People need to stop with this whole "only commercial real estate supports working from the office" nonsense. Some of us simply want our job to provide us with a space where we can work that isn't 10 feet away from where we spend the rest of our day, the same way that our job provides us with other tools we need. Not that I'm necessarily defending forced RTO but I hate this framing of the issues.
Also if your vision of WFH is that everyone sprawls out then it doesn't solve some of your other issues: people will still need to use their vehicles to get places (because unless we solve the root issue of 'too few homes' then those people will be spread out from each other or services to not create more cities with too few homes) and their sprawled out suburban communities will not suddenly become more walkable. They'll just drive everywhere.
> Also if your vision of WFH is that everyone sprawls out then it doesn't solve some of your other issues: people will still need to use their vehicles to get places (because unless we solve the root issue of 'too few homes' then those people will be spread out from each other or services to not create more cities with too few homes) and their sprawled out suburban communities will not suddenly become more walkable. They'll just drive everywhere.
Partially disagree.
Maybe I'm not representative, but most of my family's driving is specifically _commuting_. All other weekly errands add up to less than one day of commute driving. Actually, less than one way of one day of commuting.
Unless you compare a "fully rural" drive-60-miles-to-get-groceries lifestyle to basically a "downtown manhattan" walk-to-the-office one, I'm skeptical that total car-miles will increase when transitioning from WFO to WFH.
Most "completely non-walkable" suburbs will still have a grocery store within a few miles, usually in a so-called super center with a bunch of other stores. I don't have data to back this up (other than talking with coworkers), but my sense is that people who talk about transitioning to a "rural" WFH really mean "move to a small town" or "move to the outskirts of an exurb".
So, even if they become completely car dependent, they're still reducing from 50 commuting miles per day to 2-3 "errands" miles.
> we're trying to make sure going back to the office isn't a REQUIREMENT but a luxury
There are multiple equilibria. I like hybrid work. That doesn’t mean others shouldn’t be allowed to require office time. The market will work this out in tech; employees have bargaining power.
> people will still need to use their vehicles to get places
Hmm ... walkable neighborhood has even become more livable and walkable, all my car uses could now be public transport or car sharing.. needing one now maybe at most once or twice.per month, sometimes less.
> we solve the root issue of 'too few homes' then
Yes.. but on the other hand you can mix only so many homes around offices.. which would make my neighborhood less walkable again.
Also I neither want to be location dependent for job selection, nor do I want to move due to jobs? Kind of arrogant privileged view, on the other hand, why not just leave the space for people that actually really need to live nearby their working location, like the merchant, the doctor, etcetc?
> Some of us simply want our job to provide us with a space where we can work that isn't 10 feet away from where we spend the rest of our day
If you really have that luck to be able to live that close to your office, great.. but how long will this hold? I idiot actually moved pre-pandemic closer to the job, just that they wanted a cheaper location and reorganize and moved then farer away, lol, so I had 2 month of 10 minutes to work :) Until I get that back I prefer not to was so much time travelling for barely nothing.
It's also ridiculous because it demonstrates a lack of understanding of sunk costs. If a company with an office is that concerned about costs, it's cheaper to keep the office closed without paying for utilities and all the other overhead.
A lot of people here just want to work from home and the range of social and economic problems they work backward to have WFH solve is astounding.
I don't actually believe in the whole commercial real estate conspiracy. The employers who actually have the agency here are presumably mostly not so stupid as to be making decisions based on (often relatively short-term) sunk costs.
But if those same employers are OK with employees who want to and can productively work from home, they're also justified in largely ignoring the preferences of employees who would prefer a bustling in-person office.
Most employers don't own any real estate at all... they lease it. It's extremely uncommon for companies not directly in the business of Real Estate to own their own buildings... there's probably some single digit % of office space owned by the company occupying it.
There may be an incentive for executives tied to local real estate, though. e.g. owning a home in the Bay Area, and seeing it get devalued as everyone is moving away. Residential prices have been falling in the Bay Area... but then NYC has been pretty stable and there's still an urge for BTO there among the banks. Finance is much more relationship driven than Tech, though.
The companies I worked for in San Francisco signed like 10 year leases for premium real estate in the city (millions per year). Before COVID it was a “sure thing” that prices would only go up, incentivizing longer and longer leases.
I suspect this is the real reason big companies are so incessant about RTO. They have to stay or breach the contract which would cost a ridiculous sum of money. Funny enough I’ve observed the exact same behavior when buying colo space or circuits in a datacenter. The previous person would sign a 10yr contact and act like we saved a ton of money, then we’d be stuck paying $10,000/mo for a 100Mb internet connection long after prices dropped an order of magnitude. Unfortunately there is no requirement for critical thinking skills to sign a contract.
It’s a little astonishing that so many companies reacted to “we made our own lives difficult by signing a contract for a thing that, it turns out, we don’t need” with “we can solve the problem by deeply annoying a lot of our employees.”
I know it’s a little more complicated than this, and I know there are jobs with Reasons to be in the office (I enjoy one) but still… now you have TWO problems.
I have noticed this as well, companies leaning on the sunk cost fallacy to feel more comfortable throwing away the rent by having the office occupied. In the end its much better for companies if office rents fall substantially, so why fight it?
In general there tend to be conventions around lease durations, and in a hot market you don’t have much bargaining power to change the terms. The better the tenant, the more leverage you have though.
In general the risks of locking into long duration contracts needs to be weighed carefully, as we saw with SVB
It’s not so much about individual investments, but how commercial real estate sits as an asset class in wealthy people’s portfolios generally. There’s no scenario where a 2008 for commercial real estate doesn’t cost them a lot of money, so it’s in their material interest to push for back to office.
> It’s not so much about individual investments, but how commercial real estate sits as an asset class in wealthy people’s portfolios generally.
Those same individuals also own companies that pay rent, and so also have an incentive to reduce the amount of money spent on that.
I don't think anyone in the managerial class is looking at their E-Trade asset mix, and deciding that they should change company policy to protect their investments. One decision at one company isn't going to move the needle one iota. And even if it did, it would move another needle the other way (companies are tenants, not landlords).
Much easier to sell the real estate and purchase more shares in companies that were once tenants.
> whom would they sell this real estate in a tanking, high-interest rate market, exactly
Anyone with the political connections to get a residential conversion approved. The wealthy elite are uniquely positioned to profit from this in a civically inactive and politically insular city like San Francisco.
Residential conversions are wildly expensive and frequently infeasible, so even assuming you have the political connections, the financing is going to be a challenge, and of course your end goal is to fill them with tenants in a down market for tech jobs.
Congratulations, you’re basically back to square one of filling empty real estate, now at additional cost. And thus why the incentives are to try and ride out the status quo by forcing people back into offices.
This really depends on the specific building. There are many office buildings that could have slapdash remodels done to make them habitable and revenue positive, and there is plentiful pent up demand for affordable rents in urban cores.
Nevermind the knock on effects of retaining and growing the on street retail base that has fled entirely commercial sections of many urban cores. You don't get a safe, friendly neighborhood when the streets are deserted every evening after 5:30pm.
As cited elsewhere on this thread, it really only works for old buildings and not for huge swathes of the newer-built commercial real estate that’s sitting empty right now:
Again, we also have to think about what the incentives would be for preserving the value of the general case of the asset class, not whether individual buildings are convertible.
Generalizing the forest while ignoring large swathes of what it consists of is a bad idea, not every metro area has the same building makeup and composition as NYC.
NYC already has seen many extreme building conversions, for example turning large apartments into micro-apartments. Many other cities have not had the economic pressure for conversions to occur.
When these buildings default and their property taxes go unpaid, the locality will have to do something with these properties, and often the financing available to municipalities is much better than what the general market can get.
That's sufficiently indirect and diffuse that I don't really believe it. That's a bit like Amazon is a non-trivial part of my stock portfolio even through index funds so I'm going to make us go all-in on AWS for that reason (as opposed to other herd-following reasons that may be good or bad).
Especially among execs who have so much wealth that commercial real estate holdings, much less the ones they can directly influence, are in the noise.
An individual investor has nowhere near as much sway over masses of other people as the business owners we’re describing here, so this analogy doesn’t hold. If you could invest in Amazon while simultaneously forcing others to spend millions on their services, you probably would!
I don't understand why I'm supposed to be outraged here.
As a customer, I get the experience of a cashierless store. I don't really care how that's accomplished.
As an investor, I might care that I'm being sold snake oil, but I doubt that I chose to invest in Amazon solely over the Fresh stores.
As someone working in the industry, it might certainly affect my perception of what's possible or feasible, but I'm already used to the fact that most of what's being sold as "sophisticated AI" is snake oil.
It just feels to me like this article strikes a bizarre tone about it all, not to mention the fact that other comments in this thread have offered up equally plausible explanations.
I pay $1200 a year to insure my Tesla Model S at the max liability coverage, with comprehensive and collision. Admittedly, I've filed that I drive a max of 6k miles a year and I have the highest deductible set on both comprehensive and collision, but I have strong doubts it'd quintuple in price to insure if I went and set those to more typical settings.
How old are you? I bought a model 3 performance when I was 27 and sold it a year ago. I was paying 285/month with Allstate (before Tesla started offering insurance). I drive my old ICE now and pay 108/month. Clean record.
From what I understand the older you are the less you pay.
Canadian dollars. I don't pretend to understand the reasoning, the insurers have their own logic. But anything with a battery (even PHEV's) seem to command a much higher premium; I was quoted $3400 a year last year for a RAV4 Prime.
I love how in the US, instead of building all these services and offices near each other and walkable from people's homes, we insist on ideas that force people to drive dozens of miles to get a walkable and convenient experience.
These Obama "we"s that contradict all known facts must stop. It's a kind of logical falacy to throw out a we that includes a vast majority that you know are not in agreement with you!
Americans absolutely freaking love their cars and have no desire to change the drive-thru lifestyle. I can't convince my parents not to feel pity on me when I'm overseas without one, they don't understand and can't understand that I am not merely indifferent, I hate the burden of a car and living in the inconvenient cities that pop up as an result of mass car ownership. The preferences of my friends in their 30s make it clear to me this American preference is not changing within our lifetimes. The lifestyle I want is only available, for the most part, in Asia. A recent long stay in Paris was even quite a surprise for me, I found the population density way too low to enjoy the convenient walk everywhere lifestyle easily found in Shanghai, Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul etc.
Right - I moved to the city because here in the US it's the only option to get any human-scale density. The next level down that you can commonly find is car-centric suburbia. The remaining human-scale places in the US outside of city centers are mostly isolated remnants from before we started knocking them all down to make room for cars. Nobody's building new ones.
1. Usually already located at a crossroads; you want a mall at a busy junction to attract custom
2. Usually already a local transit hub, since they tend to be a major concentration of jobs
3. Are separated from any pesky residential neighbors by major roads and/or large swathes for parking
4. Have a lot of land in the form of said large swathes of parking
These characteristics actually make them ideal for densification into a more walkable oasis; they already have some mixed uses, and the parking lots are developable without much fuss from neighbors. And you can do the whole thing in phases.
A bunch of malls in the Seattle area are getting redeveloped in this manner.
#1 is a mixed bag. Access by car is "easy", but traffic can be awful.
#3 is a negative. The separation from housing makes them LESS suitable for office space.
Put the two together, and even if the mall is redeveloped into nice office space with room to walk around, people outside the mall have to drive to do so. For people on the other side of those major arteries, they literally have to drive 1-2 blocks to walk around the mall (or former mall).
None of which is to imply we shouldn't redevelop malls into mixed use "urban" hubs. But, we shouldn't assume that redeveloping the mall in isolation will succeed. The surrounding area might need significant changes to fully utilize the former mall zone.
To be fair the US has the space to do what Asian and European countries couldn't.
Also America was basically virgin land. The invention of the car and highways shaped US cities when Tokyo and Paris were already centuries old.
I think you’ll find its pretty split. Lots of people prefer the privacy of a private car and large yards, but others would prefer walkable denser areas.
On the whole it might be slightly trending to the latter.
I'm an avid cyclist, so follow local traffic and infrastructure plans and related political/governmental issues. I live in a fairly dense suburb about 40 minutes outside DC (near Dulles Airport).
From what I can see, there is a subset of people who love owning a yard and having some of their own space for kids or gardening or whatever. And they like having a garage to store all their crap (and occasionally a car).
But, within that group, there is often a sort of despair (probably too strong a word) about the rotting infrastructure that surrounds them. Potholed roads, bridges literally crumbling, too much traffic, etc. This group pushes hard for more road construction, more sprawl, etc despite studies that mostly show more infrastructure doesn't help (demand always catches up). And they don't want to fund it via taxes.
There is another group that lives in the suburbs by necessity. Jobs are out here, costs are manageable, etc. They'd move to a city, if it were easier/affordable. I fall into this group. I actually sold my single-family home a few years ago and bought a smaller townhouse in a denser neighborhood so I could walk more places. Cost was the same and I enjoy the downsized home/yard, ability to walk/cycle for coffee or beer, and walk to work (thought that last bit was dumb luck on an office move).
And the vast majority are somewhere in between. Mostly ambivalent. Maybe some notion of the "American Dream" (big colonial home, white picket fence, etc), but content somewhere in the middle.
tl;dr - Americans like the cost and convenience of the suburbs, but much of that comes from indefinitely deferred infrastructure investment (though a massive chunk of suburban residents don't actually realize just how badly that spending is being deferred).
I once had a thought experiment of how a suburban city could be reworked with a focus on coworking centers.
Like the center of a neighborhood would be a coworking center and a park, it could be surrounded on each side by a subdivision, and the corners could be commercial/services. That way you'd be able to easily walk to your job if you wanted, and head home to let out pets or have lunch, no problem.
It would require pretty much everyone to move to coworking for it to be viable, though, and you might find out you don't like spending so much time with your neighbors.
After living in various parts of Europe for a few years and coming back, the US way of doing it seems mind-boggingly wasteful. Huge swaths of our country are long roads that lead to massive parking lots.
And of course we're obese, many people couldn't walk to accomplish errands if they wanted to.
I've been watching some Virtual Japan videos on YouTube lately, and it was really interesting how so many major streets in Japan don't seem to even be built for cars, people just walk in the center of the street and from location to location no problem, there might be some motorbikes but that's about it.
I don't think I've ever been to a city where they decide they don't need cars on their major streets. All of our cities presuppose that enough people will need to drive through it, and everything is much more spaced out because of it.
Who's going to pay for me to upsize my apartment so I can make a home office? Working from the same desk I use for my personal computer / gaming is really taking a toll on the ol' mental health? Also who's going to pay for my extra electricity use, etc? I also used to get free food at the office, would I be getting a raise to cover that as well?
My commute was a pleasant 25m bike ride I could use to listen to podcasts (which is exercise I've now lost, so losing the commute didn't exactly give me a bunch of extra free time). Seeing coworkers in person was a really nice way to not only get some social contact every day but also build a rapport with my teammates. The office was also going to be a great place for my dog to get some socialization with other dogs.
Yes, I was annoyed at the moves to more open spaces and with regular frustrating interruptions, but with those mitigated, an office with my actual coworkers (with at most 1 day a week at home) is vastly superior to what I'm doing now, regardless of how much processes change. Not to mention, employers sort of implicitly assume that any time you gained back from not having to commute or whatever are just going to doing extra work.
> My commute was a pleasant 25m bike ride I could use to listen to podcasts (which is exercise I've now lost, so losing the commute didn't exactly give me a bunch of extra free time).
You can still do that, though. Get up, do a 12.5m bike ride out, and 12.5m bike ride back home. Then start work.
Or do anything else. Maybe you'd prefer to go for a run some days? Great, you can do that. Maybe you want to lift weights? Great, you can do that. Maybe you stayed up late the night before doing something fun and want to sleep in a little? Great, you can do that. None of this other stuff would have been possible when you were fixed into the required, inflexible commute routine, but now you can do any of these things, or just keep doing your same commute routine, just with a different route that returns you home.
> Not to mention, employers sort of implicitly assume that any time you gained back from not having to commute or whatever are just going to doing extra work.
They only assume that if you allow them to by working longer hours. Set your boundaries, and assert them.
> Who's going to pay for me to upsize my apartment so I can make a home office?
Your company. Offices are pretty expensive, if the company goes remote they have extra capital to distribute during yearly review or whatever policy your company has.
I've been working at the same desk I had set up for my personal computer since quarantine started and it's mentally a disaster when the difference between personal time and work time involves zero physical movement (not to mention it's harder to have all of the personal equipment I want + work equipment I need to fit all on one desk and I haven't exactly set up my apartment in a way that really fits two desks in here without giving up on some other hobbies).
One reason (among many) why I'd be very resistant to permanently working remotely is that nobody is going to be paying me extra to move into a 2br apartment so I can have a home office, despite the fact that all the employers would hypothetically be saving a killing on their real estate.
It seems to me that someone with this philosophy has never tried to change or refactor a subsystem of a very complicated legacy project. Sure, sometimes your tests fail because they're poorly written and test implementation details, but other times they catch the fact that you didn't know about case X that had been discovered years ago and required a minor non-obvious tweak in the code to make work correctly.
Since we're on the topic of the Airpods noise cancellation, does anyone know why Apple doesn't let you enable noise cancelling with only one Airpod in? Is it just that they're worried about the pressure imbalance causing discomfort?
Another comment told you how to change this behavior, but I heard someone rationalize the default behavior as taking out one earbud can signal you're trying to talk to someone so it disables noise cancelation so you can hear them with both ears.
That doesn't mean politicians won't pretend like every piece of infrastructure is funded purely though state gas taxes in an effort to create additional revenue streams and justify increasing registration fees and whatnot.
Personally I'm fine with not imposing extra taxes on EVs. They're a negligible portion of road traffic right now and since they aren't heavy trucks they account for basically none of the infrastructure wear and tear.
Also if your vision of WFH is that everyone sprawls out then it doesn't solve some of your other issues: people will still need to use their vehicles to get places (because unless we solve the root issue of 'too few homes' then those people will be spread out from each other or services to not create more cities with too few homes) and their sprawled out suburban communities will not suddenly become more walkable. They'll just drive everywhere.