Source? Im friends with a fairly high level commercial real estate agent in manhattan and per his view of things, vast amounts of empty office space in most neighborhoods. covid and zoom may have changed the market forever.
My company has been fully back in-office since the vaccines came out. The descriptions of WFH I've heard online have sounded like dispatches from a parallel universe. I haven't been on a Zoom call since 2020.
The commute is really the thing that makes some workplaces intolerable, I think. You can put up with a lot more if you don't have to sit and angrily drive home for an hour afterwards.
All non remote offices are intolerable when you've become accustomed to taking lunch with your spouse and having your kids hug you at your desk when they return from school.
So many chores get done too with working from home. Laundry, dishes, yard work, errands etc, all on my lunch breaks that would otherwise be spent scrolling the internet over a sad sandwich i cobbled together in 5 minutes at 7am. By the time the end of the day rolls around I'm actually done with work, not just work work but the home work that I'd have to do in the few tired hours that exist at the end of the day after you've finally commuted home and finished cleaning up after dinner. Plus being able to attend to essential business with fickle hours is a godsend. I am no longer forced to do all my banking and DMV business on saturday before 3pm when all these things close. I can do it in the middle of the week like a retiree and not hit any lines. Running errands in the middle of the day means I don't hit any traffic either. It's still a 40 hour work week, its just one that's way more optimized for my convenience, to the point where it would be hard to put a price on the stress relief it brings.
For me, that's looking up from the monitor to watch the kitties romping together (20-20-20 eye rule reminders), taking a short movement break to throw them some toys to chase, and occasionally having one curl up on my lap while I'm thinking.
If you work a 230-day year, every ten minutes on your commute is over 38 hours of time. You're spending the equivalent of 17 work weeks in the car, or 37.5% of your 230-day work year.