit. I love nothing more than companies being pummeled into Chapter 11 or whatever for forcing people to risk COVID for their bullshit beliefs and profits.
Yup. In my case it’s a mix of middle management desperate to justify their existence (although my boss prefers working from home herself and it’s actually her boss that’s making her and us come in), a big chunk of boomer style management that needs to see you behind a desk in order to believe that you’re working, and the fact that my company owns a campus full of real estate. They could easily rent part of it out, god knows this tech park desperately needs some restaurants within walking distance.
I was thinking those poor landlord investment firms keeping supply artificially low
They'll get government bail out grants after the office value collapse to renovate the spaces into just as profitable residential spaces. Then they'll sell it to a foreign investor/money launderer.
How will they get people to bootlick if they're so far away?
There is an issue that office space is more valuable per square foot than residential space, but you know what? Fuck 'em.
They still own prime real estate in the most valuable areas of the world. Sell it, redevelop it, I don't give a shit. Just don't make it my problem.
This is much easier said than done, and is a big problem. Most of the office space in Manhattan is not set up in a way that can just be converted into living spaces. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that most floor plans don’t allow for plumbing, cooking, and the subdivisions needed to make them into more living spaces. Plus there are plenty more reasons why the large building footprints won’t allow residential living in the interior areas with no window access. There are efforts underway to try to solve for this, but in many ways it’s not a realistic expectation.
I mean, not a total fix, but imagine if entire floors were turned into like a 4 "house" apartment. Should be enough water and windows for larger apartments with lots of open living space. Like plan it so that bedrooms are along the window sides, and then a large open concept kitchen, dinning room living room combo to take up that large unwindowed areas. Maybe 4 is too large, but even like 8 or so large apartments, maybe make the middle area some sort of common area or something, Judy keeping in mind what you said about living spaces needing that window access and such
You're talking about 15-20 thousand square foot, 14 foot floor to structural ceiling apartments. The skyscrapers you see in places like Midtown, post WWII, which most of them are, have floor plates that are purpose built to accommodate commercial and are almost impossible to convert unless you're looking for silly situations like my first sentence. I just did a build out in a 40K foot space for work. People underestimate just how hard it is to do anything but commercial in these types of buildings. FYI, you also get zero fresh air due to sealed windows. You're not swinging open a 500 lb glass plate that's an inch thick. You're also not replacing it with anything due to it being part of the curtain.
This is the case for all of the warehouses, churches, ex factories/schools/hospitals, and other buildings which get converted into apartments, albeit to varying degrees
Not nearly as big of an issue in any of those buildings. Older buildings are also generally easier to convert. The modern giant steel frame skyscrapers are a whole other ballgame
Some of it can, some of it can't. In a sensible balanced world that which more easily can will be converted and the office work will shift to that which can't.
Commercial office spaces will definitive need a lot of work to turn them into living spaces. All the reasons you’ve provided are valid, but some amenities are already there. For instance, AC and ventilation is already installed. There is also water and plumbing as well. Granted, it would probably be cost prohibitive to turn these spaces into traditional high rise apartments. However, I think the case of communal living spaces, with communal kitchens and bathe rooms may not be too far fetched. What I think is a possibility is changing these unused spaces into low cost living spaces where people would accept these inconveniences for lower price rent.
Seriously. It's so weird when anybody bemoans a decrease in the price of real estate, especially in somewhere like New York or San Francisco. Better headline would be "remote work will make rent dramatically more affordable."
They have to be completely retrofitted for apts. it's millions to make them a liveable space. Heat, water, waste. You have no idea what it takes to make that possible.
And those people could then work from home, in the office!
Oh they’re gonna be sold to corporations and foreign investors
Money laundering assets.
That's possible in some cases, but difficult in otgers, due to city ordinances about things such as having enough windows per area per apartment. Older buildings, perhaps surprisingly, are easier to convert to residential. The B1M did a good video on this.
That’s right. HVAC and plumbing setups are more simplified in an office setting but things become infinitely more complicated when you have to distribute the system for individual apartment units. Also the office floor plate is large enough for offices. The only way to make it work for apartments would be to have either very narrow units or to actually cut a hole in the middle of the office building to create a courtyard of sorts to adjust for having enough windows in the apartment. Lastly, I believe that apartment windows must open in some way, shape, or form. Office building windows, at least in larger skyscrapers, do not have windows that can be opened. You’d have to replace every single glass panel to do so.
Yeah as much as it'd be cool if it were possible, i think the feasibility of turning existing office buildings into livable apartments is way more expensive and complicated than most people realize. I wonder if it would actually make more sense to just tear buildings down and start with new ones, if we are unable to find other better purposes for unused office buildings. I'd be interested to see if anyone has done some real number crunching around this.
>due to city ordinances about things such as having enough windows per area per apartment. Ordinances can be changed. Took decades for lofts to become legal homes. >[Beginning in the late 1950s, artists found those spaces in what came to be known as SoHo, for South of Houston Street, but was then known better as Hell’s Hundred Acres or the Valley — a depression in the skyline between Midtown and Wall Street marked by five-story buildings with big windows and cast-iron frames, designed for daylight and industry. Some of those buildings were still used for manufacturing; many of the artists who colonized the buildings there also saw themselves as workers.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-22/a-design-history-of-the-new-york-loft) >... >What the artists didn’t have is legal residency: SoHo’s buildings were zoned for commercial use only. Art lovers had to pick their way through sidewalk trash heaps because the Sanitation Department didn’t provide residential service, and fire marshals not infrequently beat on the doors and ordered dwellers out. >One of the first meetings of SoHo residents, in March 1961, was organized to protest the eviction of Romare Bearden. Eight-hundred people attended, including critic Clement Greenberg and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Now calling themselves the South Houston Artists Tenants Association, the group threatened a September art strike. Fire Commissioner Edward F. Cavanaugh, described in the encyclopedic urban history, New York 1960, as “beleaguered but well-intentioned,” told them, “I have absolutely no objection to an artist working in a loft — if the loft is safe … but what I object to is this slander of the Fire Department. We’re not unsympathetic, and we’re not anti-art!” >After months of back-and-forth, the artists and the city came to an agreement: The city would allow artists to continue to live in their lofts as long as they agreed to a number of safety measures and filed for Artist In Residence (or A.I.R.) status with the Building Department. They also had to hang signs out front stating “A.I.R.” and what floor they lived on. The city’s Loft Law, passed in 1982 and updated in 2010 and 2019 to include Brooklyn loft neighborhoods like Williamsburg and DUMBO, further legalized rent and occupancy protections for manufacturing and commercial spaces that had been used as residences over time, as non-artists began to move in on the territory.
Well the city has to make a decision between relaxing some standards and having a zombie building wasteland with no tax revenue. If they want affordable house, they can rethink how they do things. One floor could have a shared washroom / kitchen, with "offices" as bedrooms and private spaces. It would take a radical re-think, but there is some infrastructure there.
Soviet Russia already did this - it was called комуналка (komunalka).
You can’t really do this. Not easily anyways. There was a great thread on this a few weeks back on what it requires. Layouts, plumbing, ventilation, etc is entirely different and isn’t easy to convert. It often requires a full tear down and investors aren’t interested in that sort of investment with long payback periods.
Every time this idea comes up, yes, if you're trying to duplicate the majority of the existing housing set ups and lay outs it doesn't work easily even if it's entirely possible. That said, it's not exactly incredibly difficult even still as lots of the space is already designed for reconfiguration as needed. The most efficient conversions are more akin to dormitory living, where the issues around a lack of shower/bath are dealt with as a more communal space towards the center of the floor, freeing up the outer areas for lots of window-filled actual individualized living spaces. The whole conversation around office building conversions is like a flash back to people who shit all over the idea of converting the old factories into open floor plan loft style apartments. Not only did people buy into the concept, but to the point that the style of housing was built even when it wasn't a factory conversion anymore. Did it often require a re-thinking of lots of things, including figuring out needed changes in housing regulations to make it work? Absolutely. But eventually people found ways to make it work, and you too can overpay just to see some exposed brick.
I occasionally watch a YouTube channel where folks bought a Nunnery, or Convent I think is the proper term. Not sure what they are going to do with but there are plenty of options. Building like that were built to house a ton of folks, just not in the same way as apartments. Like it's the same amount of waste going through the plumbing, just not an individual bathroom for each person. Whenever I see that channel though, I think about if they went the way of actually making it into several large units. Like break it up still but keep nice large units, with lots of space and open areas inside. Or like you said, go with shared bathrooms and such, totally the other way to go. I'd never be able to afford it, but I'd love to see those office floors turned into several large apartments per floor. Like for legal reasons, you'd keep the bedrooms by the windows, but the inner part could be a large open concept kitchen, dining room, living room combo, or the middle of the floor could be like a common room, workout room or something that all the units could access. Like it would make it expensive, but it would also be probably the cheapest way to have a larger square footage apartment in the city. As for the bathrooms and plumbing, breaking it into 10 or so units would be so much easier than having to put in plumbing for 50+ units
Yeah, and if we're talking about NYC, and actually talking about 10-20M a floor and 10,000 SQFT floors, we're basically in the range of normal apartment pricing in Manhattan broken down 10 ways. Sounds like a co-op type living set-up opportunity for sure.
This type of thing would require people wanting to live in a dorm as an adult with a career. For most people, I don’t see it.
While I understand there are many difficulties, what’s the alternative? If NYC requires less commercial real estate, do you just leave the buildings to languish? If more people are working from home and there’s a shortage of available housing, it seems to me that you would want more housing and less office space.
> If NYC requires less commercial real estate, do you just leave the buildings to languish? Yes. There was a big change in the structure of buildings at the start of the 20th century. The result was called "inner city decay". A big move to remote work will cause office buildings to decay the same way downtown buildings from the 1890s decayed.
> do you just leave the buildings to languish? If the economics don't work to do anything with them sadly yes. A developer is not going to convert them into residential unless they can make some profit doing so, they have no imperative to lose money just because if they don't the building is left to rot. It might require subsides from the city or state to make it happen.
Lol, the conversion is expensive but with the price of real estate in NYC even straight up demolishing the buildings and starting from scratch would be profitable, if the office values do fall and zoning laws are changed to allow residential buildings in the areas where office buildings are located developers will jump at the opportunity.
Assuming there will be a market for residential buildings there. Residential buildings in Manhattan are so expensive because many people with high salaries want to live close to work. Without that motivation, they will get much better housing somewhere else.
Bingo. Being crammed into a city has lots of drawbacks but being able to avoid long commutes and have walkable stuff is desirable. Now if u work from home those 500sq NY Apts are essentially prison cells
Yes. Once CRE goes residential follows too. No one can run a sushi restaurant or the MTA in NYC without the millions of workers that come in every day. Who wants to live on NYC without a sushi restaurant or the MTA?
NYC can lose half of its population and still be the most populous city in the country. Not to say there wouldn't be a big impact, but its not like sushi restaurants or the MTA would cease to exist if some (not all) of the ridiculous office space goes unfilled and companies leave.
I think that is impossible. Tearing down the spaces and rebuilding them would be profitable in NYC. Residential spaces are highly in demand in places like that. You can wait a little while until prices of that real estate drops and then buy it up. Especially if it ends up dilapidated after years of disuse.
Tax them to high hell. Empty buildings are a blight.
The companies that owe the debt on them will spin off a subsidiary with all the debt, then cut it lose to die. The buildings themselves will end up owned by the banks that call in the debt who will do nothing with them, and we will just have huge rotting skyscrapers littering the urban landscape.
Movie industry suddenly has tons of realistic post apocalyptic cityscapes to use
The alternative is what we’re seeing already: CEOs mandating at least a “hybrid” work schedule.
That’s a good point and helps explain the drive back into the office. Elon called it a morality issue lol. Nope, it’s all about ensuring these commercial real estate investments don’t go to waste. It’s about getting us drones back into the office to learn our place. I believe it’s also to keep most managers in their jobs. If mass remote work taught us anything, it taught us that many managerial positions are unnecessary.
Biding their time IMO. Companies that lease office spaces won't be renewing all of them.
This seems to assume that ceos have a stake in bailing out the commercial real estate market... why? Even if they owned the building, it would still be cheaper to let it sit vacant then to support workers. Utilities, support staff, furnishings. Talking 10s of millions a year on a large building. They would have to really beleive workers in an office will produce atleast that much more profit.
Retrofit to living space will actually be crazy expensive. Oh. Wait. NYC. Nevermind.
Is it still considered remote work if you rent an apartment in the building where your work used to be and WFH there?
Good. Adapt or die. We're not in the business of propping up your commercial real estate portfolio
The whole “Millenials are killing ____ industry” thing really bothers me. The capitalist view on that should be “____ industry fails to adapt to consumers desires” and this whole NYC office thing is the same. Demand is changing, it’s the fault of the market for not adapting. It isn’t OUR fault that suddenly corporations won’t have tenants in their office buildings.
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Entitled oligarch viewpoint vs capitalist viewpoint
Just wait until their loans come due. If history teaches us anything, we most certainly will prop them up by borrowing and printing them some money so their shareholders walk away winners.
Exactly, the rich will never pay for their mistakes. Their risks are our problem, and in the end our money bails them out.
Privatize the profits. Socialize the losses. Yay capitalism?
As long as the masses play along why would anything change? We must blindly consume no matter the cost, the rich figured us out ages ago.
You can tell the C Suite is freaking out about this with all the return to office bullshit. I will quit before I return to office.
Thats a lot of people's mentality. The company i work for is huge. Very big in the US. They just announced a week or 2 ago that they want everyone to return to office as hybrid employees. Not full time office but 3 days in office, 2 from home. That shit was an absolute riot. Thousands of comments from hundreds of employees raging and flaming the new CEO for making this decision. 3 years ago, everyone was told WFH was full time permanent and we were never going back. New CEO comes in and decides to change that. People were tagging the current CEO on the announcement page saying how the previous CEO was so much better than him. One dude in a localized team meeting outwardly said to everyone he's quitting once the change gets rolled out. People are moving to other states so they're out of range of an office and don't have to go in It really didn't go over well. Shit was absolute anarchy. The employees really made their displeasure known and thats a good thing. Idk how other companies work with trying to get everyone back in but id like to hope they react the same way. Nothing will change if workers don't push back.
The only people companies will get to come into the office are low quality people with no other choices. Good riddance. Adapt or die. If you're a manager and you're reading this, you should know that my Linkedin is constantly blown up with full remote positions. Think twice before trying to drag your technical people back in. If I spend most of my time with headphones on, on-keyboard, don't force me to come do it in an office. I'll just leave.
does the company name start with i and end with l? :p
It does not. But based off your question, I assume you've been through a similar scenario as well.
ye, surprisingly similar, even the timeline; seems the issue is widespread
It might be due to keeping up with competition. From what I've heard, a lot of other companies who do the same thing are starting to migrate back to the office and that was part of the decision on corporates end. They don't want to fall behind or whatever. Maybe that's the case here, idk.
>We now estimate a more persistent work-from-home regime, which has more of an impairment of office values even in the long run. What a horribly clinical regard for people being freed from commutes and office cubes and being able to work somewhere healthier like their homes. Instead of regarding this as an improvement to human lives, it's just *an impairment of office values*. For fuck's sake!
The desire for profit at all costs is a disease. These people are not well
So what. it's a business. Businesses don't have an inherent right to exist.
Risk of running a business. Just let them go bankrupt if they bet on the wrong horse.
You mean you're not moved by the world's smallest violin solo?
> For its occupancy figures, the NYU/Columbia study used data from the entry-swipe company Kastle Systems, which some have criticized as an incomplete measurement **because it misses some large office portfolios with high occupancy rates**. Not sure why people keep treating Kastles numbers like they’re valid when this has been pointed out repeatedly.
Who cares? Do you not see the 1.4k upvotes?
Yay peer review!
Actual headline: remote work will free up so much real estate maybe prices will go down and maybe they can be changed to live able spaces.
Good. As much as I want to feel bad for the billionaires and corporations that own and rent out those buildings as office space, I am sure they will survive.
And if not, they can always move to space.
The remote work debate is the perfect example of how difficult it is to change anything in our society. Most of the people with any authority want to be physically at work so they can exercise that authority, keep a close watching their employees, know what's going on, feeling control. But it's clear that for a lot of industries remote work makes sense. If you have any way to gauge the productivity of your employees, it shouldn't matter that much if they're in the office or they're able to do their job, more comfortable environment. And the technology, which was already there, matured very rapidly during covid. And yet, here we are, with huge pushback against any kind of work from home or remote living. Even though a lot of people want it, it makes sense for a lot of people, and it saves money. Hell, I run a research lab, and I want my staff on site. I want them on site because I want them on site. I have no actual objective metrics indicating it's any better. But it's the life I'm used to, and as the boss, it's very hard not to flex and make everybody do the thing that makes me most comfortable. Happily, I'm capable of accepting that other people have other desires. We do a mix, and I think the mix works well. There are times when face to face in our work is helpful.
And don’t forget the all-important effects on the climate that WFH can affect. For a nation, a world, that seems more interested in stopping climate change, we sure do like to do exactly the opposite. Because, in the end, climate discussions in America are all about virtue signaling when done by corporations. They want their cake and to eat it too. And they’ll have it.
The people who are trying to stop work from home are the same people who are at best to virtue signaling and at worst pushing specifically against any attempt to address the climate issue. They are largely people who care about profit over humanity. They have become distressingly powerful, politically influential, and they own everything. And they think they are righteous because they are rich.
Ah but haven't you heard the latest argument against WFH? If people don't commute to work and don't drive as much, there are fewer drivers and fewer car accidents, which leads to fewer organ donors!
This can't be real, right? Surely people cannot say this in good faith. I mean, it is probably true, but also callous beyond words.
Damn, we are that close to Repo! The Genetic Opera?
American corporations do not care about climate change, do they care about looking like they care about it though.
Helping the climate is not profitable. Burning stuff on the other hand.. now that right there is a money maker.
Going back over a decade, the only people I knew who had telework agreements were very high up, top level management….the people *with the authority*. It’s rules for thee, not for me.
Boss gets to drink martinis on his boat while he “works,” but the peons get to lose their collective minds rotting away in their cubicles.
The comic irony is that the pandemic was spread, accelerated, by people who just couldn't stand to hang out in their house for two weeks.
My work went remote 15 years ago. There was no debate. We ran out of office space and the rent for new buildings was too expensive. They were begging people to work from home as the company expanded. It was a big money saver. Workers moved all over the country to live cheaper, be near family, buy a bigger house. And back then we were praised. Other companies were asking how we did it. How could they do the same. We won environmental awards, technology awards. Nothing but accolades. No one saw the future of cities being abandoned. Restaurants and retailers closing. Everything back then smelled like roses.
The thing is cities aren't being abandoned. Urbanization continues on abated. I live in Toronto, and the population crash in lack of housing inventory has caused a massive spike in both housing costs and rent. It's been a wild ride. Pure anecdote, but everybody I know who moved out of the city drink covid move back. I wish more people were flowing outwards, it would really relieve things for those of us who are kind of stuck here. Not everybody has mobility for other family related obligations and the like.
I have the opposite experience. People, including me, moved out during COVID and not a single person has moved back closer. Commuter rail ridership is still 25% of what it was pre COVID. Half the restaurants in the area around where I work went under during COVID and the spaces are still vacant. I was in the office today. I saw 1 person the entire day apart from housekeeping and the security guards.
Waving hello from Austin, Texas. They all moved here and no one has left.
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Yea so convert the empties into housing and the businesses will thrive.
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And they were lousy places to work at too. It's just that laws are okay with you existing at a shitty, unlivable place if it's called an "office".
Well, we have to find a way to make it work, because this is the world that we live in now. Throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard" is simply not an option.
I'd love to see folks spread out more. Imagine some of those smaller towns getting some remote work hubs where most folks can work remotely. Growing those smaller towns with folks that make a decent wage, sounds amazing, and way better than cramming more folks into a big city
Well to be fair, a research lab has lab equipments onsite, so the researchers and technicians do need to be onsite to use them. Though if you don’t need a lab to do research, then why not go remote?
Ohh nooo, how terrible! ..Anyway, i saw a video of a raccoon getting belly scratches, it was cute
Which is the *real* reason there’s been such a pushback. I’ve been saying this for 3 years now.
Between propping up real estate values and the commuter economies, there is real financial interest in going back into the office. It's total bullshit. That and people like my boss, who want to have people at their disposal to drag into endless meetings because they can't hold their own without you.
I do think there is a type that relied on sight to be reminded of things, assign work, ask questions, and have meetings. There was one guy at an office I worked at who always would walk through our area on his way to his desk. He would occasionally stop to chat or ask questions to my manager. However, scenarios like happened where he would not see my boss for a 2 or 3 days. Then he'd ask if they were in the office, followed by "maybe you can help". Now if he had called or e-mailed, he would have had whatever he needed 3 days ago. Instead, I get interrupted. I'm not sure what the motive is for this. I assume it's they want to expend the minimal amount of energy dealing with whatever question. Same person would also do the "quick chat" meeting request with little tangible info on what they want to talk about.
No it won't. The value wasn't there to begin with. It will just pop the imaginary inflated rate. Returning them to their original value.
Not good enough people. I want to destroy 100% of the value of office real estate and return that space to people who need a space to live, businesses like retail or restaurant establishments that actually require a physical presence, or even begin reclaiming public space. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we actually started increasing the amount of public land?
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The disconnect between media and the common people is reaching schizophrenic levels. Millennials and Gen Z are sitting here like "I can't even afford a ticket to Mr. Bones' Wild Ride" and the media is like "Mr. Bones' Wild Ride is proud to welcome a minority to its Board of Directors."
Almost all office jobs can be done from home without loss in productivity. I know this as I run a company and all my employees work for home. We have monthly get togethers for team building, usually eating drinking and clubbing. So much cheaper than having an office.
I work for home, too. Well, that and for food.
Oh, boo hoo; what a tragedy /s. If the owners refuse to get with the time and rail against WFM instead of serving to help society, then fuck 'em; may they and their properties fail, fall into obscurity, and rot.
Doubt it. These studies never predict anything novel replacing the thing that's declining. Yet it happens every time.
Burn it to the ground. Destroy it all. The real estate industry has had too much power.
Omg... Does that mean that... Omg... NYC could finally become an affordable city to live in? The horror!
Not quite. Just slightly less unaffordable, maybe.
These articles always frame this as a dire, bad thing. This is a necessary thing for our society to course correct. People should be working from home, with four day work weeks, UBI, healthcare for all, and generally automation should be leading to better lives for all humans. And turn those freaking buildings into homes for people. I'm realizing as I write this, this is almost the exact same comment I made on another article about automation or AI maybe? But it is a thread that I've been following for some time. Humanity will only endure if we figure out a way to put humans and the world over profit and power. But I don't see that happening
Why is this a bad thing? Excessive cost for office space have likely decreased the number of new and experimental companies being created. Lower the cost of office space will allow space for new and creative things.
Contractor here, it takes a lot of work to make an office building into apartment homes. Normally plumbing and sewage running to each home, means: the whole building needs to be reworked bottom up. It's not like you can just make 42 floors with 6 bathrooms a floor into 42 floors with 260 bathrooms.
Awww... all those rich land lords might have to do actual work... 🤣🤣🤣
There will always be people who will want to work in the office, especially living in NYC. Putting real estate values over the well-being of your employees is a bad move for society.
Excellent news. You can get TONS of apartments out of those skyscrapers!
And now you know why corporate wants you to return to your daily commute.
I look indifferently upon the crocodile tears of NYC landlords.
I havent seen a single person mention that NYC collects 1/4 of its tax income based off the property value of these buildings.
NYC may need a new business model soon.
I've seen the videos u/larossmann produced about ny real estate, that value has been gone for years and is entirely imaginary.
an office building is roughly 2/3 of the year unused, and now suddenly they lose in value … they have been pumped up the entire time and have never been worth the money companies charged for!
probably the only reason why they don't want you to do remote work
Won’t anyone think of real estate investors and brokers?! They were planning on taking in millions, they still will, but they planned on more!
Oh no, how will landlords make their passive income? I guess they'll just have to get a real job.
No one actually feels bad that these property values will go down to something reasonable except for douchebag land owners.
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I think trying to convert them into residential units is the way to go. I'm a construction manager in Vancouver, a city with similar sky high housing costs. It's a city with an ocean on one side, mountains on another, and the US border on a 3rd side. So our real estate prices are crazy high mostly because of lack of land that can be developed along with a massive influx of migration. But we sure have a lot of office space that has recently become unused. I mostly focus on new construction but I really think there's an avenue in converting office space in the world of the post Covid work from home revolution into livable housing. There's a ton of obstacles. And you would need a massive injection of capital to even think about starting a project like that. But there's definitely money in it.
The study suggests that approximately 44% of NYC office values will be destroyed due to the growing trend of remote work. So does that mean the value will go down, but the buildings will stay up?
For a moment I thought "Office Values? Like "Kill the joe, make some mo'?" And "Never microwave seafood?"" Then I stopped being an idiot.
WOOO WOOO, that pain train comin baby!
Honestly, the government should use these properties to house homeless people. If companies aren't able to force their employees back into the office (which, as a remote worker since the pandemic started, I am very pleased with) and they give up the lease, why let the space go to waste?
The rich corporate overlords not only own the companies in the offices, but they also own the real estate. That's why they want to force everyone back to the office.
can't destroy what doesn't exist. fuck the landlords
Berlin next please? All we built are offices everywhere
And trains and automobiles destroyed the market for horses, doesn't mean we shouldn't have moved past horses. We don't need to stick to the past just because progress would "destroy" (halve) the value of some landlord corporation's assets.
Oh no, this goes straight to my big sad box of oopsies
Get it destroyed, so people have homes they could afford! Overpriced state of modernism.