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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how widespread this will be, but it will be interesting to see the impact on commercial real estate in SF and NYC where empty storefronts are already a major issue.

I'm imaging a lot of businesses were barely scraping by before the shelter-in-place.

We might see a huge increase in empty storefronts after this passes.

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Hopefully the landlords realize there is not going to be anybody lining up to take over these leases if they evict. Forgiving a couple months so a business doesn't have to close is almost certainly the shrewd business choice as well as the moral one.

The problem is many REITs don’t care. They are so large and so far removed from any one property that they would rather it sit empty for years than lower prices and have that affect the market rate and pull their portfolios average price per square foot down.

Storefronts in NYC routinely stay empty for years waiting for a large corporate client to come along, because the long-term stability and rent beat the pants off of any smaller tenant. Losing the stability and rent, I think they're okay with waiting again.

Abandoned leases then increase the incentive to demolish and replace.

I think many businesses will discover they don’t need to pay for an office. Would not want to own an office building right now.

They already knew, they just liked to see the drones line up and sing the national anthem. The sense of power having inferiors around.

Really? Come on. How does a comment like this do anything to move the discussion along?

Some of the underlying idea is true (most businesses don't feel confident that remote workers are as efficient as those they can directly supervise), though it was unnecessarily snarky and dramatic. I don't like the idea put forth that employers have a motivation driven by emotion; how you manage your employees is mostly driven by efficiency and profit.

I make an idiotic effort to make work more enjoyable for people under me. Their efficiency is off the chart.

You are right, poor choice of words. It just makes me sad that fear rather than quality of life had to be the motivation.

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